This week’s column is going to include a review of the just-aired Syfy remake of Children of the Corn, amongst other goodies.

But first…

The News

*     Fangoria.com has the details of an upcoming piece King has written for the magazine.  Due to be published in two parts (beginning with Fangoria #289, on sale in December), the article — titled “What’s Scary” — is a 7500-word essay: a retrospective critique of the last decade in horror films.

This sounds cool as heck to me; I’m going to pretend it’s a prelude to an updated version of the awesome Danse Macabre.

*     The New York Times has announced TimesTalks LIVE, a series of “intimate discussions with today’s top talents and thinkers.”  These live events will be simulcast in hi-def to movie theatres across North America.  (So far, the only announced participating theatre chain is Cineplex.)

Stephen King will appear as part of the talks with Janet Maslin on November 10, the day Under the Dome is released.

Check the TimesTalks website for ticketing info.

*     It seems to be missing the title and author info, and other such fine print, but the Under the Dome website has the (more or less) final cover:

It’s kinda gorgeous.  You can get a better look at it on the official site.

*     Lilja’s Library has an extremely tantalizing bit of info/speculation.

The section for The Dark Tower at StephenKing.com (King’s official site) has a big banner up top, featuring an illustration of part of a face, with the slogan “Ka Is A Wheel” and “November 2009″ on it.

This could be a teaser for the first issue in the new comics arc “The Dark Tower: The Battle of Jericho Hill,” which hits stores late in November, but Lilja speculates that it may mean a new Dark Tower novel is due to be announced soon.

USA Weekend writer Lorrie Lynch posted the following quote in her blog way back in March:

When we were chatting about his upcoming book Under the Dome, a novel with political subtext out in November, King said he had recently had an idea for a short story. “And then I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I find three more like this and do a book that would be almost like modern fairy tales?’ Then this thing started to add on bits and pieces so I guess it will be a novel.” That idea, according to King, is for a new Dark Tower novel, a continuation of his epic seven-part fantasy/sci-fi/Western series about a lone gunslinger named Roland and his ongoing hunt for the Man in Black. “It’s not really done yet,” King admits of his magnum opus. “Those seven books are really sections of one long uber-novel.”

Well, I just popped a nerd-boner.

Further details as they become available.

*     Lilja’s Library also posted details of a potential remake of “Quitters Inc.,” the King short story which appeared in print in Night Shift and was previously filmed as part of Cat’s Eye.  There is apparently a screenplay being written by Johnathon Schaech “for Samuel L. Jackson.”  Presumably, this means Jackson is attached to star.

Schaech is also the screenwriter of the Tobe Hooper version of From a Buick 8 which may or may not ever get made.  That’s one of my favorite King novels of the past couple of decades, and while I’m interested in any version, I’d like to see someone with a bit more talent box-office clout than Tobe Hooper attached as the film’s director.

*     Don’t forget: “The Dark Tower: The Fall of Gilead” #5 goes on sale this week!

Movie Review: Children of the Corn (2009)

Let me establish some credentials right up front:

I’m sure you can guess by the simlpe fact that I’m writing a Stephen King-related column that I’m, well, a Stephen King fan.  I have been since roughly 1987, and I’m primarily a fan of his written work.

That said, I also take a big-time interest in the movies, to the extent that I own every single one of them on DVD … except for the last couple of seasons of The Dead Zone, and those only because I keep forgetting about them. 

Heck, I even own the movies that are only tangentially part of King’s canon, such as The Mangler Reborn and Sometimes They Come Back For More and Creepshow III (still haven’t been able to force myself to actually watch that one).  Those movies are so far removed from King’s source material that it makes The Lawnmower Man look like the model of fidelity.

From all that, you can probably surmise that yes, in fact, I do own the entire Children of the Corn series.  Every last gobsmackin’ one of ‘em.  They’re all terrible, from the original right up to Revelation, but they’re all sitting right there on my shelf nevertheless, and I even watch them once every five years or so.

I do not say this lightly: the remake of Children of the Corn may even worse than the rest of the series.

It’s definitely worse than the original, and I can think of a couple of the sequels I may have enjoyed more, and frankly, there’s not a single one of the sequels I can immediately disqualify from contention as being better.

This thing is fucking awful.

This is no surprise, of course, but I’d hoped that somehow, some way, just maybe it could at least be passable.  Nope.  Not even vaguely.

The remake is directed by a fellow named Donald P. Borchers, who produced the original Children of the Corn as well as other such luminous titles as Meatballs 4 and Leprechaun 2. 

As a director, Borchers’ only other work consists of the Paul LeMat film Grave Secrets and Perfect Fit, which co-starred David Greico, who I am going to assume is Richard Greico’s shiftless brother.

Borchers “co-wrote” the screenplay with Stephen King himself; apparently, this collaboration consisted of Borchers revising King’s never-used screenplay for his own short story.  Hopefully, this was a heavy revision, as most, if not all, of the dialogue is awful.

The original story, of course, is not necessarily a classic, but it’s got style and tone going for it.  This movie has none of those things.  What it has is a lame attempt at social relevancy, coming via a poorly-considered Vietnam allegory which clearly wants to be an Iraq allegory.  However, since Borchers also wanted to be able to claim on DVD bonus features that this film was more faithful to the story than the original film, he insists on setting the film circa 1975, complete with ’00s-style interracial marriage and ’00s-style sundress.

Speaking of that sundress, it is occupied by Kandyse McClure, a greatly attractive woman who did some good work on the television series Battlestar Galactica.  She also played Sue in the underrated television remake of Carrie, so she’s hardly a stranger to appearing in King-related films made by people just because they owned remake rights.

McClure is stupendously awful in this movie, and as much as I want to lay sole blame for that at the feet of Borchers, I just can’t do it.  Even if he and his editor purposefully picked only McClure’s worst takes to use, it’d be on her to explain how she could be this bad in a movie.

To be fair, her character is written to be as unpleasantly shrill a woman who has ever existed on-screen.  And to be even more fair, this comes directly from King’s original story.

The key to making this sort of unpleasant marriage seem realistic onscreen is to … well, to play it realistically.  McClure fails miserably at this goal.  Her co-star, David Anders, fails, too, but not quite as miserably; this may be due only to not having to be as shrill as McClure is called upon to be.

Instead, he gets saddled with what surely must be one of THE worst lines of dialogue ever written: “Put that in your God and smoke it,” he says at one point.  It’s been too long since I’ve read the King story to remember if this comes from it, and I have no way of knowing if — should that not be the case — King might still have penned it as part of his original screenplay.  I really, really hope not.  Can we please get some sort of verification that this was a Borchers line?

Even worse, if you can believe that, is the portrayal of Isaac, the juvenile prophet and leader of the cult of children.  He is played here by Preston Bailey, whom you might recognize as Cody on Dexter.  (Then again, you might not.  I didn’t; IMDB helped me out there.)  Bailey is beyond awful.  Watching him in this movie is like what I imagine watching a production of the screenplay at your son’s elementary school to be like.  He’s that bad.  I don’t blame Bailey for this.  No child ought to ever be held accountable for his performance in a movie; that is something the director is in charge of sculpting, and Borchers clearly has no idea how to do so.

