The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Season 5 (sadly, the last) of The Sarah Jane Adventures. I particularly liked the one where Clive finds himself homeless. All the extras for Doctor Who's season 6, including six short pieces apparently shown on tv to keep audiences primed, and The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe with that lovely ending.

TV: The last episode of Downton Abbey, which decided to kill off Lavinia with Spanish flu, since she wasn't anything but a plot contrivance anyway, and also miraculously restore Matthew's spinal cord while still idiotically keeping him and Lady Mary apart. I will probably watch the Christmas special (on DVR tomorrow) just to see Nigel Havers, and if they decide to put Bates in jail (I doubt it), but season 3? Might, might not; it'll depend on how much else there is to watch. Once Upon a Time - is this going to be the redemption of Rumplestiltkin? That could be cool. Grimm, creepy ending. The Mentalist, with an ending I saw coming. The Middle, Bieber Fever! Loved them rejoicing over Brick being angry and humiliated: finally, appropriate emotions! (And I really identify with Frankie not being able to read the capchas...) And Modern Family's cautionary tale about mixing drinking and sentiment. I loved Claire and Mitchell under the table. Also The Hound of the Baskervilles, 2002 (here), and Once Upon a Honeymoon, which I'd never seen all of before. Cute.

Read: Death Comes to Pemberley, which isn't so much a "mystery" - Darcy & Elizabeth don't go running around solving crimes - as a continuation of the story, wrapping up a few loose ends here and there. PD James is a good writer and the book works. The World We Found, by Thrity Umrigar, a novel about four Indian women and the way their lives diverged after college in India's tumultuous '70s. The Lions of Little Rock, a rather brilliant YA about the year after the Little Rock 7, when Little Rock closed its high schools rather than integrate. I remember the bitterness in my father's voice when he talked about Montgomery and its zoo and parks, how "they'd rather shut them down and have nothing, than share." (Wikipedia says, coyly, "The Montgomery Zoo was established in 1935 at Oak Park as Oak Park Zoo. It grew and thrived there until the 1960s. In 1974, the Zoo was re-established and moved to its current located in north Montgomery.") And a hard-to-characterize novel called Taft 2012 which is about, well, current politics, but examined via President Taft's sudden reappearance in the White House grounds in 2011...