All posts in Television

There are many impor­tant things going on in the world today — the Iraq war, hor­ren­dously high gas prices, a ramping-up pres­i­den­tial cam­paign and other stuff. But this may be the most earth-shattering event of all : Which was a bet­ter human side­kick for Blue of Blue’s Clues, Joe or Steve?

Steven Burns,¹ who played, inex­plic­a­bly, “Steve”, was on the show from 1996 to 2002. When Burns decided to move on (one rea­son given — male pat­tern bald­ness), “Steve” went off to col­lege and his younger brother Joe (played by Dono­van Pat­ton) moved in to take care of Blue. Joe was intro­duced over sev­eral episodes where he learned the ropes of play­ing the sig­na­ture game, “Blue’s Clues”. The human side­kick would ask Blue a ques­tion and rather than answer, Blue would demand that his token human must find 3 clues that would lead to what Blue would have said.

Just once I wanted the human, upon learn­ing that Blue wanted to play the game, to say, “No. I don’t want to play Blue’s Clues today.” Would have been a short show.

So which was a bet­ter human hench­man, Steve or Joe? Both are lik­able enough, and my son is glued to either of them when they’re on the screen, but each has a dif­fer­ent style, which, after repeated view­ing (as I’ve done) becomes apparent.

Patton’s act­ing is more sitcom-y, I think. He’s a ham when he’s onscreen, kind of like a silent screen actor. He has ter­ri­ble hair, but that’s only par­tially his fault, since he was born that way. The other half of it is his fault, because he should get a cooler haircut.

Hard to believe, but Dono­van Pat­ton is a cousin of Gen­eral George S. Pat­ton.² I think Patton’s act­ing is goofy and his char­ac­ter of Joe acts more stu­pid and clue­less than Steve did.

Steve just seemed to be played by a bet­ter actor. I actu­ally laugh at him, which isn’t say­ing much, but he had facial quirks, eye­brow move­ments, comic tim­ing. Joe seems like his mother drank while she was preg­nant with him.

So I award Steve the Ulti­mate Blue’s Clues Human Side­kick award. Con­grat­u­la­tions Mr. Burns. You earned it.

1. You can check out Steve’s web­site here. It’s rather strange, which prob­a­bly sums up Burns. [↩]
2. It comes from that repos­i­tory of old peo­ple infor­ma­tion, Parade mag­a­zine, where peo­ple fre­quently bet steak din­ners over ques­tions writ­ten into the mag­a­zine. [↩]

I’ve loved “Lost”, and I’ve hated “Lost”. I swing like a pen­du­lum between these two extremes, and all because some tele­vi­sion writ­ers want to drag out some­thing that prob­a­bly only last another sea­son or two. Cur­rently I’m back to lov­ing it, but up until the sec­ond half of sea­son 3, I was hat­ing it, and with good rea­son, because it was suck­ing wind. After a pretty killer sea­son 2 finale episode, the first block of new episodes for sea­son 3 were less than stel­lar. I know that the pro­duc­ers of the show say they were set­ting up stuff for later in the sea­son, but face it, they still weren’t very good episodes. I was so sick of it I was ready to swear off of the show for eter­nity, but lately they’ve been doing a pretty good job of keep­ing the aver­age Vance glued to the telly week after freak­ing week.

As best as I can gather, the Losties have been on The Island for roughly around 70 days, just south of 2 months. In that time they’ve had 9 of their own die (Scott, Boone, Shan­non, Arzt, Libby, Ana Lucia, Mr. Eko, Nikki, Paulo) and one more if you count the Oceanic Air pilot killed in the first episode, and some of those peo­ple, if the show’s time line is to be believed, died lit­er­ally only weeks ago. Our cast­aways don’t seem very vis­i­bly upset by a lot of the death going on around them.