And somehow, Bailey isn’t the worst of the bunch!  There are other kids who sound as if they could get their lines out only by repeating what Borchers — or, more likely, some hapless and unpaid PA — was whispering to them from slightly off-camera.

The only cast member whose performance almost works is Daniel Newman, who plays Malachi.  He’s about a decade too old for the role, and he’s not good, but he’s passable, and in this movie, that qualifies as a legitimate achievement; so I assume, using the transitive property, that he must be a talent to look out for.

There is not one single scare in this movie, nor does one single creepy thing happen during the entire film.  I would, in fact, go so far as to say that there is not one single moment that works, even within the microcosm of the singular moment in which it is taking place.

In a world in which The Mangler Reborn exists, I cannot honestly say that it is THE worst King-related film ever made … but it’s close.

Movies really don’t get much worse than this one.

Story Review: “UR”

Spoilers ahead!

This weekend, I finally got ’round to reading the Kindle-exclusive short story “UR,” which I found to be vintage King.

“UR,” for those of you unaware of it, is a short story King released exclusively through Amazon.com for the Kindle.  The Kindle, for those of you unaware of it, is a portable device used for purchasing, downloading, and reading e-books.

“UR,” therefore, is available only to Kindle owners.  That ain’t me, but luckily, I’ve got friends more up-to-tech-date than I.

There’s one big suprise in “UR” that I don’t want to give away even with a spoiler warning, and I won’t.  However, here’s the short/medium version of the story: a college English lit professor has a breakup with his basketball-coach girlfriend, who at one point has chided him for reading books instead of, like everyone else, reading off of the computer.  As a pathetic attempt to try and win her back — and also to impress his students and colleagues — he buys a Kindle from Amazon.

What he receives is indeed a Kindle, but it’s of a color the Kindle is not manfactured in, and when he turns it on, he discovers a section for “UR FUNCTIONS.”  This leads him to a function which allows him to purchase novels from alternate realities that do not exist in his own: Hemingway novels that his Hemingway never wrote, for example.

From there, things — as you might expect — begin to get creepy.

Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of this story.  I liked the characters okay, but the real draw was the situation: that otherwordly pink Kindle and its untold billions of novels nobody could ever know about.

I also enjoy the fact that while King’s story can be seen as product placement, it’s product placement in which the placement is available only to people who already own the product.  And for those people, the product becomes a somewhat creepier product than it might have been before they read the placement.

Leave it to King to create a commercial that makes people slightly afraid of the thing they already bought.

Most of the reasons I like the story, though, fall under the heading of “I don’t want to spoil that.”

I’m sure, despite its current exclusivity, that the story will eventually appear in one of King’s story collections.  That’ll be a good thing; it’s very solid King, and could rather nicely be a part of, say, Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

That’s all for this week.  Hopefully, next week will include nothing so dire as that goddam Children of the Corn remake.

(1)  Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs  ($24.6 million, $7887 per screen, $60 million total):  Dropping only 19% from a decent opening weekend, it appears that people actually like this movie and are on the verge of turning it into a legitimate hit.  That’s good news for the box office, which otherwise is in shambles right this moment.

(2)  Surrogates  ($15 million, $5083 per screen):  I was convinced this was going to do okay, but looking back on it, I’m not sure why I thought that.  I guess I’m stuck in the early ’90s, when Bruce Willis was actually relevant as a box-office star.  No more.

And I’d guess that those silly shots of him with a full head of blond hair may have cost the movie millions of dollars in ticket sales.

Surrogates was positioned to be the 2009 version of 2008′s Eagle Eye, a mildly successful sci-fi/action thriller, and it won’t end up being even as successful as that.

(3)  Fame  ($10 million, $3241 per screen):  A remake of a movie people below the age of 35 don’t remember, starring nobody the paparazzi would break into a trot to photograph, opening in late September…?  That equals non-starter, and that’s exactly what MGM got.  All things considered, this movie probably overperformed.

(4)  The Informant!  ($6.9 million, $2760 per screen, $20.9 million total):  Holding up reasonably well from last weekend, this movie still has a long way to go before anybody will be calling it a success.

(5)  I Can Do Bad All By Myself  ($4.7 million, $2241 per screen, $44.5 million total):  Continuing to slow down, which is typical for Tyler Perry movies.

(6)  Pandorum  ($4.4 million, $1759 per screen):  As predicted, nobody cared.  I’m surprised it made as much as it did.

(7)  Love Happens  ($4.3 million, $2280 per screen, $14.7 million total)/(8)  Jennifer’s Body  ($3.5 million, $1278 per screen, $12.3 million total):  Last week’s pair of high-profile duds got no solace this week, as the chances of either of them becoming slight word-of-mouth successes flew out the window.  Both will bedistant memories in another couple of weeks.

(9)  Appropriately enough, 9  ($2.8 million, $1399 per screen, $27 million total):  The movie is now close to earning back its stated budget of $30 million, so it’s not all bad news for the studio.  Still, this was a dud.

(10)  Inglourious Basterds  ($2.7 million, $1389 per screen, $114.4 million total):  Continuing to do relatively well on a week-to-week basis, this is the last week we’ll be hearing from Aldo and his Apaches in this column, but they had a good run, and will be fondly remembered.

Next week finds five new movies going into wide release, including Capitalism: A Love Story, which performed quite well in its limited opening this weekend, averaging $60,000 on eahc of its four screens.  It won’t do as well when it hits 1000 screens, but look for it to pull in no less than $5 million.

Pixar will possibly get its first taste of defeat when it rereleases Toy Story and Toy Story 2 as a combo double feature, this time in digital 3D.  Now, I can see this doing as well as $15 million, but I can also imagine people mostly looking at it and shrugging.  After all, do you know anybody who wants to take their kids to a three-hour movie?  I didn’t think so.  But I will say this: if I’m wrong, and the box office take is considerable, then it means next summer’s Toy Story 3 is going to be absolutely ginormous.

Also opening: Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying (nobody cares), Drew Barrymore’s Whip It (good for $7 million), and Woody Harrelson’s Zombieland (good for $10 million now and every pothead in the world claiming it as their favorite movie five years hence).

Here’s a rundown of how it went:

*     The show kicked with Fred Armisen doing Moammar Gadhafi, explaining to the U.N. that his speech earlier in the week was all messed up ’cause of jet lag.  Armisen generally makes me chuckle, so there’s that, but this was mostly lame.

*     New opening credits!  No Casey Wilson or Michaela Watkins anywhere to be found!

*     Megan Fox comes out and automatically struck me as seeming way more confident than I would have expected.  Too bad the writers stranded her with a dead-end sketch involving her assuming that even though she didn’t remember posing for all those nude photos of her on the internet, she must have … ’cause, you know, they’re on the internet, so they must be real.  She’s dumb; get it?  Lame.

