The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Leverage, finished second season and some of third. Man, I'd forgotten how much I hated Tara Cole. Granted when an actress gets pregnant you only have so many choices (Major Kira, anyone?) and shooting her from the shoulders up only worked when it was video calls; they couldn't possibly have shot around Sophie when she was actively running cons. But I didn't like Tara. Did. Not.

TV: Lewis - yay! Robbie's out of retirement (as a contractor), and Hathaway is back on the force after a (I assume) temporary leave. Sounds like he walked the Camino del Santiago - but turned back at the last moment. I would assume it's because he decided that he didn't want to associate with the organized church again. The second one was interesting, what with that morally ambiguous "have a child to be a donor for the existing one" - though at least just a marrow donor. Robbie and Laura are working out their new dynamic - can't blame her for being upset he's gone so much, that's for sure! Caught up on The Middle - last week's (trying to earn money for Sue's college) actually made me tear up at the end. Modern Family was good, as usual. Doctor Who - first, after a week's thinking about it, I still don't think the Doctor's behavior last week was that out of line. Clara is only mad because (a) she's come to depend on him always doing it for her and (b) he doesn't like Danny. So I'm not surprised that she reversed her decision. That said, I do hope he gets a real companion.  (I wouldn't complain if it was Psi (apparently not Cy as I had thought), either.) Sometimes when they carry over to a second Doctor it works - sometimes it's even better, Sarah Jane really came into her own with her second Doctor. But Clara was so intimately tied to Twelve (Eleven? do we give the War Doctor a number?) that this just isn't working. (Which, by the way, is weird because she had seen every one of his incarnations; why did his regeneration freak her out so much? Audience insert? doesn't always make a good character.) This week's ep was great - a cool monster, a interesting tie-in to the whole soldier theme, and a very nice line from the Doctor to Clara about why he sometimes does the things he does: "Sometimes all your choices are bad ones. But you still have to choose." Also, this: "I'm the Doctor." "What is your doctorate in?" "That is a question that isn't asked nearly often enough."

Read: More of Pillar of Fire. It's not as gruesome as Parting the Waters, so far (though we haven't gotten to the Freedom Schools and the Chaney/Goodman/Schwerner murders yet), but at the same time the explicit details of J. Edgar Hoover's corrupt reign over the FBI are harrowing in a very different way. (Plus, if I'm honest, my junior-high adoration of RFK is taking a bit of a hit.) The newest Sharon McCone, The Night Searchers. A little lightweight but entertaining enough.