My One Big Eyeball #6

Battlestar Galactica 3x07 - A Measure Of Salvation
Episode grade: A

Galactica sends in the marines to investigate the abandoned cylon base star that Gaius was on last week and find and bring back five living cylons, models Six, Eight, Simon, Doral and Leoben. Everybody freaks out for a while about the disease, but fortunately for them, humans are immune, of course, but also, even more fortunately (also, conveniently) Athena and Helo's baby continues it's miracle curing; as well as curing Roslin's cancer last season, it's made Athena immune to the disease too. And, turns out the disease was pretty definitely left by the 13th colony, and also probably totally by accident since it's kind of like the common cold for the humans, which is pretty cool.

Meanwhile in Cylonia, Three tortures Baltar, believing him to be behind the disease, and he goes into his head with Chip Six and she sexes him up to keep his mind off the pain and he gets some weird Christ thing going on and, mid-torture, tells Three he loves her with all his heart, and it's all incredibly weird and icky.

And, back on Galactica, there's some definitely awesome shit going down. Simon gets to be the one they interrogate, seeing as how he's had little to no screentime since his first appearance way back in The Farm, and he's rather quickly forthcoming with all sorts of information, like 'the Cylons are searching for Earth too', and 'Baltar is still alive and we have him'. And then Apollo comes up with a plan to wipe out all the cylons forever; if they get in range of a resurrection ship and then kill their prisoners, the disease will transfer to the cylon fleet, and that'll be that. You have to make a kind of big leap of logic to actually buy that this makes any sense at all, but I can cope with doing that, and if you do, it's some seriously excellent moral quandary stuff. Helo freaks out on the whole genocide idea, because he is married to pretty excellent proof that the cylons are not irredeemable. Adama pussies out of actually making a decision here and passes the buck to Roslin, who, having been down on New Caprica for four months, doesn't hesitate to give Apollo's plan the go ahead. So, in spite of the fact that even his wife, an actual member of the race, supports wiping out the cylons, Helo takes matters into his own hands and kills all the prisoners before Galactica can get into resurrection ship range. And Adama totally lets him get away with it, because he's awesome, and the passing the buck was him not wanting to admit to Roslin that he agreed with Helo.

I seriously cannot believe how much the show has improved this season, because it was already absurdly good. Anyone involved in the creation of this show and it's continued existence; thank you so much.


Desperate Housewives 3x07 - Bang
Episode grade: A+

OH MY FUCKING GOD YES. Best episode ever. It's like, not even a close run thing. Totally floored me. Just way better than I ever expected out of this show.

So, it goes down like this; Bree confronts Orson about the whole spousal abuse thing, he claims self defence. Bree, as ever, accepts Orson's explanation, and decides to get revenge on Carolyn for feeding her more "lies" about Orson by telling Carolyn about Harvey's affair. Carolyn, never the most stable of characters (and on this show, that's really saying something) decides to go shoot Harvey up in the market where he works, only he hides himself in an office, so Carolyn holds all customers hostage. These inculde Julie Mayer and her love/hate blah blah just get it on already crush Austin, Edie, Lynette and Nora.

Outside the hostage market, Gabby wins the house in the divorce, but Carlos wins every single thing in it, since he taped his little trick last week. Gabby procedes to start destroying all the stuff Carlos won, and he retaliates by starting to destroy the house that she won. It's the kind of completely ridiculous yet strangely awesome thing this show did so well in it's early days, and not quite so well more recently. But then they learn about the hostage thing, and Gabby realises she's turning into a crazy shrew like Carolyn, and she and Carlos decide they're still in love, so what the hell are they getting divorced for. Woo!

Bree, on hearing the news of the hostage situation, decides to host a party. Naturally. Of course, her insane cheeriness melts a little when she realises a) some of her friends are in there and b) it's kind of her fault for driving Carolyn to this. Mostly Carolyn's fault for being an insane bitch, but still, Bree blames herself.

Back in the hostage market, Julie's freaking out and is impressed by Austin's calm, Susan is freaking out and tries to join the hostage exchange program (hee hee!) to get Julie out, Nora decides it's the perfect opportunity to start bickering with Lynette, and in all the trying to get Nora to shut the hell up, Lynette lets slip to Carolyn that Nora tried to seduce Tom a little. So Carolyn shoots Nora, and she dies in Lynette's arms and oh man. Lynette goes crazy ranting, and just as Carolyn is about to shoot her dead too, one of the other hostages beans her with a can of soup, so the shot hits Lynette in the shoulder, Austin tackles her to the ground and another hostage grabs the gun and kills Carolyn. Wowza.