*     Funny faux-commercial for Bladdivan, a drug that helps you conquer your fear of urinating in public.

*     Fox and Kristen Wiig — mmm, Kristen Wiig — play stewardesses who very calmly explain to passengers an increasingly terrible set of circumstances they are about to have to face.  It wasn’t as funny as that makes it sound, and usually, when the first post-monologue sketch is this lame, you know you’re in for a bumpy show.  Wiig gave it her all, though, and Fox did a decent job, too.

*     Will Forte plays a guy who’s gone to Russia and is bartering with Bill Hader over which Russian bride he wants to purchase.  His choices are Megan Fox and Fred Armisen … who is $10 cheaper.  This one was fairly amusing, mainly because all of the people in it not named Megan Fox are very, very funny.  But Fox was only called on to vamp, and she that quite well, so score for her, I guess.

*     A Digital Short in which Fox is on a date with an incredibly awkward Will Forte, playing a SWAT team commander (!) who has skipped work to go out with her.  Pretty funny, and I was actually mildly impressed by Fox’s ability to seem down-to-earth.  Is it possible that she could be a decent actress?

*     Kenan Thompson reprises his Grady Wilson infomercial character, this time hawking a DVD called Grady Wilson’s Burning Up the Bedsheets, another demonstration of ludicrous sex moves.  Fox shows up to help illustrate, and it’s another fairly amusing sketch.  Damn it, I just laughed at Kenan Thompson!

*     U2 comes out and performs a passable version of “Breathe.”  As usual, Bono seems mildly insane.

*     Weekend Update, mildly amusing.  Thompson shows up again, doing his Jean K. Jean bit; this character is one of THE worst in the SNL repertoire, and why anyone allows Thompson to do it is a mystery to me.  Flipside of that: Wiig ought to be required to do her Judy Grimes bit at least once a month.  Hilarious.   Mmmm, Kristen Wiig…

*     Fox doing an infomerical for live lounge, a phone sex line.  Mildly amusing at best.  The writers seem to have abandoned any attempts at giving Fox any actual comedy to perform; too bad, since in the stewardess sketch she seemed like she could actually pull it off.

*     U2 again, this time doing a good version of “Moment of Surrender.”  Bono does some freestyling, and does a decent job with it.

*     New cast member Jenny Slate, whom I find rather attractive, gets to debut a new character: Dawn, the host of Biker Chick Chat.  This is exactly what you’d think it would be, except not particularly funny.  It mainly consisted of Slate, Wiig, and Fox saying “frickin’ ” and “friggin’ ” a lot, except for the time Slate fluffed it and actually said “fuckin’ ” instead.  The look on her face as soon as she realized it was one of pure horror; it was kinda of adorable.  I hope she doesn’t get in too much trouble for it.

Video below:

*     Another Digital Short, this one featuring Andy Samberg showing up for a Movie Night date with Megan Fox at her apartment.  She introduces him to her roommate, Optimus, a fat guy wearing an Optimus Prime mask.  He “transforms,” which involves taking all of his clothes off except for the helmet.  Then Bumblebee shows up, and he transforms, too.  Not a classic, but amusing enough.

*     And now, another episode of Your Mom Talks to Megan Fox While You Get Ready!  It’s Wiig playing somebody’s mother, engaging in awkward mom-chat with Megan Fox while Fox’s friend is finishing dressing.  Amusing thanks to Wiig, who is currently one of this show’s real saving graces.

*     Fox outros, and just like Coldplay did last season, U2 gets to play part of another number.  It’s one of my favorites, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)”!  Bono is swinging from the ceiling on the microphone cord!  NBC only broadcasts half of it!

Final thoughts

Not a particularly good season premiere, but I did chuckle a fair amount, and I come away frmo this having more respect for Megan Fox than I had when the show began.  In that sense, I guess it was a success for her.

Next week: Ryan Reynolds and Lady Gaga!

And yet, here’s a second season!

Yay!

Beware of spoilers ahead.

Speaking as one of those two people who actually liked the bulk of the first season, I was beyond thrilled when Fox decided to try and atone for Firefly by bringing Dollhouse back for a second go-round.  Primarily, I hoped Whedon would find a way to not squander the opportunity, and based on “Vows,” the second-season premiere, I think I’m gonna have to say that he mostly did just that.

Found a way, that is; not squandered the opportunity.  I suck at sentence construction sometimes, and there went one.  What’s that you say, “go back and change it”?  No can do.

Anybody who has ever been a fan of one of Whedon’s other shows — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and the aforementioned Firefly – knows that one of his greatest strengths is in assembling a great cast of characters to bounce off of each other.  The series struggled a bit with this during its first season; all the pieces were in place, but nobody seemed to be moving them about very well for most of the season.

That began to change at some point, and in tonight’s season premiere, it is far and away the best element.  There are numerous excellent interactions between the characters: Boyd has great scenes with DeWitt, Ballard, and Saunders (that last one is particularly great); Topher also has a great scene with Saunders; Echo has good scenes with Ballard and with Saunders/Whiskey; DeWitt has a fine moment with Victor; Sierra — and God almighty does Dichen Lachman look good in this scene — has a great scene with Ivy in which she has an anti-Asian racist imprint.

Unless I missed it, it’s not immediately clear how much time has passed since Alpha went on his rampage at the end of the first season.  Clearly some time, probably several months, have passed, but the ramifications of that incident are still being felt in some ways.  Boyd is still very suspicious of Ballard; part of this is clearly due to his promotion to head of security, but part of him is doubtless also resentful of not being Echo’s handler anymore, and is maybe even a little jealous of Ballard’s proximity to her.

Not that Ballard is Echo’s handler, either.  No, they’ve got a more complicated relationship than that.  Apparently, Ballard’s deal with the Dollhouse is that he’s allowed to be a client, renting out Echo to use as a weapon in taking down criminals he wasn’t able to take down while at the FBI. 

This is an unexpected turn of events, and Whedon — who’s in the director’s chair tonight, and also wrote the screenplay — gets in at least one terrific reversal-of-expectations moment when he reveals that this is what’s going on with Echo’s engagement.  Initially, we’re led to believe that her engagement this week — she’s getting married to Apollo Jamie Bamber — is just another example of a kinky rich dude paying for his ya-yas.

Echo, in her guise as Mrs. Apollo, walks into the back room of a shop at one point, to find Ballard sitting there waiting on her; she greets him with a cordial, “How’s it goin’, partner,” or something like that.

Now, if you’ve seen “Epitaph One,” you know that at some point in the future, Echo/Caroline develops the ability to retain her own personality while she’s also imprinted with another, and you also know that she and Ballard end up working together.  So my first thought upon hearing her switch into a different tone of voice and call Ballard her partner was that this plot element was already starting.  Instead, it’s then revealed that Echo’s real current imprint is of an FBI agent Ballard is partnered with; she’s gone undercover, seduced an arms dealer, and is on a long-con sort of engagement designed to take him down.

