Podcast adventure number seven may be short, but it’s sweet, like the finest fruits of a mystical far off-land, tasting of summer and first love. Allow us to take you back to those innocent days, with our discussion of topics such as:
Download, for your listening enjoyment. [16m 38s]
It may be long overdo, but the sixth episode of our podcast-to-end-all-podcasts is now ready for your listening consumption. Note that we do not recommend consuming this podcast orally, as the ingredients contained in this episode could be harmful to your health, including:
Download, for your listening enjoyment. [18m 37s]
Once again, I’m filling in for the inimitable Tony by bring you this week’s DOOM. Remember, folks, Doombot is 100% guaranteed not to give you the swine flu, so drink up.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Politics
Animal House
Night of the Dead Dead
Heartwarming YouTube Story of the Week
As Tony, your usual emissary of all things doom-ish, is currently hibernating in his underground laboratory, completing plans for world domination—or possibly perfecting the Guinness Chocolate Cake—I’ve agreed to sit in for him to bring your weekly fix of, yes, DOOM.
The Black Art of Science
Law, Hold the Order
What is Technology?
Step right up, step right up and experience the fifth episode of our continuing experiment in the magical art of sound broadcast right over these very here Internets. You’ll witness amazing, death-defying conversations concerning such wonders of the world as:
Download, for your listening enjoyment. [17m 30s]
* Not actually dead.
How many reviews of Life on Mars must a man write in life? If the late, great Douglas Adams is to be believed, 42. So: only 40 to go. The American version, cancelled by ABC, concluded with a 17th episode, lasting one episode more than the BBC series that inspired it. Now that it’s finished, it’s interesting to see how two shows with the same exact premise ended up differing so wildly.
As I said in a comment to my original review, a strange thing happened as the British show went on: it became more about Gene Hunt than protagonist Sam Tyler. In fact, Gene became so central to the show that when they concluded the series, they immediately spun him and compatriots Ray and Chris off to a new show.
By contrast, the US version always kept its focus on Sam and his predicament. Here, Gene is just another supporting character, a piece of the vintage scenery, and though Keitel’s performance grew (and grew on me) over the course of the series, Gene never became the same show-stealer that he did at the hands of Philip Glenister (I did appreciate the tip of the hat that the US series creators gave him in a later episode, naming a police bar “Glenister’s”). Keitel did much better when he wasn’t treading in Glenister’s footsteps, allowing the American version of Gene Hunt to become his own character rather than the pale imitation of another man’s performance.
To my biggest surprise, by the end of the series I found myself liking the US version of Ray far more than the original’s. In the British series, Ray always came across as two-dimensional: the dimwit caveman comic relief who acted as Gene’s contemporary counterweight to Sam’s modern-day influence. The US version’s Ray, on the other hand, is a surprisingly complex character: he’s painfully aware that the world he knows is in the process of changing all around him, whether he likes it or not—and he most assuredly does not. I came to enjoy his ribbing of Sam—his constant taunt of “spaceman”—and his complicated relationship with female liberation in the form of Annie.
From a story perspective, the US version also attempted to turn itself into a mythology show in a way that the UK series never did—by comparison, it was more cerebral—a psychodrama. The UK shows always felt very tight, very claustrophobic, somehow conveying an atmosphere that we were all in Sam’s head and it was very much reflected in the way that the show eventually came to a close.
Meanwhile, the US version tried to insert hints of a deeper meaning, of archetypal conflicts between good and evil, light and darkness, and even between father and son. I think that attempt, to make Sam’s struggle larger than just himself, is somewhat emblematic of an American storytelling ethic in a way that it isn’t for the British—but perhaps that’s an investigation for another time.
