It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was Garry Shandling’s first big break, and it was a weird one. The show was a traditional multi-camera sitcom except that the characters on the show were aware they were on a show, Garry opened every episode with a monologue to the live studio audience and the audience was encouraged from time to time to interact with the cast and the set. In other words, it was not a traditional multi-camera sitcom.

The show broke the fourth wall at every opportunity and shattered virtually every convention of traditional sitcoms, it set a bizarre precedent and its influence on sitcoms can still be felt today. In short, it was one of those gloriously weird ahead-of-its-time shows whose existence we tend to mourn after a pitifully short life in recent years. But It’s Garry Shandling’s Show lasted for four years, first on Showtime and eventually being rebroadcast on a prime time network. I don’t know if it got cancelled at that point or he chose to end it so he could go do something else, but either way four years is a respectable run for a show as strange as this one.

In today’s market there are so many more channels, offering such a wide variety of niche entertainment; weird shows that used to survive by virtue of a lack of competition are now being supplanted by stuff people want to watch. The truth is that most of the time, weird experimental shows have an audience of a few million at the most. A few million is the very peak, and anything less than that is rarely considered viable in our current market — even though with more than one channel per million people, having an audience of that size should be considered quite respectable.

I’m not sure I’ve articulated this before, but I think we’re coming to a point in modern time where the increased access to increasingly targeted material aimed at increasingly narrow niches will make most of that content too economically risky to produce, except in low budget fare produced cheaply perhaps on and for the Internet. This isn’t the end of this sort of content, but we might see networks taking fewer risks and producing blander content hoping to reach the greatest common overlap of audiences. Yes, they already do that, but they still experiment with genre shows, and weird meta-driven comedies, and rich character driven serials. All of that could be shunted away from television to the internet, where everything is cheaper to make.

And make no mistake, as shows budgets get slashed, their ability to tell large stories, the type of stories people want to see from expansive experimental television, will fall away. Sometimes a limited budget can produce beauteous brevity, see The Twilight Zone, but there are some things that simply can’t be done on a small budget. Lost, for example, could not be made on a small budget. A show that explored similar ideas, maybe even with similar characters, could be made but too much of the scale would be lost — the dangers would feel smaller, the climaxes less earned — the show would no longer be Lost.

(It’s possible with the recent success of True Blood and The Walking Dead — and one hopes similar success for Game of Thrones — we will see a renewal of interest in interesting genre storytelling from the cable channels, but even premium cable channels have their limits: HBO cancelled Carnivàle, one of the best and potentially expansive¹ shows they’ve ever made, because of ballooning costs due to the fantasy nature along with it being a period piece, which tends to require larger budgets for the props departments. So don’t expect the cable channels to rescue us from network television mediocrity forever.)

But if the market speaks, there’s not much we can do about it. People will watch what they want to watch. Enjoy the good times while they’re still here. Watch Fringe maybe?

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Footnotes

1. The show was cancelled before the scope of its story was fully widened, but from the rough sketches of the future of the show made available to fans, the story was headed to big places. [↩]

I’ve been known to complain about Heroes’ lack of consistency, lazy storytelling, poor use of quality character actors, and all-around suckery, but I’m more than willing to admit that this new season isn’t terrible.

Some of the storylines are terrible, of course. Hiro and his kin continue to squander in the arrested development of the comedic subplot limited by the writers’ inability and/or unwillingness to grow them beyond mere punchlines. Tracy continues to be a complete waste of a character and of airtime. The only saving grace of Claire’s storyline is the inevitable lesbianic adventures. Nathan Petrelli still sucks as much as ever. HRG continues to… do whatever it is he does when he’s not on screen, because he does nothing of consequence when he’s visible.

I know what you’re thinking. There aren’t really any characters left. Well, you’re either thinking that or you’re thinking the only remaining substantial characters are Matt Parkman and Peter Petrelli, both of whom are shitty shitty characters. Well you’re mostly right.

Matt Parkman is in many ways the epitome of Heroes. He is the barometer for the rest of the show. He started off as one of the most appealing characters, but has degraded apace with the show. He’s easily the most disappointing character right now. And I’m certainly not saying he’s a good character, but he’s no longer a bad character; there are moments now when Parkman is almost a realistic character.