So, what you’ve got here is a person named Caroline, memory wiped and turned all tabula rasa in the form of an active designated Echo, imprinted with the personality of an FBI agent who in turn is pretending to be somebody else.  Um, that’s, like, pretty fucking deep.

Even deeper: Echo isn’t really Echo anymore.  She’s still dealing with occasional flashes of memory of other engagements, so in some ways, she’s still a bit of that superintelligence — or whatever you want to call it — that Alpha made her into last season.  But only Ballard knows this, so in a sense Echo isn’t Echo anymore; she’s somebody else pretending, at times, to be Echo.

This isn’t as confusing as it sounds.  I wouldn’t say confusing; I’d lean closer, this episoe, to “compelling.”

Also compelling is the sad case of Whiskey, who seems to be well on her way to the loony bin.  She’s fucking with Topher’s mind, trying to repay him for creating her.  Not at all happy with knowing she’s a fake person, she’s doing things like putting rats in cabinets for him to discover, and showing up to sppon with him and give him morning wood.  She’s supposedly trying to conquer her own self-loathing through conquering an object of external loathing, but it doesn’t work too well … or does it?

She’s been designed to want to never leave the Dollhouse, but at episode’s end, she runs away in a convertible, headed for a new role on a new series on a different network.  (Amy Acker has a role on ABC’s upcoming Happy Town, alongside Sam Neill and Steven Weber; however, she will be appearing on Dollhouse again at some point, or so “Epitaph One” assures me.)

The performances are all pretty great this week.  Starting at the top, I know a lot of people don’t like Eliza Dushku, but when she’s playing within her range, she can be really good, and she’s really good in this episode.  Whedon had to play to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s strengths and avoid her weaknesses on Buffy, and it worked; if he can keep doing that here with Dushku, it’ll work out fine.

Amy Acker is particularly good in her role; she’s got a sort of crazed, doomed, defeated thing going on, to the extent that she even professes to want to keep her scars.  Acker, as Angel fans know, gives good crazy.  That fucking Happy Town had better be quite  a show; she’s going to missed on this one.

I was also impressed this week by Fran Kranz.  Topher, as a character, was a bit of a hemorrhoid during the first season, but starting with “Epitaph One” and continuing into “Vows,” he’s growing into an interesting character.  Kranz is obviously up to the challenge, too, and that pleases me.

Everyone else is good, including Jamie Bamber, who is largely wasted, true, but it’s nice to see him anyways.

There’s also a new character introduced, Senator Perrin, played by Angel‘s Alexis Denisof.  Perrin is seen on television publicly declaring a private war against the Rossum Corporation for holding out technology that could benefit Alzheimer’s patients.  Both Langton and Ballard suspect each other of having tipped Perrin off about the Dollhouse(s); this can lead nowhere good.

I’m pleased to see Denisof back in the Whedonverse, and I can only hope that Dollhouse can stick around long enough to properly take advantage of his tremendous talents.

If the rest of the season is as improved as this first episode, then I suspect that might well come to pass.

This episode, “Night of Desirable Objects,” picks up roughly where the last one left off, and we see Olivia being discharged from the hospital.  She’s not 100%, though, not by any means: she’s walking with a cane, has nasty bruises all over her back and shoulder, still has a bit of the shakes in her hands, and … what else? … oh yeah, she’s got superhearing.  That’s right, if you ever wanted to know what a fly’s footsteps sound like, you might want to have a talk with Olivia Dunham; she’s got the scoop.

I’m already seeing reviews that are expressing disappointment with the lack of development in the alternate-universe storyline, but as with last week, I found this week’s episode to be a perfectly satisfactory example of making Olivia’s amnesia, and her confusion over it, a vital enough part of the story that I’m okay with not knowing more for now.

This episode isn’t as good as the season premiere, but it’s certainly got its moments, and it’s grounded enough in character that it easily sails over the more problematic elements.

Those problematic elements?  Well, it’s hard to care about the monster of the week very much.  There are some wonderfully creepy moments, some of which rival vintage X-Files monster-moments; however, as was the case with many a lesser X-Files episode, the monster plotline just never manages to amount to much of anything on the whole.

The opening sequence is great, though, featuring a creepy cornfield and a creepy scarecrow and a frightening Carrie-esque moment.  Later, there is a spooky shot of a monster bounding into partial view in an underground cave, and toward the end of the episode, there is a genuinely frightening moment in which the same monster suddenly appears behind one of the main characters.

But the mumbo-jumbo about the monster being a genetic experiment using scorpion DNA to allow a baby to gestate inside a lupus-stricken mother is of almost no interest at all.  I’m thnkful that it didn’t turn out to be yet another former experiment of one Walter Bishop, though; maybe that too-frequently-used plot device has seen its last days.

What we’re left with is the story of Olivia continuing to deal with her amnesia, and now with her ability to hear all sorts of things she shouldn’t be able to hear.  To me, that’s what this episode is really about, and it mostly succeeds on that level; the monster stuff is just window dressing.

Olivia’s enhanced hearing first manifests itself when she suddenly begins hearing a fly as its feet make noise while it walks.  Later, she hears somebody moving around in a house she and Peter are investigating, and she is so much on edge as a result that she very nearly puts a bullet in Peter’s skull.  Even later, while she’s in the tub — oooh, Anna Torv plus bubbles – she begins hearing all sorts of things all at once, and then abruptly stops hearing them again.

She’s also been visited by Nina, who gives her the contact information for one Sam Weiss, a fellow who helped put Nina “back together again” at one point, whatever that means.  Olivia goes to see Weiss, who apparently works at a bowling alley; he asks her if the headaches have begun yet, and when she says no, he says that they will.  Who is this Weiss?  I’m sure we’ll find out; as far as information goes, we’re just along for the ride with Olivia on this one, for now.

Olivia has also confided in Charlie, who, as you might recall from last week, is no longer Charlie at all.  No, he’s just a soldier from another dimension wearing a copy of Charlie’s body, and he gets to sit for another session at the interdimensional typewriter.  Whoever is on the other end isn’t happy to find out that Olivia doesn’t remember anything, and orders “Charlie” to help her remember … presumably by any means necessary.

Another element running through the episode is a theme involving Walter and Peter, father and son.  Just as Dr. Hughes has gone to great lengths to create a son for himself, Walter has … well, we still don’t know what he’s done, but we know by now that he’s surely done something.  Walter just has too knowing a look in his eye after it is discovered that the grave of Baby Boy Hughes is empty; “The grave of a boy who is not in his grave,” Walter says to himself, significantly not specifiying who he’s talking about.  John Noble, as always, is great this week.

He’s also got a fine scene in which Peter makes a date with him to go fishing.  While investigating this new case, Peter has seen a fishing lure on a wall; it’s called a “Night of Desirable Objects” lure, and Peter once bought a similar one to take on a fishing trip with his dad.  That trip never came off, but years later, they’ve got a second chance.

