Dollhouse - Echoes (Episode 7)

First, according to the Dollverse, FOX has confirmed that all 13 episodes will run. If that's true, that's good news, although it isn't clear that the last episode will air, which seems strange. But I assume that if they get that far they will figure out how to air the season finale. This news is a relief. After watching the Man on the Street episode I started to worry that they would take it off the air at the exact moment that it started to get good.

I also decided to go back and see which episodes had actually been written by Whedon and it turns out that only Episode 1 (Ghost) and last weeks' Episode 6 (Man on the Street) were actual Whedon-written episodes. On all other episodes he was listed as creator but no writer.

I went back to look because tonight's episode finally had some humor, it was Whedonesque humor but the whole episode didn't quite seem like Joss himself. It wasn't tight enough. I was right, according to IMDB it was written by Elizabeth Craft (who wrote a number of Angel episodes). (The Whedonesque website says it was written by Craft and by Sarah Fain.)

On the one hand, I liked this episode because we got a lot of new information and a great deal of character development. On the other hand, last week's episode was a hard act to follow and this episode didn't quite rise to that level. But I did think that I need to watch it again because with all the flashbacks I want to make sure that I have the whole thing straight.

Tonight they proved that DeWitt, Topher, Mr. Dominic, and Langton aren't secretly actives. They were all affected by the drug/secret sauce. Amy Acker wasn't in this episode so nothing is proved about her character. Nor was Topher's assistant.

One of the best moments was when Langton asked Echo if she wanted a treatment and she said "no". Second favorite moment is Dominic apologizing to Echo for trying to burn her alive. (Although it isn't clear the drug is a truth serum so I still don't trust him.) I just truly love Reed Diamond so I'm happy whenever he's on and I'm glad they are giving his character some layers.

I liked what they did with DeWitt in this episode, and for once I didn't find Topher completely annoying. In fact ... I think he is growing on me. I was a little confused about the last scene between DeWitt and Dominic. Neither of them saw the other drugged so I'm not sure why they would be embarrassed in front of each other. I would think DeWitt and Topher would be more embarrassed about their experience. (I loved the scene where DeWitt is jumping up and down in the background while Topher is on the phone.)

From a storyline perspective I thought it was really effective to go back in time and show us more of Caroline's original meeting with DeWitt and then a portion of the meeting DeWitt has with Sam, the new Doll. This idea that the Dolls are volunteers has been hard for me to swallow, but it might be possible that some of them signed on the dotted line willingly. Sam didn't have any real reason to sign up except for money. Unless of course Rossum Corporation is going to hunt him down for interfering with their experiments.

The back story on what happened to Caroline was helpful. And the parallel between the animal testing and the Dolls was well done. Although at the meeting between DeWitt and Caroline, DeWitt made some reference about their interaction going on for two years. Caroline disappeared from the hospital bed before DeWitt could get to her, so presumably even more happened to her during the ensuing two years.

I hope Mellie has left permanently.

There are a lot of big themes developing. Jen and andif had some excellent comments to my last post. I need to think about it some more before trying to talk about them.

One Book, One Chicago

The One Book for "One Book, One Chicago" was recently announced by the Chicago Public Library: The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros.  I don't live in Chicago, but I might read it anyway.   I have family in Chicago.  And friends in Chicago.  And a President from Chicago.

And I know nothing about this book so it will be a big surprise to me.  But sometimes I like it that way.

This & That: TV, Movies, etc

Some stuff:

• I went to see Duplicity, the new movie with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. I was ambivalent. I enjoyed it - but not as much as I expected. And it seemed a little long. Roberts and Owen play spies (CIA and MI5 respectively) who leave their agencies and team up to make money doing corporate security - by stealing from their employers. They have chemistry - when they are together the sparks fly. But when they aren't together things kind of drag. And maybe I was distracted or bored at the end, but I can't figure out how Owen's character ended up where he did with what he did. And I consider that a flaw, not a benefit. The director, Tony Gilroy, also directed Michael Clayton which I also enjoyed but found totally unbelievable.
• After three episodes, I'm still good with Castle. It's not the greatest TV show ever made, but it keeps my interest on Monday nights and Nathan Fillion is never anything but great. And things have changed since the days of Murder She Wrote: now they solve crimes using blue tooth technology.
• Right before Castle comes on, Dancing with the Stars is on. I've never watched the show before although I've caught glimpses. And I've never bothered to sit through the whole thing this season, but the 15 minutes or so that I've seen has been pretty enjoyable. It makes me wonder if there has been an upsurge in ballroom dancing since it went on the air. I'm a total klutz so the idea of dancing backwards in high heels in front of an audience makes my stomach hurt. On the other hand, the idea of being able to dance like that at a wedding reception or anniversary party sounds like fun.
• Have I mentioned that I love hulu? Right now you can watch all episodes of Cosmos with Carl Sagan. And funnily enough, I've been thinking of Cosmos lately. Every time someone on TV talks about the billions and billions of dollars we are spending on the financial bailout I hear Carl Sagan's voice. Billions and billions ...
• A very practical website I found via Justin Fox (Time's economics blogger) is Still Tasty where you can find how long your favorite food or beverage will last and how to store it. According to Fox the "creator is a retired food safety expert with the Canadian government." It answers questions like "Is it better to store my bread on the counter or in the fridge?" (on the counter). I also found that I can keep my opened jar of Strawberry Jelly in the refrigerator for up to a year.