And Peter Petrelli, though I’ve found his story for the past two seasons to be terrible, had a pretty good first season. In fact, rethinking the ending of the first season, it makes sense that Peter’s emotional empathy, not his supernatural empathy, would be the final factor in who would win between him and Sylar. Of course, that’s a minor adjustment, because the tone of the build-up of the season was counter to that, and in the end it wasn’t Peter’s empathy that beat Sylar but his punch. So, really, all my complaints about season one of Heroes remain valid, but in retrospect I think I was overly hard on the emotional empathy angle the writers attempted for unrelated reasons.

So while Peter has been middling at best as of late, he was pretty good this most recent episode. Unlike Parkman’s idiotic aversion to his powers, he’s using his to actually help people. Almost as if he were a hero or something. And the plot this week with him being sued for his overzealous rescuing of people in danger was a great shout out to the comic world and the reason superheroes maintain a secret identity: so they can’t get sued.

And finally, the reason I decided to write this post in the first place, the influx of new characters managed to work this time. The carnival folk, led by Robert Knepper, are interesting in a way no villain has since early-first season Sylar, and what’s more they manage to make these characters interesting and mysterious without the crutch of anonymity. I attribute much of this to Robert Knepper, who as far as I can tell can do no wrong.

In addition, the deaf woman introduced in this episode reminded me of early Heroes, when the characters first experienced their powers. Seeing sound isn’t a particularly awesome power, but the moments we spent with that character were interesting to me. It makes we wonder how much better the show might have been at this point had the writers stuck with their initial plan to rotate out the cast every season, introducing new characters, new conflicts while retaining the same basic structure.

All that said, Heroes is still not a very good show. The last couple episodes were more watchable than last year but the show remains subpar with miles of room for improvement. But, at this point, if you’re like me and still watching Heroes despite the slow crawl towards increasing inadequacy and certainty of cancellation, me telling you the show has improved marginally isn’t really shifting your view. And anybody who gave up watching long ago shouldn’t take this post as an endorsement that you pick up the habit again. It’s not. I just thought I should acknowledge that it improved, if only for a little while, if only by a little bit.

Just before Kings was cancelled, the fifth episode aired and I found the initial love affair I had with the show dwindling; the characters weren’t as fully developed as I’d have liked, the stories often resolved themselves too easily, and overall the show didn’t seem as good as it once did.

I think that, should I go back and watch the series anew at a later date, I’d find that the quality had not dissipated but rather the realization that the show is “almost brilliant” had simply been delayed.

In robotics there is a term for that eerie feeling we all get when we see a robot that almost duplicates a perfect human being but has very slight flaws and discrepancies. It’s called the Uncanny Valley. These slight discontinuities jar the mind and make us feel at unease. We don’t feel that unease when looking at a robot like C3PO or R2-D2 or WALL-E because they are not human and the differences are notable and numerous. They become a sort of living cartoon, something we accept as a human analog because we can cobble together empathy based on the few anthropomorphic cues available.

I believe that there is similar valley that exists in the world of television. Most television exists before this valley; the characters are entertaining and endearing, but not wholly real. Then there are the special few shows that exist beyond the valley; those shows have such a well-defined universe, such believable characters, that we are enveloped by the show, taking it in as more than mere entertainment. Kings, unfortunately, existed in the abyss betwixt.

Kings was a show that was too good but not good enough. The early comparisons I made to Carnivàle were a sign that the show was attempting to achieve the greatness that lies beyond the valley; where a show will be talked about and analysed for years after. But it didn’t make it there. Maybe Michael Green didn’t have the writing chops to match Daniel Knauf, or maybe the show would have achieved that greatness over the course of the series. Either way, in my mind, Kings sits somewhere in that valley, reaching for more, and not getting the chance it deserves.

This week’s Kings continued the trials of Silas, and further explored the depths of the machinations of the entire royal family. But first a bit of abstract discussion, shall we?

I’m generally slower writing my reviews than most TV blogs because I have a full time job and other real world responsibility whereas most bloggers have blogging as their job. This is a detriment to my work because it can often seem like an out of date topic by the time I get around to publishing. At the same time, I also get a chance to read other reviews and comments on those reviews. This can both colour my view and also give me a chance to crystallize rebuttals and confirmations of those discussions. Of course, sometimes I have these thoughts independently and it seems like I’m parroting others but what can you do. Other people can be right sometimes too.