Joshua Jackson is good in this scene, and in the episode as a whole.  Anna Torv is very good this week, also, and the chemistry between her and Jackson — practically nonexistant during much of the first seaon — is finally starting to click.

And Kirk Acevedo makes for a great creepy faux-Charlie; he was underused during the first season, and it’s gonna be a shame to see him leave the show, but at least he’s getting to go out playing something interesting.

The guest cast is pretty good this week, too, with Charles Martin Smith playing a thankless role as a police officer; it’s always nice to see him, though, even if he’s wasted, as he is here. 

Also popping up is John Savage, who you might remember from The Deer Hunter, and — in the role of Sam Weiss, who is sure to be a recurring character — Kevin Corrigan, from The Departed amongst many other roles.

All three of those actors have more gravity and weight than is typically the case for guest stars on Fringe; it tends to be workmanlike in many of its smaller roles, and having people a bit further up the talent scale makes the whole endeavor seem a bit more worthy this week.

Not a perfect episode, by any means, but good enough for me to heartily endorse it.

I do want to be one of those guys busting a nut to say that this is not entirely a bad thing.

The similarities are somewhat superficial: the episode starts out with an ambiguous scene of catastrophe, which involves people screaming and people dying and things on fire and explosions.  The rest of the episode (titled “No More Good Days”) revolves around mysterious events happening to a large cast of actors.

Only this time, Penny is there!  And also, director David Goyer is no J.J. Abrams!  And also, the screenplay doesn’t have even a fifth as much subtlety, wonder, and genuine, lean-forward-in-your-seat mystery as that Lost pilot had.

And that, folks, is gonna be the last time I compare this series to Lost; assuming future episodes don’t involve Dominic Monaghan’s heroin habit or a character discovering and plotting a way to infiltrate some sort of hatch in the ground, I just don’t know that further comparisons would be either fair or useful, to either series.

So let’s move on, shall we?

I’m going to give you my short, general reaction first, and then we’ll start getting into somewhat spoilery specifics.

My reaction is that I enjoyed the pilot.  I didn’t love it.  Some scenes didn’t quite work for me, and on the whole, things felt more than a little bit rushed. 

I mean, sure, I get that something genuinely awful has happened, and that it’s happened worldwide.  Personally, I think I’d've liked to see this play out a bit more.  Maybe it might could’ve taken more than what seems like two minutes for everyone everywhere to accept the events of the day…?  Shouldn’t there be something more along the lines of societal panic, and shoulsn’t that panic last more than fifteen minutes?  I’m just sayin’.

But, that’s not the direction David Goyer and Brannon Braga have decided to go in … and possibly some of this is also coming from Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, on which the series is based.  (Robert J. Sawyer, eh?  Alright, stopping.)  I’ve not read that novel, and therefore can’t comment on it or be informed by it, and therefore, this will be the last time I’m going to be considering it.  From this point forward, I’ll be assuming that the producers are writing the story afresh … which, really, they are, whether they accept it or not.

So, ignoring my (mostly unfair) thoughts about how I’d have done the series, I’ll focus instead on how they did the series.  For better or for worse, it’s what we’ve got, and yes, in fact, I did enjoy this episode.  It’s a cool idea, and it’s got a good cast, and if the story from this point forward develops satisfactorily, I won’t care that the pilot seems rushed.

Let’s go back to that cast.

There’s Joseph Fiennes, playing Mark Benford, an FBI agent.  He’s a recovering alcoholic, whose marriage is seemingly repaired after a long bout of hanging by a thread.  He is apparently the only person at the FBI smart enough — or self-reflective enough — to realize that when the whole world blacked out, it didn’t just black out: he had a vision of the future.

And not a pleasant one: he’s drinking again, and being hunted by a man with a very large gun inside the FBI offices.

Fiennes does a good job, and certainly handles his American accent capably.  He seems like a decent enough fellow to hang a series upon.

Who’s that fellow Joseph Fiennes is clutching?

Why, you’re absolutely correct; that is John Cho!

He plays Benford’s partner, Agent Demetri Noh.  Man, I really wish he had been a doctor instead.  Cause, um, Doctor Noh.

Cho is actually quite good.  He’s very plausible as an FBI agent, and between this and Star Trek, his career is obviously developing quite nicely.

Noh’s vision during the blackout is possibly the most disturbing of the ones we hear about, no so much for what it is as what it isn’t: anything at all.  Noh doesn’t have a vision, and he assumes that this means he’s not going to be alive six months in the future.  Crikey!

Demetri is part of a task force with Mark and a female agent whose name escaped my notes.  She finds security camera footage of a baseball game during the flash forward … and amongst all those thousands of people lying there passed out, she finds a man walking around.  Well, that’s got to be meaningful, right?

Sonya Walger — Penny on Lost, for those of you who don’t know  — plays Mark’s wife, Olivia, a surgeon who loses a patient during the flash forward.  Even worse, she has a vision in which she is obviously cheating on her husband with another man.

That man there, in fact.

That’s Jack Davenport, and I’d wager that his role on this show won’t be as funny as his role on Coupling.  He plays the father of a boy whose life Olivia has to save after the flash forward; when he comes into the ER, he already knows her name.  Creepy.

Zachary Knighton plays Bryce, a colleague of Olivia’s who, at the time of the flash forward, has a gun pressed beneath his chin.  He’s just about to pull the trigger, so he’s obviously got some issues, but they seem afterward to mostly be gone: he’s had a vision of the future in which he is alive and happy, and who is he to question a vision?

That’s Dominic Monaghan.  I didn’t see him in this episode, but apparently, he is a cast member, and will show up next week.

There’s Brian F. O’Byrne — you might recognize him as Colin from the gone-too-soon Brotherhood – who plays Aaron, Mark’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor.  He has a vision in which his daughter, who came home from the war dead, is still alive somewhere in Afghanistan; unlike many of the people in the world, he’s hoping that what he saw will come true.

O’Byrne is pretty good here, and Aaron threatens to be one of the most interesting characters on the show.  O’Byrne’s American accent is flawless; I knew I’d seen him somewhere, but with that accent and a thick beard, I had to rely on IMDB to tell me who he was.

And yes, that is in fact Seth MacFarlane, who has a small role as another FBI agent.  I can’t abide Family Guy, but I think I kinda like MacFarlane himself.  I’ve seen interviews in which he was actually funny, and here, he doesn’t seem at all out of place playing an FBI agent.  Dunno if he’s recurring, or if this was a one-off, but I’d not mind if he came back.

Summing up, this was by no means a great pilot, but it certainly has potential, especially if the writers are able to mine some nuggets out of the rich vein of symbolic meaning to be found in a series about people’s actions when they think they know what is going to happen in the future.

For example, that tension between Mark and Aaron — one who wants his vision to be false, and one who desperately wants his to be true — could well hold some good drama.  And does Demetri’s lack of a vision indeed mean that he won’t be around come April 2010?  With Olivia’s vision, does it actually mean what she thinks it means, or could something else be going on?