I attribute this to the “The ‘Lost’ Short Term Mem­ory Syn­drome”. It’s a con­di­tion com­monly found in tele­vi­sion char­ac­ters who crashed on an island 3 years ago and are still liv­ing in that time, yet they’re being watched 3 years in the future on tele­vi­sion. How else can you explain the lack of feel­ings, the for­got­ten things that hap­pen from one week (or day, or what­ever their pas­sage of time con­sists of) to the next?

We’ll be talk­ing in “Lost” time, not real world time, FYI.

On the sec­ond day our Losties are on the island some of them hike to higher ground to see if they can use a radio to con­tact the out­side world, but they pick up sig­nals in French from a radio tower. Shan­non is able to deci­pher them, but many more peo­ple were there besides her. Do they not remem­ber this unseen tower? Why aren’t they look­ing for it?

Sawyer was tor­tured by Sayid roughly a week and a half after they crashed for hoard­ing, yet in last night’s episode, Sawyer and Sayid are pal­ing around and try­ing to get Juliet to talk. Would you be friends with some­one who had tor­tured you not 2 months before? Why isn’t Sawyer try­ing to get even with Sayid for doing this?

Three weeks ago Jinn, Sawyer, Michael and Walt set sail on their boat, which was blown up by the Other known as Tom later that day. That was 3 weeks ago? Feels like for­ever ago.

Sayid loved Shan­non, and she died about on day 48 of their time on the island. If we’re at about day 65+, shouldn’t Sayid still be a lit­tle torn up over her? The guy sure did mourn a long time for his girl, didn’t he?

On day 59, Locke was trapped beneath the blast door in the Hatch. It pierced his thighs, but a week later he’s fine? What gives? I know it’s the “heal­ing pow­ers of the island”, but come on, don’t give me that.

Eight-ish days ago, Michael killed Ana Lucia and Libby. Eight days ago. Three days after that Michael and Walt are given a boat and coor­di­nates by Ben Linus. They leave the island.

On the same day the Hatch explodes. If the Hatch exploded on day 65, and we’re right around day 70 or so, it’s been less than a week since that occur­rence. None of the Losties seem to remem­ber the Hatch, but the Oth­ers talk about the Pur­ple Light that screwed up their nav­i­ga­tion systems.

I guess they for­got about the Num­bers too. And they were such a big deal, weren’t they?

I’ll give them a point of con­sis­tency though — Sawyer has not reverted to call­ing peo­ple nick­names yet. I expect that to change as he con­ve­niently for­gets his deal with Hurley.

Saul Tigh, Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of the Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, is one tough frakkin’ SOB. The man drinks, he swears, he beats up pris­on­ers and crew mem­bers alike with a pas­sion, he over­throws gov­ern­ments, he’s had one of his eyes ripped out of the socket and, to top it all off, he’s had to kill his own wife! How’s that for one tough guy?

Tigh has been my favorite char­ac­ter on BSG since the excel­lent minis­eries launched the show, and it’s funny, since if the guy were real and we were to meet in real life I’d prob­a­bly hate him, mainly from his demeanor. Upon first meet­ing he’d prob­a­bly give one raised nos­tril in a sneer and snarl some­thing degrad­ing, But Michael Hogan makes him so real and flawed that his human­ity (or lack of human­ity, now that the sea­son 3 finally has come and gone) pours out of him.

Now that sup­pos­edly Tigh is a Cylon, I have no idea how they will rec­tify his back story with what we now know he is. Accord­ing to the excel­lent Battlestarwiki.org, Tigh served aboard a war­ship called the Brenik dur­ing the first Cylon war when he was just a teenager. He was released from ser­vice after the war, served aboard civil­ian ships and met Bill Adama dur­ing a bar fight. The two men grew old together while they served the colonies together. How they’re going to make him a Cylon that grew old is beyond me. I don’t know.