A decent chunk of the discussion from the last few episodes, especially from io9 and its commenters, has been focused on the saccharine innocence of David, without recognizing that that is a necessary part of his character. I said last week that this show reminded me of Carnivàle, but it was for more than the use of prophetic dreams and religious destiny. They are both telling the story of the birth of a hero, in the classical sense. I can imagine these same cynics, who criticise David’s virtuousness, rolling their eyes when, early on in Carnivàle, Ben Hawkins uses his empathy to coax a grief-stricken mother to give up her dead child from her hand to be given a burial.

Carnivàle does a better job of this, obviously. Ben is introduced as a man on the run for murder, and that past follows him throughout the two year run, but at the same time, there is hardly a moment in the run of that show where Ben Hawkins is not perfectly virtuous or at the very least fighting desperately the temptations offered to him. But the journey is the same. Ben struggled with this role while being tempted until he ultimately grew into a more mature role and accepted his quest to kill Brother Justin. David will follow a similar path, because both stories are of the Hero chosen by God. So to criticise his virtuous origins is, I think, to completely misunderstand the story that is being told to you. And now onto the show.

The big thing I took away from this episode was that the Queen rules much more than anyone knew. Silas may have catalyzed a broken people, but it was her work in building and designing the monarchy that keeps their people strong and vibrant. Having something greater than themselves kept them believing in the dream of Shiloh in the long arduous years before the glistening city was built. And now that the years of war and conflict are over, the people of Shiloh need to see their royal family. The premiere of the ballet, around which the episode revolves, that the queen cares about. “We are the performance,” she says. The thing to inspire the people, and also to remind them of who is in charge and why. There’s something to be said for exploring that. Often, democracies fall into dictatorships and empires because particularly compelling and inspiring leaders come about. It’s just as reasonable that a modern day monarchy, one created recently not one long ago established and only retained for nostalgia’s sake, would require those same “larger than life” characteristics to remain viable.

Of course, in this episode Silas is doing his own work to maintain that larger than life persona, by abandoning his mistress and her son, possibly permanently; a sacrifice God demanded, it seems. His bastard son is once again sick, and this time it doesn’t look reparable. And, so his recent spat with Reverend Samuels be damned, he seeks Samuels’ counsel and wisdom. What must he do to regain God’s favour? Why must God constantly punish him? First by giving him a son who desires men, then by giving his people a greater hero to worship, and now by taking his younger son’s life. After Samuels offers little comfort, Silas’ truck flips over after colliding with a deer. Seeing the deer slowly dying on the ground before him, he realises that he needs to make a sacrifice in his life and quickly snaps the neck of the deer. He then returns to the hospital where his son lays near death, and goes to sleep. When he awakes, his son is better and he takes that as a sign that his decision from the night before was right. He leaves them both behind for his decadent, and solitudinous, royal life.

The solitude of Michelle Benjamin continues at the gala following the ballet, where she hopes to run into David — who was abruptly uninvited by the queen due to his rising star — but instead gets hooked up for a play date with a childhood friend, who is now a financial success, by her mother. She uses the situation to her advantage to obtain financial backing for her long suffering health care initiatives. Which will likely introduce a romantic rival for David as the story progresses. Speaking of, David is invited by Jack Benjamin to club hop and have a good time in general. Jack, having been ever so subtly pushed by his mother to take David down a peg or two, gets his female friend to get him to do dirty things in public places. Of course, David fights the urge and so the paparazzi only get a shot of him making out with her rather than shots of him fucking. But mackage is mackage, and Michelle sees the story online the next morning.

There are a few nuances I’m ignoring or glossing over here, but I can bring them up later on when they’re more relevant. Maybe I’d seem smarter if I mentioned my personal thoughts on these little scenes now and they come to fruition later, but I’m fine with leaving some of these details out when there’s no strong need to discuss them now. Overall, it was a good episode, and the show’s trajectory is interesting and quick thus far. The writing is strong and lyrical, and I don’t expect it to degrade. However, this is, I believe, the last episode directed by Francis Lawrence, so we’ll have to see if the visual beauty of the show can be maintained without his hand behind the camera next week.