I hope the writers here are canny enough to take advantage of the premises they’ve set up.  If the reason why the pilot feels a little rushed to me is that they were really more interested in getting to stories that can properly exploits those premises, then I’ll take that as good news.  Only time will tell.

Personally, I’m hoping to be watching FlashForward for several seasons to come, and while this episode doesn’t quite convince me that I will be, it also definitely leaves the door open.

To be continued next week…

Well, because…

(Oh, how can I say this?)

Because…

…because I just laughed at something Bobby Moynihan did on SNL.

There!  I said it!  Are you happy now?!?

SNL Weekend Update Thursdays 2×2

Of course, when I say I “just” laughed at something Bobby Moynihan did, what I actually mean is that over two hours ago, I laughed at something Bobby Moynihan did, but you get the idea.

Nah, like, the opening skecth on SNL was of President Obama doing interviews with various lower-tier cable networks like Bravo and the Food Network, and Moynihan showed up playing that ultra-douchey dude with the spiked blond hair from the Food Network.  He did a pretty good job of it, and I guffawed.  There, now it’s out and I don’t have to feel so awful anymore.

It was a pretty funny show, all in all.  Fred Armisen did his David Paterson schtick, which is always good for a laugh; I’m a big fan of when he gets right up in the camera, which he did while the closing credits ran.  It’s not exactly sophisticated humor, I guess, but it tickles me for reasons I cannot fully explicate.

There was also a moderately amusing Darrell Hammond/Bill Clinton bit, which was capped by a decently amusing “cameo” by Megan Fox, who hosts this Saturday on the season premiere of the regular show.

Pretty good chuckles, all in all.  I can already sense that I’m going to miss this when its time slot is taken up by Community.

Parks and Recreation 2×2, “The Stakeout”:

Heh.  When I wrote down the title of this episode on my notes, I wrote it down as “The Steakout.”  Boy, am I dumb.  Mmmm … steak.

Another strong episode from this supposedly much-improved series.  Dear America: watch, won’t you?  Thanks ever so much.

Leslie has planted a community garden at the bottom of the pit, and she and Tom discover that somebody is growing marijuana in it, so she diecides they should stake — steak? — the place out to catch the perps in action.

This just so happens to be near Ann’s house, and Leslie does the requisite amount of spying on Ann as Mark picks her up for their first date (which seems to actually go relatively well).

Best laughs probably go to Nick Offerman.  Ron has aggravated a hernia, so he’s sitting at his desk literally trying not to move either his head or his torso.  Now, that’s funny enough, but slap a mustache and a grimace on top of it, and you’ve got gold.  Throw Aubrey Plaza into the mix as an intern who — either through neglect, malice, or ignorance, and it’s hard to tell which — decides to make things even worse by “helping,” and you’ve … well, you’ve still got gold, but it’s now gold co-starring Aubrey Plaza.

Andy shows up to his new home in the pit, and Leslie and Tom invite him into their van to help with the stakeout.  He eats a candy necklace whole and goes into a weird sugar-high sort of fugue.  Big laughs again.

Coming home from their date, Ann and Mark see what appears to be a thief breaking into a van and call the cops.  It’s actually Tom, who is quite belligerent to the officer who arrives to investigate.  That officer is played by Louis C.K., who hauls Tom off to jail, and it’s up to Leslie to turn into a hardassed government official in order to get him out of dutch.  Amy Poehler gets her biggest laughs of the episode in this scene.

It’s always nice to see Louis C.K.  I still miss Lucky Louie, one of many shows HBO cut down far too early over the past few years.  Here, it looks like maybe he’s being set up as a potential love interest for Leslie; that’d be an interesting new direction.

I’m still loving this show, and if you ain’t with me, then yore agin me.

The Office 6×2, “The Meeting”:

David from corporate shows up to have a private meeting with Jim, and of course, this makes Michael go into full-on paranoia mode.  Long story short, Jim ends up getting promoted to co-manager of the Scranton branch alongside Michael.

This is a major plot development, to the extent that a show like this can have major plot developments, and I find that while I certainly enjoyed the episode, I have almost nothing to say about it.

“Almost,” I said.

Michael asking Oscar for advice on how best to about enjoying a colonoscopy; Michael enlisting Andy to help him infiltrate the secret meeting by hiding inside a makeshift cheese cart; this episode’s “that’s what she said.”  If it had nothing else going for it, this episode would be worthwhile for those moments alone.

Community 1×2, “Spanish 101″:

I said in my review of last week’s episode that I was going to give this series a minimum of four episodes, and I intend to stick by that cavalier and ill-judged comment, but I gotta level with you: I regret those words a bit, and wish I could just go ahead and pull the ripcord on this one right now.

Here’s the thing: this show is just not funny.  I appreciate that humor is a subjective thing, I accept that fact and live with it, like the knowledge of my own mortality and the fact that no matter what I do, people are going to continue to watch VH1 reality shows.  I’d stop all of these things if I could, but hey, it’s an imperfect world.

What Community wants to be — what it desperately wants to be — is 30 Rock.  It wants to be the kind of show where there is no real need for the plot or the setting to make any but the loosest kind of sense, thereby allowing the characters to go into hilarious flights of randomness that are designed to showcase how wacky life can be, and how wacky people’s ideas can be, and how wacky people’s ideas about humor can be.

Community, you are not 30 Rock, and odds are, you never will be.

Whay do you expect me to accept the idea that all these people like Jeff so much?  What has he done to earn even the vaguest semblance of this sort of adulation?  What, specifically?  And, see, I wouldn’t care about that if you were funny, Community; I wouldn’t care at all.

I’ll give you points for at least trying to give Checy Chase something funny to do this week; you failed, but at least you recognized the necessity.

I’ll also give you very tiny props for making me chuckle about twice during Senor Chang’s monologue.

Starburns, though?  Fairly lame.  I get that community colleges are probably full of peole who think they’r ecooler than they really are, and I’d guess that out of all of those posers, a few of them probably have an undue amount of vanity over their sideburns.  But “Starburns”?  Fairly lame.

Because I was reckless enough to commit to four weeks in a public forum, you’ve got two more chances to impress me, Community.  Don’t squander them.

If you have not seen this episode, and ever intend to, DO NOT read the rest of this review.

Seriously.

Stop.

Stop, Dave.

Won’t you stop, Dave?

Alright, jackanapes, you’ve been warned.

This episode — which is almost certainly one of the better episodes of the series to date — is an instant classic, and what people are mostly going to remember is one very specific moment in which … well, we’ll get to that later, but suffice it to say that it was one of the most shocking moments I’ve ever seen on a television show.  Another review I read — I believe it was HitFix’s, but I could be wrong about that — compared the moment to something one would expect to see in a Tarantino or Coen film.

They weren’t wrong to make that comparison.  More on that later.

The setup here is that Sterling-Cooper is getting a visit from the overseas owners, who are coming in to evaluate the lay of the land and, as it turns out, to reorganize things a bit.

