The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Lewis Series Six Yay! It came, and I devoured it. No self-control... I do wish they had more than four episodes a year. (David Soul guest-starred as the victim in one of them - I almost didn't recognize him.) Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (A Match Made in Heaven), a rom-com which asks us to believe that Shah Rukh Khan could be a mousy geek in an arranged marriage (her groom & his whole family died in a wreck the day before the marriage, and her father asked him to step in) - and that she won't recognize him with a make-over (granted, he's really over the top as Raj). It's a fantasy, but it's very cute. And I love their house, built around the inner, open courtyard. I also finished Edge of Darkness. I was finding the first half very ... involved, hard to follow without paying a lot of attention, though worth it. I started on disc 2 and it was a bit jarring until I realized it was an extended flashback... that kept going and going, and about halfway through ep 5 I realized they were progressing right up to the beginning. Which they did. By which time I realized they'd put the discs in the case backwards (at least from my point of view). Yeah: I watched eps 4-6 last week and 1-3 this. Stupid menus never had a number on them anywhere. So the story was really a lot easier to follow than I'd thought, and characters did get proper introductions. But the end was ... not unsatisfying, exactly or even really, but unsettled. Unsettling. I'll have to watch it all again and make a final judgment, but it's good.

TV: Futurama is back! Yay! Not just for them - two tightly crafted and very funny episodes, one exploring the deeply weird robot culture (ever wonder who would build a crippled child beggar robot, or Hedonism Bot?) and the other a dig at the Mayan Calendar nonsense - but also because if Futurama is here, can Psych and Leverage be far behind?

Read: Green Light Delivery, a funny-ish sf novel exploring the notion that we don't pick our destiny, but maybe we can pick our friends, and maybe - if we put our head down and persevere - we can get through it anyway. Very enjoyable. Also, Walking Into the Ocean, a mystery/procedural I got based on the EQMM review. I finished it, but I don't think I'll read more by the author. If you don't mind police detectives who never tell anyone, including their putative partners, anything they think, preferring to keep it all inside until they can spring the big surprise at the end - all the while being told not to and denying that they are - right up until refusing to share gets someone killed, or mysterious moody women who hint and hint that they know the truth about the murderer but won't come right out and say anything and the detective just lets it go, drifting back every few days for another cryptic comment - then this book is for you. It is mostly well-written and has a very atmospheric setting, but we spend most of them time in the protagonist's pov, and he annoys me - and then the brief moments when we're with someone else seem contrived.