NOTE: I apologize for the length of this recap/review; I’m still experimenting with the format I’m most comfortable with for doing these sorts of posts.

Dollhouse took another step up in quality this week after the slight fumble last week. In fact, aside from the opening scene where Echo serves as a doula in a secluded estate perched on an icy mountainside — which will surely engender endless theories about why someone would need to hire an Active to aid in childbirth, aside from the helpful and foreshadowy line “I want to forget!” — this episode was once again a marked improvement over its predecessor.

A scene with Boyd and Topher once again explores some of the nuances of the Actives and biology, in general. Topher’s worried about the “flocking” that the three main actives are exhibiting, which is likely a way for the show to explain away why the same four Actives will so frequently be seen cavorting in future episodes when their memory of past cavorts has been erased. This also emphasizes something left implied to this point: the Actives are completely wiped every time they’re brought back to the Dollhouse. Which is a convenient way of escaping the questions other Actives might naturally have when one is on a long-term mission. It also ensures Actives can’t develop long-term relationships even with other Actives or staff. The takeaway from these scenes, for me, was that the Dollhouse is very good at what they do.

After this prelude, the mission of the week is introduced. Here, we learn that (supposedly) nobody on staff knows what the missions are, and the risk factor is determined by a computer program. I don’t see how this could be done unless that program was a full-on artificial intelligence, and beyond that the handlers of the Actives are also fully aware of the mission as they observe it at all times. But for now, I’ll take them at their word, under the assumption they’re lying in some way. Either way, Echo’s mission this week has been rated as having “special requirements.” Meanwhile, a Voiceless Higher-Up calls up DeWitt about the progress of the Ballard mind fuck. They’re working on it, but not fast enough to warrant a goodbye from the VHU.

And now Echo’s “high risk” mission starts off and she’s a hooker. Look’s like that misogynist Joss Whedon has struck again. After the hot and heavy gyration’s of Taffy, Echo’s role du jour, the head of security for the hotel comes by offering a bit of champagne to get their dirrtiness, and Eliza Dushku’s over-the-top sexy squeals, up to their suite and away from the hotel lobby. We see Taffy’s client, now shirtless and chugging back the champagne, chasing her down the hallway and into the arms of the aforementioned head of security who wisks her away to his secret hideaway with its impenetrable keypad-based security, whose code Taffy dutifully observes for future use. Once in this fortress of securitude, the head of security gently consoles her and offers her a pay-off so that she’ll not sue either the hotel or her customers. What’s saddest about this is that I could totally see hotels having stacks of cash sitting around to pay off disgruntled hookers. Anyways, Taffy is outraged at this insult and refuses the money and then knocks the dude out and gets on her bluetooth headpiece, which would have looked so cool and spy-ish only a few years ago and now simply seems quite banal, to inform her team she’s in. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to the unconscious guard. She said it earlier too, but I can only type it so many times without bashing my head into my keyboard and I need to use it at least once more later on. And as the credits play, I once again have to express my appreciation of its length, even though it’s still much shorter than a truly great credit sequence, such as Six Feet Under’s or Carnivàle‘s, requires.

After the break, Taffy’s wonderful breasts are discussed, and a line as bizarre as “honest to blog” was in Juno is uttered in the course of said discussion when Taffy says “You can mention that when you blog about this later.” I guess it’s cheap way to explain that the guy she directs to blog is the tech guy for the job. Though really, I don’t think “I was aiding in the illegal theft of something last weekend and this chick I was working with had awesome boobs” is really the best thing to put on your blog. Incredibly personal discussions of the cause of your broken heart? Go for it. But leave illegalities out of it, m’kay?

In short order, all the men on the team have their roles defined. The blog guy is the tech-head, the “professor” is the one with domain expertise of what they plan to steal, and the guy pushing for the murder of the incapacitated head of security is the macho muscle that has no real purpose other than to argue for the most violent solution to any given problem. But Taffy, much like Baby, is not one for being put into corners and asserts her dominance with zeal explaining the “no-kill” order their boss has issued for this theft and that she knows to never second guess a client. And wear comfy shoes.