With them comes Guy MacKendrick (Guy walks into an advertising agency, indeed), a smooth-talking, handsome fellow who will be taking Lane Pryce’s position.  Poor Lane is being shipped off to Bombay, where, it is hoped, he will do as fine as a job as he’s done in New York.

As Roger notes, this Guy is a born account man, and it’s clear that a major shakeup to the status quo is in the offing.  Heck, they even left Roger off of the flowchart showing the new structure!  Supposedly an “oversight,” but Guy seems too slick by far to permit that sort of an oversight.

He’s not too slick, though, to avoid another oversight: failing to notice a drunken secretary plowing stright toward him astride a riding lawnmower.  In a spray of blood both horrifying and (in the “holy-fucking-shit-did-I-just-see-that?!” manner of Tarantino) comical, the secretary — one of several whose name I can never remember — plows right over Guy’s foot, and then crashes through a door into one of the offices.

I believe I shouted “Thafuck?!” so loudly that at least three of my five cats went tearing straight out of the room, possibly fearful in their dim, feline way that some sort of end-times-level calamity had struck.  The one thing I can say about Mad Men before this episode is that I would never have expected to see a foot mown off by a John Deere; after this episode, well shit, what isn’t fair game?  Expressing that with the sort of reflexive verbosity with which I expressed it will apparently send cats headed for the nearest beneath-a-bed location, but hey, whattaya gona do?  Sometimes, you’ve got to just blurt it out.

Thing is, that mower vs. foot collision is more than just a water-cooler moment of grand guignol; it’s also a powerful reflection of what is going on in the lives of multiple characters on the show.  Several of them have had similar happenings in their lives recently.  I say “similar” not in the sense of having had various body parts subjected to the cruel touch of sharpened steel moving at lightning speed, but instead in the sense of having had something unexpected and (emotionally) painful happen.

Don has been led to believe the visit from overseas means that he is being eyed for a position at the London branch, but finds out suddenly that this is not the case; Lane Pryce is delivered the news that he is being despatched to Bombay, to be a sort of snake charmer; Roger has discovered that he is so far beneath the esteem of London that they’ve forgotten he’s even part of the team. 

Joan, meanwhile, has found out that her husband didn’t get the job he was expecting, which means that she is going to have to keep working … and since she’s just resigned from Sterling-Cooper, this means she’ll be starting all over again in some new job somewhere.  Not only that, it also seems to mean that she is never going to be the wife of a highly-esteemed surgeon, which is what she’s been expecting.  Instead, it seems more likely that she’s going to be the bread-winning wife of a drunken boor who, once upon a time, used to be a doctor.  The future is not looking at all bright for poor Joan; I suspect it may contain more instances of surprise sex.

Sally Draper, also, has had the emotional equivalent of a John Deere drift into her path.  Still wrestling with her grandfather’s death, the anxiety over it is manifesting as jealousy — and fear — of her baby brother.  She reasons that he’s named Gene, he looks like her grandfather, and he lives in her grandfather’s old room; he may as well be a ghost.

Don tells her that she ought not to feel this way, that her new brother is just a baby, and that they don’t know who he is yet, so he can’t be anybody to be afraid of.  Don, of course, can sell anything to anybody, and as the episode ends, he and his daughter and new son are sitting in a chair together, bathed in moonlight, seemingly at peace.

Similarly, some of the other characters are able to find ways of turning their new adversity into opportunity.  It’s unclear how Roger and Joan will be affected by their bad news, but Lane Pryce benefits from Guy’s misfortunes by finding himself in a position to stay in New York instead of departing for Bombay.

Don, meanwhile, gets a phone call from Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate.  Turns out, the guy Don met in the bar at the country club a few episodes back was in fact Mr. Hilton, who remembered the chance encounter, and took the initiative of finding Don so he could ask his advice on an ad campaign.  There’s every indication that Don may have just inadvertently landed a whopper of an account.

In the world of Mad Men – this episode, at least — that’s how it goes: on the one hand, you might get run over by an intoxicated woman in a beige skirt, and on the other, you might get a phone call from a multimillionaire who wants your advice, and is willing to bring you up in the world to get it.

There’s a great little trio of scenes in which at least some of this is eloquently rendered around the theme of light fixtures.  After Joan has found out her husband isn’t getting his job, she tells him to go to bed, and then goes to one of the lights in her apartment; she lingers for a moment in the light, and then turns it off.  Cut to Don, who still thinks he might be headed for London; he’s lying in bed, in the dark, hands behind his head, smiling up at the ceiling, looking at the overhead light wich is turned off.  Cut to Sally in her bedroom, with a little nightlight providing some lessening of the gloom; she huddles near it like a cavewoman near one of the first fires. 

Earlier in the episode, Sally has told Don that she’s afraid of the dark because she is afraid of what will happen when the lights are turned out.  In this collection of moments, Don is the only one who is clearly comfortable with the dark, and maybe it’s only because he has optimism to cling to.

And after all, the darkness is nothing to fear.  Guy MacKendrick is proof of that: the offices of Sterling-Cooper couldn’t possibly be better lit, and none of that light helped keep those whirling blades from kissing his toes.

The darkness and the light are both merely what we make of them.

“Tonight’s” episode is titled “The Fog,” and thankfully, not only is it better than the crappy horror remake with the same name from a few years back, it’s also better than the original John Carpenter movie of the same name.

Why do I mention that, you ask?  Well, I thought it, so I typed it.  Not much more to it than that.

Moving along…

No, there are no ghostly pirates lurking in the night waiting to give you the gift of throat avulsion as an act of retribution from beyond the veil of life, but that’s not to say there’s nothing creepy going on in this episode.  Quite the opposite.

As has been the case with much of this season, there’s ooginess aplenty lurking around every other corner.  Maybe it’s just Halloween season creeping up on me, but here’s a list of some of the more cringe-inducing moments from Mad Men‘s “The Fog” (all of them the best kind of cringe-inducing):

*     During a parent/teacher conference with Sally’s teacher, there is an intercut shot of Sally — who has gotten in trouble for being in a fight with another student — smearing what looks like blood across her cheek.  This is a distrubing little snippet of film that maybe can’t quite compete with similar cutaways in The Exorcist and The Shining, but coming in the midst of a mostly no-nonsense drama like Mad Men, it is deeply unsettling … all the more so because we don’t really know what it is or what it represents.  We have just enough information to make wild guesses, which of course, is the quickest way to existential terror.

*     Speaking of Sally’s teacher — you remember her from the Maypole dance and Don’s fingers-in-the-grass moment, right? — she calls the Draper house and begins the process of flirting with Don, only to be interrupted by Betty announcing that it’s time to go to the hospital.  The teacher is obviously well on the way to being drunk, and seems to be partially coming out of her clothes.  Never what you want from your daughter’s teacher; in this instance, she seems even more fucked up than Sally, who is pretty fucked up to begin with.

Will future episodes find Don Darper puttin’ the Polish to Ms. Farrell?  Surely not; he’s a new father!

