I made-- forced! at gunpoint!-- gileswench show me a lot of Due South, and we admired Paul Gross's ass acting. Fraser is just such a fabulous character. If you love Corporal Carrot, you will love Fraser. RayV's kvetching is adorable as well. I nearly snorted the Wench's fabulous berry pie through my nose several times while watching. Much love.

Mr Pedia and I caught up on Torchwood tonight. Well, it's science fiction. On television. Not just the usual fantasy-plus-lasers crap we get. There is, if not actual rejoicing, at least appreciation from Mr Pedia. I loathe and enjoy all the characters by turns, though I suppose Gwen comes in for the least loathing. And wait, Toshiko has been pretty great this season. Okay, I loathe all the male characters on Torchwood. Gwen/Tosh slash nao plz.

Look! Heroes action figures! I might need to have Hiro and Mohinder on my desk at work.

And that concludes this evening's exercise in fannish shallowness. Now I go write h/c prawn. Wait. That's shallow too.

Basically, we enjoyed this. I think it has to be considered alongside last week's episode, the dark and cynical "They keep killing...".

( Spoilers hidden... )

However, Torchwood is going to lose my viewing attention in favor of Heroes real soon. Okay, the BBC writers do better with dialog than the painfully earnest and on-the-nose Heroes writers do. But overall story arc wins. Also, vaguely pandering incoherent jokes like the stopwatch thing do not, in the end, endear the show to me.

Best Torchwood yet, by a long shot.

Good Lord. And let the ( spoiler... ) Ha.

1. Saw tonight's Torchwood. Was wasted opportunity in some ways. In others, makes me frustrated with the quality of writing in TV horror/SF. Can't you guys hire some writers who know the territory and can do something other than the shallow and the obvious with the widget of the week? And yet... still quite interesting.

2. Casino Royale. Many thoughts about this film, about the take on Bond, about the goodness of the return to the plots of the novels, about the set pieces. (And the shedding of the camp elements.) Strongest reaction I had while viewing was to the soundtrack. Title sequence was fantastic aside from the horrible, bad, awful song they had over it. Soundtrack teased deliciously with the Bond theme, giving us tastes of the instrumentation and the intervals at moments when Craig's character is being Bond-ish. But we wait, on tenterhooks, for that Bond theme until just before the end titles, when Craig finally gives us the most famous Bond trope. Then, boom, we get it in full, no teasing, no screwing around with modernity. Well done. Excellent establishment of intentions for a new sequence of Bond films.

Today's Torchwood, "Countrycide": best yet. I had been losing a bit of heart about it after last week's, which I found mediocre.

The series has pretty firmly staked out its horror territory, I think. The basic plot was familiar (no one should have been surprised by the whodunnit), and the camera work was all "Homicide vs Blair Witch". But effective, and the character development was awesome.

Also, the BBC can go far further on television than US networks can.

The husband says, "Better than Teacher's Pet. Not as good as Inca Mummy Girl."

( Spoiler discussion... )

When Mr P finally got home from work yesterday, he was all sore-throaty and ucky. We sat on the couch and watched the 2nd and 3rd Torchwoods on my Macbook. ( Cut even though this is not a spoilery discussion at all... )

This morning's reading is mireille719's Grief, Written on Skin, Giles/Wesley, post-Gift. A watcherlove ficathon finished this weekend, so there should be lots more yummy G/Wes to read today. But that one grabbed me hard, and I think I'm going to read it a few times more before I move on.

Today I am feeling very very guilty about series fic left unfinished or un-moved-forward while I do NaNo and start another long story.