Now that everyone knows she’s the boss, she exposits that their job is to break in to an extremely secure vault which happens to be completely insecure right now due to an hour-long system upgrade hence the episode title “Gray Hour.” They break in and the other criminals quietly wonder why, if Taffy is the best, they’ve never heard of this criminal superstar. Put simply, she likes the quiet life and isn’t looking for attention. Which is a quick way of the show getting across that you don’t need to be famous to be the best at what you do, thus justifying virtually any mission the Actives might have in the future. And to emphasize that she’s simply another instance of the phrase “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” she promptly breaks through a very impressive looking vault door and leads them all into an artwork trove. After the professor makes us all aware of the value of the items in this vault, one painting alone is worth $17 million he says, we learn what they’re here to steal: the Parthenon.

Meanwhile, Agent Ballard has returned from the hospital with a gun shot wound, some drugs, and a sneaky suspicion that Lubov/Victor is lurking in the shadows. He interrogates Lubov about the picture he received from Alpha two weeks earlier and demands to know who gave him the tip that turned out to be a trap. Lubov was given the tip by someone — with a Georgian accent “Russia Georgia,” not “Sweet Home Georgia,” which Ballard Joss-fully corrects “Alabama” — who now knows that he’s in cahoots with Ballard and so wants protection. Ballard says he’ll help so long as he never sees Lubov again.

Returning to the vault, the professor exposits that Turkey, when they were in control of Athens, allowed the Earl of Elgin to take these small marble engravings from the Parthenon so while it’s not stolen per se, there’s probably a good reason it’s holed away in a vault. (Although, while doing a bit of perfunctory research for this post, I found out that these so-called Elgin Marbles are actually on display in the British Museum and Britain has publicly denied requests for their return to Greece, so all of this is a little misleading historically speaking.)

This little tidbit of historical information, leads the thieves to deciding that Greece hired them to steal the marbles back. As this pointless discovery is fleshed out by the non-professors, the professor is unartfully attempting to close the vault door behind himself locking them in and him out with the marbles. The tech-head tries to stop him but gets a gut full of ancient sword for his troubles, and they’re all stuck inside the vault as the professor makes a clean getaway. Luckily, Taffy’s got an outside man.

She calls up Boyd, who’s waiting in his surveillance van, to inform him of the man leaving the hotel and her desire that he not get away. The muscle attempts to interject with the brilliant line “how are you getting reception down here?!” but is shut down as Echo explains to Boyd that she’s got things under control and can get them out of the vault before the gray hour is over. But as her conversation with Boyd ends a sharp shrill noise rings out through the phone. Echo looks confused and quietly asks “Did I fall asleep?” Oh shit.

After the break, Topher is regaling a coworker with his opinions on the various nuances of his brain manipulating genius. It’s like this show knows how to get me all hot and bothered. Unfortunately, before the show can get me completely titillated, Topher notices that Echo’s vitals have gone off the charts. Her behaviour in the vault isn’t much better as she shudders in the fetal position “shall I go now?” awaiting her preprogrammed response. The muscle is confused and decides, as per usual, that the solution to the problem is more violence. Amazingly, it doesn’t work.

Boyd, on the other hand, has got his shit well in hand. He shoots the professorial prick just for the fun of it and gets the marbles. Meanwhile, Topher is explaining to DeWitt how Echo has lost hers. Her vitals are off the chart, and despite explanations from others, Topher knows that her pulse rate, with her current personality, would never go over 65 BPM. Something went wrong. Luckily, they’ve got a recording of Echo’s conversation with Boyd, and Topher is terrified when he hears the high pitched noise that ends the call. After a bit of befuddlement, he explains that Echo has been remotely wiped, something that has never been tested and shouldn’t have even been possible. Echo has essentially been born again without the comforts the Dollhouse has built into their wiping protocol. And she certainly won’t be able to help herself.

In the vault, the muscle is working on getting Taffy back, but all Echo can do is repeat the things he’s told her to say. “Taffy’s gone man, and she’s not coming back.” the tech-head says as he cradles his gut wound. Which leads us to Sierra waking up in the Dollhouse brain-changing chair. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to DeWitt who says she needs Taffy’s help. Taffy’s back, people.