*     Betty’s stay at the hospital seems about as unpleasant as you’d ever want to see.  Everything feels sick and green, and at one point when a nurse tells Betty it’s time for a shave and an enema, I knew this was not a place I wanted to be in.

*     Then again, I don’t much want to be out in the solarium with Don, either.  He’s stuck out there with a creepily intense prison guard whose wife has apparently been in in the process of a breach birth for quite a few hours.  This fellow is just normal enough to pass a ’63-style decency inspection, but also just drunk and violent enough that it inspires a bit of a shudder at the thought of him being a prison guard, a husband, or a father.

Later, when Don is visiting Betty, he passes the guard and his wife; he’s rolling her in a wheelchair down the corridor, and while both of them have strange expressions, neither of them has a baby.  I’d be hesistant to say for sure what that means, but I don’t think it’s a good thing.

*     Drifting away on a cloud — nay, a fog — of drugs and pain and exhaustion, Betty goes into a reverie in which she imagines herself back at her home.  She walks inside, and finds her father mopping the floor, apparently using blood instead of water.  She also finds her dead mother, standing over Medger Evers, who has recently been murdered in the timeline of this episode, and who now sits at the Draper kitchen table, a bloody rag held to the back of his skull.

In another reverie sequence earlier in the episode, Betty — looking impossibly gorgeous in the way she must see herself in her dreams — walks calmly down a street, and cups a caterpillar in her hand, presumably so it can become a butterfly. 

In the Gene/mother/Evers reverie (and indeed during some of the real events in the hospital), Betty acts almost like a child, and this spectre of her father reinforces the idea: “You’re a housecat,” he says; “you’re very important, and you have little to do.”

People have on occasion accused Betty of being an uninteresting character, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact is that she just never quite managed to grow up, and despite giving birth to her third child, she still hasn’t managed it.  I’m fascinated to see where this all leads.

*     Pete corners Hollis the elevator operator to get him to spill the beans to Pete about why Negros buy certain types of televisions.  This is, oddly, not as off-putting as it seems like it might be; nowhere near as bad as, say, Roger Sterling singing “My Old Kentucky Home” in blackface.  The things is, even though I know Pete is a racist, I also know he’s racist out of ignorance moreso than out of hatred or outright bigotry.  He honestly wants to know why Hollis behaves as he behaves regarding the purchase of television sets, and while Pete is certainly guilty of assuming that this one person can act as a stand-in for a multitude of other people … well, isn’t that what advertising is all about? 

Pete, at least, wants to let the Negros have their own place, and then determine how to make money off of it; Roger, and Bert Cooper as well, would rather pretend that such a place doesn’t exist at all.  With that in mind, I don’t think Pete comes off looking too bad here.

*     Peggy goes to Don, emboldened by the idea that Duck Phillips wants her to come work for him, and asks for a raise.  She is shut down entirely, and it’s impossible not to root for her.  She’s right to point out that women deserve equal pay; she’s also right that she frequently does a better job than Kinsey.  Don’s rejection — which was possibly brought on more by exhaustion than by workplace chauvinism — will doubtless have consequences.

*     Finally, we see Betty getting up in the middle of the night, woken by baby Gene crying from papa Gene’s old room.  In the hallway, Betty pauses, almost as if she has to summon the strength to make herself go into the room.  It would be easy to say that this is due to sad feelings over the room having briefly belonged to her now-dead father, but we know better: this woman wishes she was anything other than a mother.  She is usually strong enough to put up a good facade, but here, in the middle of the night, in the dark where nobody else can see, the true Betty appears.

And the episode is over.

Another great hour of television come and gone.

Another fine episode, this one picks up the Gene-centric plot elements from the previous episode and builds on them.  The episode begins with Gene taking Sally and her brother out for a drive in his Lincoln … with Sally driving.

My first reaction to seeing this little girl seated on a stack of notebooks, piloting a car while an old man with senile dementia or some such ailment controls the gas pedal from the next seat over was the feel a little bit of a panic coming on.  I was convinced something bad was going to happen along the lines of Betty losing control of the car and crashing it way back in the first season.

That didn’t come to pass, but it was hardly the only instance of Gene behaving in that manner.  Throughout the episode, he seems determined to pass experiences on to his grandchildren.  With Sally, he obviously wants to urge her into what he feels is her potential: he teaches her to drive, and then later has a conversation with her in which he tells her that she can be something, that she is smart and talented, that she shouldn’t let her mother discourage her.  Gene obviously wants Sally to begin growing up, and by the end of the episode, she has started to do so in an unexpected way.

With Bobby, Gene wants to pass along his WWI experiences.  He shows the boy a Victory medal, and tries to give him a helmet formerly belonging to a Prussian soldier he killed; the helmet has a bullet hole and dried blood, and Don, angered, refuses to allow Bobby to keep it.

Gene’s plotline comes to an abrupt end when he drops dead (offscreen) in an A&P.  We get this news through Sally’s eyes; she is sitting on the front steps waiting on her grandpa to come home, and what she gets instead is a visit from a policeman with some bad news.  There had been hints that this might happen — “This tastes like chocolate,” Gene has said earlier while eating some illicit ice cream, “but it smells like oranges” — but it still shocked me.  I’d expected the element of Gene being in the Draper house to continue to play out over the course of the season; now, it appears, that will be replaced by the story of how Gene’s passing will affect Sally. 

And, possibly, Betty.  Apart from the one scene in which Gene tries to discuss his final arrangements with Betty, we don’t get much reaction from her about her father’s death.  You can feel it coming, though.

There are at least two other parent/child relationships at the forefront of this episode.  Peggy has determined that she wants to move to Manhattan, and her mother — deep in a funk over the death of the Pope — is bitterly upset by the decision.  She’d be even more upset if she’d ever seen any of the episodes of Californication that Carla Gallo, the actress playing her daughter’s new roommate, had co-starred in.

Also, Pete Campbell has brought in a major new account from a well-to-do college friend with more money than sense.  Pete’s friend — he’s called “Ho-Ho” rather than Horace Jr. — wants to give Sterling/Cooper $1 million to turn Jai Alai into the new American pastime.  Don knows that Horace Sr. is a friend of Bert Cooper’s, and alerts the man, who all but says to go ahead and fleece his son, figuring that the failure will do him good.

Apparently, nobody’s got nice parents on this show.

Elsewhere, Sal finds himself unexpectedly given the grand opportunity of directing the “Bye Bye Birdie” mashup commercial for Patio.  He does so, and while the Patio people reject it, everyone else seems to feel that Sal has given them exactly what they asked for.  Looks like he might have a burgeoning career as a commercial director, and you can practically see him preening with pride.

Not so happy about it…?  Sal’s wife, Kitty.  She tries to seduce her husband, who turns her down cold and then begins showing her what his actress will be doing in the commercial when it films the next day.  He reenacts Ann-Margert’s seductive, flirty movements, and you can practically see Kitty realizing that he husband must like dick.

It’s a great scene … par for the course on this show.