Despite their differences, the shows weren’t totally dissimilar. As both progressed, they became more about the idea of a man out of time than about the mystery of how he’d come to be there. We derived our entertainment from the dramatic irony of viewing the past through the lens of our present, while the 1973 inhabitants are stuck in the dark ages. While the ongoing mystery of how Sam came to be in the past was the hook that kept us coming back for more, fed by occasional breadcrumbs scattered through the episodes, it’s not really the reason that we tune in. Part of that was, of course, a matter of necessity—for Sam to find out how he’d gotten to the past would have robbed us of our impetus to watch—but part of it was because we, like Sam, start to like 1973 a bit more than the present.
And so it’s little surprise to me that the US ending, like its UK counterpart, is a bit of a letdown. In the US case, you can blame it on the show’s premature cancelation—I don’t know if this is the ending they’d planned had they gone for a longer run, and it’s undeniably a bit silly and cutesy—though not entirely in a bad way. I’ll give them credit for this: I sure as hell didn’t see it coming. If nothing else, I applaud the creators with letting their imaginations run wild. As with many serial dramas—Battlestar Galactica comes to mind—the real interest in Life on Mars turned out to be in its journey, not its destination.
It is a fact that my love for The Middleman knows no bounds, corporeal or spiritual, so despite the fact that the show is—in the words of its creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach—”hibernating in a high-tech vat, or a sac filled with a translucent amniotic fluid”, I can still rest secure in the knowledge that come July, I will be able to own all twelve episodes in one handy DVD package. Not only that, but arriving at the same time is a graphic novel that concludes the storyline from the TV show (which, if you’ll cast your mind back to more carefree days, you’ll remember was itself based on a comic series).
To my mind, The Middleman is undoubtedly the best prematurely-cancelled show since Firefly walked upon England’s mountains of green—and let’s be fair: I watch a lot of shows that get cancelled. I could almost be the patron saint of cancelled television shows—well, except for that whole “performing miracles” business. Then again, Firefly already got revived once, so maybe if a couple more shows I liked come back from the dead, that’ll count.
Basically, this is all a long way of saying that you should really watch The Middleman. This is, after all, the show that brought us fish zombies, vampire bat puppets, and five intergalactic dictators masquerading as a boy band. Matt Keeslar as the eponymous Middleman is a square-jawed, all-American hero in the vein of pulp heroes of old, and Natalie Morales’s Wendy Watson is probably geekdom’s best heroine since Veronica Mars. If you like the show half as much as I like it, well, I’ll have liked it twice as much as you.
And that’s logic you can’t argue with.
This installment of Putting a Name with a Face comes to you at the behest of fellow Doombot contributor Tony. Patrick Fischler is another one of those guys who seems to pop up in every show I watch—last summer I saw him on three separate series within the space of a couple weeks. The distinctive-looking Fischler, 39, started his Hollywood career in 1993—his second role was as a guard in an episode of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.—but here’s a few other places you might have noticed him lately.
Fischler’s also appeared in several feature films, including The Shadow, Speed, Twister, Mulholland Dr., and Ghost World, as well as episodes of The West Wing, Angel, and Star Trek: Enterprise, and the both the unaired and aired pilot episodes of the short-lived Nathan Fillion series Drive.
For some reason, my brain’s always been wired pretty well for recognizing faces, and given I watch as much TV as I do, I frequently see familiar faces show up in guest star roles—especially when they then appear the next week on a different show. So as a public service, I’m thinking of providing this semi-regular feature where I tell you where the hell you’ve seen that guy (or gal) before.
Today’s candidate? Mark Sheppard. I’m guessing many of you will know Sheppard from his recurring role on Battlestar Galactica, but I swear to God, every time I tune into a show it seems like he turns up eventually. Here are a couple of other places you might have seen the prolific 44 year-old London-born actor (that’s right, ladies: the accent is real), who usually plays villains and characters of questionable morality.
Of course, Sheppard’s got an extensive filmography dating back to 1992 with additional roles on Star Trek: Voyager, Charmed, and 24, so the chances that you’ve seen him somewhere else are damn good.
The fourth episode of the Doomcast covers a variety of topics that may have slipped through the cracks of so-called professional news organizations:
Download, for your listening enjoyment. [18m 15s]