After the break, we get a scene where the tech-head teaches Echo about art. He talks about the appearance of art, and how it can either be about what you see or about what is. “That’s what art’s for: to show us who we are” he says romantically. It’s an interesting little scene where the discussion about the art around them effectively mirrors Echo’s disintegration under the stresses she’s experiencing. It would be nice if the scene was a little longer, even though it’s a little shoe-gazy, but the muscle decides it’s time for more muscle. He calls them all weak and busts out a drill to… I’m not really sure what he plans to do with it, he does know vault doors have protection against that sort of thing, right?

SierraTaffy is livid back at the Dollhouse, that she got passed over after all the work she put into planning the Parthenon heist. She repeats EchoTaffy’s story about never second guessing clients. She even adds on the comfy shoes bit, to emphasize how meaningless the distinction between the first Taffy and the new Taffy is. They’re both the same person, just in a different body.

Now that Topher’s had some time to process what happened, he feels the need to barrage the audience with completely meaningless technobabble about “neurotropic factor” and how impossible it would be to break through all the firewalls he put into place. He’s certain that this isn’t a one-man hack. Which is a little odd given his scenes with DeWitt later on. He calls up Boyd to ask if Echo seemed normal when he took her out tonight. Boyd answers but wants to know why it matters. I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Was he thinking that Echo did the remote wipe to herself? That it was an inside job? Oh right, the show just needs a credible reason for Boyd to know that Echo’s in trouble. And so Boyd calls up DeWitt to complain that he was left out of the loop. And then he demands from the professor a map to the security room they entered the vault from. SierraTaffy continues her role as an exposition machine, explaining that while she has all the skills needed to solve this problem there’s a time factor as well. There are only nine more minutes left in the gray hour, so there’s no way for her to do the job in person, but if Echo can follow instructions everything will be all right.

Tech-head continues his art lecture series, soon to be released on his blog and available on iTunes, and Echo offers the crucial information that she likes sky. And that there’s a mountain in the painting they’re both looking at. She then asks what her name is and explains that when she’s “there,” her name is something else. Is this an example of her memory persisting, despite what Topher’s instruments indicate, or an example of the depth of the base state programming of the Actives? Is she programmed to have the name Echo when she’s in the Dollhouse? It’s a seemingly pointless digression, but it may be important in future episodes. Either way, tech-head is sick of Echo’s child-like persona. He asks her to get something from his bag. As he prepares the syringe, he explains to Echo that they’re fucked and the only way that door will be opened is by the security guards outside, who will take them to prison.

“What’s prison?” Echo asks. “It’s a place with no sky” Tech-head helpfully answers. The look on Echo’s face as she hears this description of prison is deep with meaning and memory. She’s been in prison before. “We’re bad guys.” Tech-head says as he slide the syringe up to his arm. But death is the easy way out, says the muscle. He takes the syringe away, lifts the no-kill order, and takes out a gun.

Topher continues to explore the list of possible hackers that could have remote wiped Echo. Although, that list should probably be pretty small given the secrecy about Dollhouse’s very existence. In fact, after throwing away his most recent accusation for being a hack, he says “there’s only one person I know, who could achieve a remote wipe. And he’s dead.” The look of confusion on his face lingers until just before the camera cuts away when it quickly shifts to one of understanding.

SierraTaffy is trying to call Echo but nobody’s picking up. She explains how she’ll open the vault door. Echo finally picks up. And SierraTaffy and EchoTaffy’s similarities are once again noted by the show. They both hide their vault-cracking resin in their bra. There’s a short vault-cracking scene which doesn’t end up successful and SierraTaffy heads off to her “treatment” with her briefcase full of cash. Something tells me, she’s not going to be leaving with that money.

Because official authorities are potentially getting involved, it’s time for the Dollhouse to make sure they’re isolated, so DeWitt orders a couple operatives to be ready to eliminate Echo should the need arise. She is also explicit that she doesn’t want Boyd knowing about it, as she thinks he’s grown too attached to Echo.