Stormy Weather

A few years ago I read Enemy Women, the best selling novel by Paulette Jiles.  Set in Missouri during the Civil War, it was fascinating to see my states' history finally novelized in a best seller.  I remember being interested in the story but not particularly loving Jiles' writing style.  But I can't remember why.

I recently finished her latest novel, Stormy Weather, and again I was fascinated by the story but less than enamored with her style.  It isn't that I dislike it, but I'm not wild about it.  I find it unusual.

She writes in the third person, which I like better than the first person most of the time.  But, although she incorporates the points of view of many of her characters, she is detached from them.   What is strange is that she somehow manages to keep the reader turning the pages while at the same time glossing over what would normally be the most exciting parts of the story.

For example, one of the key plot points in Stormy Weather involves a young girl named Bea who falls down a well.  For most novelists this would be a big emotional scene.  Not for Jiles. 

The scene is told from the point of view of Bea, who falls into the well while her cat Prince Albert remains above:

The water was very cold.  She heard Prince Albert making strange noises far above at the edge of the well. Bea could feel a distant sort of panic overtaking her but she seemed to look on her overwhelming fear of being buried alive at the bottom of the well from a faraway place.  The well cover was twisted; after a few moments a board fell from it and came turning over and over down the well shaft and struck her foot, but her foot seemed to be connected to some other body.  She was drifting in deep December water.  She was in the terrible underground.  She was in another world, which was deadly, and above her was the old house and the warm stove and Albert.

And that's it.  That's all the description we get of the experience.  She "seemed to look" at the experience from a distance.  We are not told her actual thoughts, Jiles describes them from afar.

Of course when I first read it I assumed she was going to die in the well and the emotion would come when her sisters discover her.  But when they finally discover her in the well, she is alive and they hear her call "Mother, mother, mother"  ... and then the story immediately shifts to this:

They drove Bea to the hospital in Mineral Wells. It seemed to take years to drive the twisted road.  Jeanine drove. Mayme and her mother sat holding Bea, laid on the bed of the truck on as many quilts and pillows as they could rip off the beds, her left leg bent at an acute angle,  as if there were a new joint in the middle of her shin.  Jeanine's hands and legs and coat were covered with mud and torn by the rope they had lowered into the well.  Mayme had run to the Crowsers', but by the time Abel got there Elizabeth and Jeanine had rigged the rope to the cedar tree and Jeanine had gone down into the well.  She didn't know if she had torn or broken Bea's legs any worse getting her out.  Bea's face was covered in blood so that it looked as if someone had thrown red paint in her face.  Her skin was pale blue and splattered with random blood splashes.

Again, that's it.  That's all. The entire rescue buried in the middle of a paragraph.

Even though this style didn't grab me it didn't completely bother me.  It occurred to me that it might be appropriate to the times in which this story was set:  Texas during the Great Depression.  A time when people were just trying to get by and hardship was a daily occurrence. 

They were adrift. So were millions of others and no one could figure out why the economy had ceased to function, not even the banker J.P. Morgan. He said as much on the radio.

But although the style might have been appropriate it kept me from becoming emotionally attached to any of the characters, even Jeanine who is the main focus of this story.  I'm not sorry that I read the novel.  It gave me view of oil drilling and dust storms and poverty arising from a broken economy that I'm glad I now have.   From an informational point of view, it was useful.  But it fell short for me as a novel with an emotional heart.

Hey! Editors of Online Editions of Book Reviews ...

What is your problem? Do you want people to NOT read your section? Because that's where things are going. Are you under orders to kill the demand for quality book reviews by doing everything in your power to make sure that people don't read them?

