On West Egg

I got through one episode of that, and thank god it hasn't a massive online fandom like some other shows, because the race wank would be epic, since the characters are, by nature, stuck in rather 1930's British mindsets, generally, even though the show isn't. This is a roundabout way of saying I just saw the Chinatown episode.

Anyway, I got through one episode, and then caved and started Lost Galaxy. First off, I never realized I had totally missed the first episode, so yeah. Second, and this is going to be amusing to only a few specific people who sat through a certain packaged-with-Eva-for-no-reason DVD I have, in the second episode, THE YELLOW RANGER RAN UP A TREE. Sadly, she did not burst up out of the piles of leaves on the ground first, but you can't have everything.

Also: Bulk and Prof. Phenominous forgetting Skull when boarding Terra Venture? NOT COOL SHOW. NOT COOL. NO COOKIES FOR YOU NOW. Even if Leo and Kai are crazy hot. Okay, only Kai is crazy hot, but Leo's normal-hot still. BUT STILL. WAY TO SHIT ON SKULL. HE WAS IN THE EPISODE, WHY DID YOU DO THAT SHOW?

I WANT TO FINISH POIROT SO THAT I CAN MOVE ON TO THE TURBO FINALE, BUT I HAVE TO QUITE THIS AT YOU NNNGH.

Hastings: Miss Lemon says he makes pies.
Poirot: Makes pies? Hastings, to say that Benedict Farley makes pies is like saying that Wagner wrote semiquavers!
Hastings: Are they good pies, are they?
Poirot. No, horrible. But there are a great many of them.

LOL PWNED

"I do not approve of murder" - Hercule Poirot.

I've been continuing through Poirot (as well as Turbo and Cirque du Soleil's Solstrom, as noticing I had the same number of episodes left of each had me start watching in rotation), as well as picking up some of the stories from the library. I continue to enjoy.

Reading Curtain, which is narrated by Hastings, has convinced me that the condemnation-through-simple-presentation of the particularly British breed of racism does indeed come from Christie, and was not just a more modern adaptation making a subtle shift.

Of course, one has to remember that Christie was writing up into the 1970s, and set her books in the present, even if we do all imagine them (and televise them) as happening all in the Very Deco '30s. Not that I mind - good lord are the sets in this series to die for.

Solstrom is interesting to work through - one begins to wonder why such a high proportion of the performers do the spanish web and the aerial ribbon act - indeed, one could make a drinking game of certain maneuvers common among those acts. Still, most of the performers are damn hot, on top of the impressive skill, and the last episode I watched included a random appearance by Colin Mochrie.

Power Rangers has gotten back in the third-season swing of things in the latter half of Turbo. There are ongoing plots, with the occasional clunker of a standalone episode. While most of Ranger fandom hates on Trouble by the Slice, I actually think it's one of the better one-shots. Yes, the sentai footage is the most ridiculous to ever be adapted for the series - the sentient cars get turned evil when the monster throws pizzas at them which stick to the wheels, and the rangers wind up trapped in a giant microwave oven and cooked into a pizza - but what Power Rangers does with that is straight up adapt that with no attempt at justification, with the addition of a flat-out ridiculous Divatox-gets-amnesia-and-winds-up-working-at-a-pizza-joint plot. The joke isn't the footage, or the plot, but the way that the episode is quite aware of how ridiculous the source footage is, and clearly gave up taking itself seriously well before it was filmed. I enjoyed.

However, that was one of the last appearances of the first actress playing TV-Divatox, and I can say right now, that if Movie-Divatox had returned to the role by this episode, I would have hated it. I much prefer Divatox-1. She was very very in on the joke in a way that Divatox-2 isn't, and Diva-2 plays things far too silly. Plus, where Diva-1 clearly made attempts to make her characterization follow on from D-2's performance in the movie, D-2 ignored everything D-1 had done with the role and just played it how she wanted. It's jarring.

And it really makes me wish that D-2 had been the first TV Divatox instead, because D-1's style is so much more suited to the story-arc nature of the latter part of the series, and D-2's would... well, I'd prefer she not appear at all, but if she has to, she'd work better in the early part of the season.

Also: something I didn't notice during the original run, or in my rewatch until a few episodes ago - when Pirhanatron appear from the ground, the FX give them mermaid-style tails in place of legs until the splash when they "land." It's a nice touch.

So I've been a fan of Poirot for some time, but it only just occurred to me that, y'know, the internet lets me catch up on the twenty years worth of episodes. Nearly exactly, actually, as it first aired in January of '89. (Don't worry - it's a British series, so you frequently get huge gaps between airdates and strings of only three or four episodes. While David Suchet now wants to film every remaining Poirot story - of which there are few - before he's too old to film, there was a period where he quite hated being Poirot.)

Now, I know that British standards about things are different, but what I didn't expect was a sympathetic, if coded, lesbian in the second episode, and exposed breasts all over the place in the fourth.

Plus, the scripts manage to deftly, and more importantly subtly, highlight and condemn the upper-and-middle-class casual racism, both from maliciousness and ignorance, that still pervades an uncomfortable fraction of the country. In fact, one of Poirot's few redeeming social graces is that he is highly perturbed when he encounters it, even if his investigations usually require he keep quiet about it in order to continue unimpeded.

Hastings is much more an idiot than I remember, though. Good lord. I do hope he improves.

OH. OH. ALSO: WHY DID I NEVER RECOGNIZE HOW FREAKISHLY AMAZING MISS LEMON WAS BACK WHEN I USED TO WATCH? SHE IS MADE OF KITTENS AND EFFICIENCY.