The alarm has been set off, the guards are closing in and the muscle is telling Echo to shoot at the bad guys. This confuses her because she was pretty certain that they were the bad guys. So the muscle holds his gun to her and says to shoot or be shot. Echo would prefer to just go, sans shootout. Somehow, she gets it into her head to take the syringe of death and inject it into the muscle’s neck. How she knew it would harm him is left unanswered as her previous reaction to it was completely benign. Regardless, the muscle goes down and shoots off a few rounds as he does instigating a one-way fire-fight in which he fires blindly and yet somehow manages to hit every guard that the camera shows. Tech-head gives Echo instructions on how to get out and then throws a smoke grenade. Boyd follows the map drawn for him. He gets to the whole in the wall as Echo and the tech-head are making their way out.

“Are you OK?” Boyd asks. “He’s broken.” Echo responds talking about tech-head as she passes him over to Boyd. Boyd reaches his hand out for Echo to take to which she says “I’m not broken.”

Finally, Ballard gets back from his help-getting mission which turns out wasn’t so much a “help you out” mission as it was a “fuck you over” mission. Lubov is marked for capture everywhere and if he tries to leave LA, he’ll be picked up by the FBI and dropped off with a handshake at the Russian mob’s doorstep. Harsh, dude.

Well, Echo’s back to being a blank slate, the marble is intact and headed to the client and Topher says the remote wipe did no permanent damage. But that’s not what Topher is really there to talk about. He knows that Alpha was the one that remote wiped Echo. Nobody else could have done it. DeWitt needs a signature from Topher: his security clearance has been upgraded. Alpha is indeed alive. And out there. The Dollhouse is not all powerful says DeWitt. Though its creation appears to be.

Echo has returned to her calm life at the Dollhouse, and yet seems affected by these recent events as she draws a sad face in the steam of her mirror. And wipes it away.

This episode once again relied on integrating the mythology with the episodic storyline. Like the second episode, Alpha introduced something unexpected into one of Echo’s missions. It still remains unclear what Alpha’s goal is with these sabotages, but they seem to be having an effect on Echo. For example, at first glance, the thread with Boyd trying to get to Echo to help her out seems pointless, but after re-watching, it seems like they’re trying to show that Echo managed the situation without Boyd’s help. Unlike what Topher said, she did help herself. Is this a growing ability in Echo? And if so, was it instigated by this event or was it always there waiting to be demonstrated? And is that why Alpha spared Echo during his massacre?

The mythology of the show and the questions regarding Echo’s growth are deepening. I’m glad that the show is expanding the mythology so quickly, though mostly because it means we’ll probably be getting answers some time this year, and given that the likelihood of Dollhouse getting another season diminishes each week, I hope for some level of closure before Fox bitch slaps this show into oblivion. The show still suffers from the problem that the Ballard storylines are far too separate from the rest of the action. This episode took a step in the right direction by getting DeWitt involved in his story, but it needs to be even more integrated. I know I say this every week, and given that the show started at a B+ and is thus far at about an A- the improvements might seem marginal, the show really does continue to improve with each new episode. And episode seven is supposedly when the season really kicks off. I can’t wait.

Music today, popular music anyways, seems to rely much much more on catchy hooks and addictive beats. There’s nothing immanently wrong with music like this, but the fact is music can do better.

Verses have become afterthoughts, subsumed by choruses and pre-choruses. What’s worse is that songs often begin with the chorus now. Starting a song in media res is not daring, innovative, or Tarantino-esque. It’s simplistic song writing, relying on simple repetitive overgeneralized lyrics which water down the more complex issues dealt with in the verse. As OutKast said in “Hey Ya!” about the song’s message that Love is not magical and eternal: “Y’all don’t want to hear me, ya just want to dance.”

Our culture is far too invested in distractions. I can hardly act self-righteous about this point given the sheer quantity of television I watch. Escapism is something I do every day. But often my escapism isn’t into a shiny happy world of harmonies and melodies. It’s a gritty realistic sobering take on life in space that takes on issues our society grapples with daily. Or it’s a tale of battles between good and evil occurring in one of the darkest times in our recent history. The things I watch and listen to for entertainment inform my views of the world today. If the same is true for the people who listen to current pop music as their predominant music then future generations are fucked.

Music was most likely the first art form our species experimented with (this can be easily disputed by virtue of the ephemeral nature of sound, but at least intuitively makes sense) so its power should not be underestimated. We began with simple grunts and rhythms and as we grew more sophisticated we developed harmony and melody and with the advent of language we incorporated lyrics into the tribal drums and bone flutes. So don’t tell me lyrics don’t matter.