I used to love the New York Times Book Review. In the days before online newspapers I used to walk across to the book store across the street and buy just the Book Review, not the whole NY Times. I read it cover to cover, slowly throughout the week. Now I'm lucky if I read one or two reviews from it.

The problem isn't that I've become an impatient online reader. The problem is that the editors of the online edition seem determined to make me think twice before forging ahead into even sampling a book review.

Let me give you an example. The NYTimes recently reviewed Blurring Boundaries by Janet Burraway. I had never heard of this novel before - no advance notices had reached my radar. So I wasn't looking for the review. On the main page of the NYTimes book section I read this:

In Janet Burroway’s novel, a newly widowed woman deals with questions of race, love and home.

Well that just didn't grab me, so I skipped over it. What do I have in common with a newly widowed woman? I've never been married. And "deals with" questions of race, love and home. That is so broad as to be uninteresting.

I realized, however, when I got to the end of the page that there wasn't a single review that interested me last Sunday. Not a single one. And that just couldn't be. It was perfectly possible that there would not be a single book that was reviewed that I would end up wanting to read, but it was just impossible that I wouldn't want to read a single review.

So, being one of those persons who will dwell on a question until I come up with some kind of answer, I recreated in my mind the world of the 1990's when I read the Book Review cover to cover. I read reviews of books I wasn't even remotely interested in reading. Why?

Because I actually started reading the review, I sampled the review, and the writing of the reviewer sucked me in.

So I went back and clicked open the actual review of Blurring Boundaries and read these words written by the actual reviewer, Susann Cokal and not some online editor:

In Janet Burroway’s latest novel, “the fundamental news has to do with pain, fear, sadness, or the mere and lucky lack thereof.” This thesis holds true whether the news is personal or political. Dana Ullman, the appealing central character in “Bridge of Sand,” is on her way to a funeral — her husband, a state senator, has died of cancer — when she sees smoke “hurling itself up” from a Pennsylvania field. It’s Sept. 11, 2001, and United Flight 93 has just gone down. Dana’s bereavement immediately becomes a non-event, eclipsed by national catastrophe.

Now THAT made me want to read the rest of the review. And maybe even the novel.

Interested in my new thesis that online editors are killing the book review page by writing their own elementary school level summaries of book reviews, I went to The Guardian and chose a book I had never heard of, Constable in Love by Martin Gaynford, which I presumed from the following blurb was about the painter John Constable:

Martin Gayford's portrait of Constable is a gift to the artist's many admirers, writes Andrew Motion.

So, is this a sort of "Shakespeare in Love" version of John Constable's life? Ho Hum. Who cares about his love life? Ordinarily I wouldn't click on that link. But in the spirit of experiment I did and read this from Andrew Motion:

Constable in Love. The title's a problem. Partly because it's cheesy, making John Constable sound more submissive than he was, and partly because the book does not contain a full account of what being in love meant to him. It's the history of his courtship - admittedly a very long-drawn-out, complicated business - and gives no more than a sketch of his subsequent marriage (which all the evidence suggests was just as loving as the preamble).

Well, I'm still not interested in the book, but went on to read the rest of the review.

I headed over to the Globe and Mail, and selected Alice in Newfoundland, a new novel by Jessica Grant that, again, I knew nothing about. The blurb said:

Diane Baker Mason reviews Jessica Grant's sprawling comic novel, Come, Thou Tortoise.

Unless someone was looking for a "sprawling comic novel" why would one bother to click through? But I did and read Diane Baker Mason's first paragraph:

I don't believe I've ever read anything quite like Jessica Grant's Come, Thou Tortoise. In fact, I'm not even sure what it's about. I disagree with the book jacket's assertion that it may be a “small mystery,” and I'm puzzled by the assertion in the publicity materials that its main narrator, Audrey Flowers, is “IQ-challenged.” Audrey might have been told by her school at one point that she had a “low IQ,” but that's not credible. Audrey's brilliant. She's hilarious. I could read about her all day.

And, again, I read the entire review.

In the days of print, paper was expensive, ink was expensive and the labor to run the printing presses was expensive. And presumably paying well known people to review books cost some bucks too. So maybe it would have made sense to limit the blurb on the "cover page" of a book review section to one sentence written by an editor. But in these days of digital the only one of those costs that still holds up is the cost of paying the book reviewer (and, of course, the editor). And if your main cost right now is the person writing the review - why not lure people into reading those words with a sample of those words? That's how people read the print edition of the book reviews - they thumbed through and read the first paragraphs.

There is no just no reason not to give us the first paragraph of the review and a little link that says "click here to continue reading".