I guess what I like about him is his iras­ci­ble char­ac­ter, his take-no-garbage atti­tude and his will­ing­ness to do any­thing that is nec­es­sary to sur­vive. He only seems to have given up that fight twice in his life, once when he’d divorced Ellen and was drift­ing aim­lessly, and then after he’d had to kill Ellen and return to the Galac­tica. Exe­cut­ing Cylon col­lab­o­ra­tors seemed to have helped quench some of his fury, but as a man he was drifting.

Now that he believes that he is a Cylon he has turned back to the one con­stant in his life; serv­ing under Bill Adama as XO. He defi­antly declared upon real­iza­tion that he isn’t human, “My name is Saul Tigh. I’m an offi­cer in the Colo­nial Fleet. What­ever else I am, what­ever else it means, that’s the man I want to be. And if I die today, that’s the man I’ll be.”

God, I love this man. God­speed, Tigh! May you make it to “Earth” so we may all know you in all your ornery glory!

I was done with “Lost”, I was tired of it and never wanted to watch it again, and then what did Carl­ton Cuse and Damon Lin­de­lof go and do?

Make me care again.

You bas­tards!

The peo­ple behind “Lost” must have noticed that our house­hold was get­ting tired of their lit­tle tele­vised social exper­i­ment, because out of the blue they’ve started putting on far bet­ter shows than we were used to see­ing on ABC on Wednes­day nights. Except for a few glitches this sea­son (like the horr-i-ble Jack-centric “Stranger in a Strange Land”) the sec­ond half of sea­son 3 hasn’t been too shabby, with episodes like the Desmond-centric episode “Flashes Before Your Eyes” being the stand out for me this sea­son, fol­lowed by “The Man from Tal­la­has­see” and last week’s fun (for me, at least) “Expose” where they killed off the lat­est clum­sily intro­duced mem­bers of the Losties.

The pro­duc­ers def­i­nitely were yank­ing our chains when the sea­son started, what with the down­beat episodes of Jack, Sawyer and Kate’s cap­tiv­ity and Jack’s grow­ing rela­tion­ships with Ben and Juliet. I love Ben now, he’s just so creepy/weird and you really (up until “Expose”) didn’t know where he was com­ing from, but he’s either manip­u­lat­ing peo­ple to do what they wouldn’t nor­mally do and he’s a mas­ter­mind of sorts, or he’s delu­sional and thinks he’s some amaz­ing pup­pet mas­ter. And Juliet has evil writ­ten all over her. Just a feel­ing I get.

John Locke has been infu­ri­at­ing this sea­son though. You can’t stop play­ing with com­put­ers, can you John? First Mikhail escapes because you want to play chess on the Fire Station’s com­puter, then you blow up the Fire Sta­tion out of stu­pid­ity, and then you kill Mikhail because he knows you were a para­plegic, and to top it all off you go and take that C4 that you found and blow up the one reli­able mode of trans­porta­tion off of the island? What’s your angle, John? You bet­ter pray that Penny Wid­more res­cues your ass, or at least your com­pa­tri­ots, since you’ll never want to leave the island now that you can walk.

Char­lie can die any­time he wants now. After the drug sto­ry­line was done with he started feel­ing extra­ne­ous, like Shan­non. Hey Desmond, don’t tell Char­lie when he’s going to die so he won’t know you didn’t save him, okay?

Where did Rose and Bern­hard go? I liked both of them and they’ve just dis­ap­peared, but of course, in “Lost” time, they’ve been gone for prob­a­bly 5 days.

I keep hop­ing we’ll see Michael and Walt again some­day. I like to think that the coor­di­nates that Ben gave Michael when he left at the end of last sea­son took him straight to the sec­ond island and that they’re both there. They’re prob­a­bly locked up some­where, but I wish they’d explained Walt’s weird gift with ani­mals and draw­ing them to him. Guess that’ll go straight into the toi­let, won’t it? Along with so many other mysteries.

And I don’t miss Eko. He had the abil­ity to become cool, like Locke, but he used all of his street cred up with me. RIP, Eko.