So, you've got all storylines weaving together excellently, perfect mix of dark comedy and drama, and everyone's acting firing on all cylinders. Hard to choose from all the many, many amazing moments, but I think Tom's hamburger speech wins. Man did that choke me up but good. I'm not going to question why I watch this show again for a while, that's for sure. Lost writers, ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?


Heroes 1x07 - Nothing To Hide
Episode grade: B

So, Niki is not dead, neither is ikiN. But ikiN's name is actually Jessica, apparently. I don't know when or how Niki learned that, but she did. But anyway, she's not much on the screentime this week; Matt and the Petrelli brothers get the bulk of it.

So, Matt's FBI friend thinks she's found Sylar, but, not so much. What she has found is Radioactive Man! So, with his radiation powers, he accidentally put his wife in a coma and freaked out rather. Matt uses his mind reading power to tell Radioactive Man his comatose wife's thoughts before she dies, which is a pretty nice scene. Later, he uses his mind reading power to discover that his wife has been cheating on him with one of his police buddies and clocks the guy in the face. He's totally going to hook up with the FBI chick, though, so it's all good.

At the Petrelli household, we finally meet Nathan's wife, who's wheelchair bound, and Peter does an excellent job of covering for Nathan when he's having trouble answering a reporter's questions about his time in Vegas, so Nathan gets hold of Isaac's missing painting that Simone has sold to Linderman. But then he tells Peter that Linderman wouldn't give it up. Whuh? I don't exactly know what the hell is going with that, but I do enjoy the brothers Petrelli's relationship, and Nathan's general asshattery.

And, more coincidence/fate Hero meetings; D.L. and Hiro combine their powers to save someone from a car wreck, but manage to do so without actually finding out each other's powers, I think. And Micah, being the son of two Heroes, has powers of his own, of course, his being the power of machinery-control or somesuch. His superhero name is totally Repair Man, anyway, and he uses his powers to call Jessica from a broken payphone and tell her where D.L. has taken him. Oh, and he totally knows about the Niki/Jessica thing. He's so cool.


Lost 3x06 - I Do
Episode grade: D

Flashbacks; Kate, only she's calling herself 'Monica', marries Cap'n Mal Reynolds, only he's calling himself 'Kevin'. But light up, light up, as if you have a choice, Kate can't keep up the pretense that she's not a fugitive, and drugs Mal and makes a break for it, because she's BORN TO RUN. And not even Nathan Fillion can make up for the invariable complete dullness of a Kate flashback to tell us that she is BORN TO RUN, just like every other Kate flashback.

Craphole Island; Locke and his band of merry men bury Eko right where he is, rather than having a grand ceremony back on the beach, because, per Locke, they've had too many funerals lately. That, there is actually good stuff, it's as shame this stuff was only, like, five seconds of the episode. Also, he marks Eko's grave with Eko's Jesus stick, and in doing so see something about 'looking to the north' written on it, so I'm sure we'll get right on with finding out what that and the four-toed statue are all about when we come back in February. In five second bursts each episode between the far more important Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle, OFF COURSE.

Other Island; Somehow, Jack is suddenly by far the coolest character here, kind of excellently telling Benry that he's going to let him die. But then someone leads him into the surveillance room and he gets to watch Kate and Sawyer have sex in the cages they can get out of whenever they feel like it, but still don't, which is still incredibly fucking stupid. This seems to change Jack's mind, but then in the surgery, he deliberately fucks it up, tells the Others that Benry will die in an hour if he doesn't fix it and he's not doing that until Kate and Sawyer have got away. He calls them on walkie-talkie to tell Kate to run, instead of informing him of the whole Alcatraz situation of not actually being on Craphole Island, just tells him she can't leave him behind, and Picket holds a gun to Sawyer's head and threatens to shoot without actually firing for the whole enitre episode or so, and it's all very melodramatic and stupid.

Right now I just don't care, and I'm on the verge of giving up. Come February, Lost, you've got two episodes to win me back. Use them wisely.