Lyrics do more than repeat tropes over newly generated beats. And if you have nothing of value to say with your words, then let your instruments do the talking. I have nothing against a catchy beat, and I have no fundamental issue with pop music. I simply believe that music doesn’t need to be watered down, nor should it be; it should be distilled into its harshest, most biting, most truthful. One of my favorite songs of recent history is Casey’s Song by City and Colour which contains the lyrics “With you on my mind and my heart held in your hand, screaming ‘Break me’” and that’s it. I don’t need a verse to elaborate on that, those few words along with the accompanying music tell a story better than most exposition-laden pop songs.

It may seem like those two points are contradictory but they’re not; I want terse and smartly written lyrics, but I’m not willing to put up with pop music’s current love of short verses and repetitive choruses with little substance. Pop music is popular music, not bubbly vapid superificial music.

I don’t have any strong feelings regarding Coldplay; I generally enjoy their music, but I’d never consider them a favourite of mine. At the same time, I would have to have a discussion with someone who said they hated Coldplay to see why. If only because their music is so gentle and innocuous that disliking them is like disliking water.

That said, their newest song, Viva La Vida, is quite stuck in my head but it’s not because of the song but what it makes me think of.

Kings is a new show which looks to be coming to NBC in February and while it claims it’s a modern retelling of the classic tale of David and Goliath — with David played by a young man named David, and the part of Goliath being played by a fucking Tank — it seems much more likely from the footage I’ve seen that David’s triumph is merely a kicking off point for a show that will explore many themes ranging from Love and Devotion, both to family and country, to War and Fanaticism.

So what does this have to do with Coldplay? Well, at the end of the Kings panel at Comic-con they showed us a trailer which was most likely cobbled together from the pilot episode set to Coldplay’s song Viva La Vida. And there was something about the interleaving of the song and the show that stuck out to me. It also goes to show how ineffectual Coldplay really is, something a friend of mine noted a few weeks ago, that a trailer for a show that I had never heard of an hour before I saw it left a greater impact than the song itself.

Before the trailer, there was a discussion with the producers and some of the cast, though Ian McShane was stuck in traffic and didn’t make it to the panel, which talked in very broad terms about where the show was going and the kind of support they’re receiving from the studio and none of it was particularly revelatory or insightful so I’m fine with not dicussing it further. But before that they showed us the first twenty minutes of the pilot to give us a taste of what the show will be like.

I really wish that I had seen the whole pilot or at least had the chance to watch what I was given a couple more times because I don’t want to jump the gun on this and overhype the show. At the same time, I’m seriously majorly intensely excited about this show. What I saw was really impressive; the scope of the show is epic, pardon the pun, with the story beginning as a war-torn nation (or city-state, it’s not quite clear) is finally opening their new capital of Shiloh after years of hardship and struggle. Opening is obviously the wrong word because the city has been lived in as it was being built but with construction complete, an inaugural celebration is at hand.

After this brief introduction to the world and people of this tale, we jump ahead a year and a half to the war of their fathers born again. It’s here that David goes up against Goliath, the name of the type of tank that their adversary lines their front lines with, and by defeating it frees the captive hostages on the other side, one of whom is the King’s son.

I’m leaving out a lot of nuance and storytelling here because when I sat down for the Kings panel I didn’t know what to expect, so I wasn’t mentally prepared to analyze and record it in great depth. But what I saw was enough. This show could be “Carnivàle” good, which is really really fucking good in my books. The acting from everyone was really good, the story drew you in, and you can tell a lot of care has been taken by the creators to develop this world.

I don’t know if this is overhyping it because I’ve seen so little but I’ve been burned before by not hyping shows. I sat by and let my friends not watch Firefly when it first aired, I didn’t push anyone I know to watch Journeyman even though I knew it was one of the best new shows of the year and needed the audience. I’m sick of my favourite shows dying before their time. So if my choices are to overhype a show which might end up sucking, or not offer my support for a show which needs a fan base as it develops, I’ll take the former. Watch it. Make it through a full season. If you hate it, leave it be, but give it a real chance.