P is for Precusor to Edward Snowden

PERSON OF INTEREST
is the Best TV show
you are probably NOT watching.

The Machine is actually an Artificial Intelligence who cares deeply for its creator, Howard Finch. 

Howard and his "Hands On" man, John Reese, a former Intelligence operative, gain new allies and new enemies:

crime lords, corrupt policemen, Intelligence Agencies (our own and foreign). 

Dangerous enemies turn out to be only pawns of even more deadly foes. 

Some enemies, like Root (Amy Acker) join their cause ... for their own reasons of course.

In the 4th Season (the present one), those still alive are reeling from a recent loss of a beloved comrade.
 

Finally they are up against a rival AI, Samaritan, 

with no ethical parameters, aiding our government for its own purposes.

For four seasons, PERSON OF INTEREST has won increasingly positive critical acclaim.

Samaritan has upped the ante: It wishes to control the American government and ultimately the world.

To humble the President into submission, Samaritan recently tried to crash Wall Street. 

Howard, Reese and the others raced in a suicide mission to stop it.

The Machine raced itself through simulations to find a scenario to save her Creator, the one human she is unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good.

No longer having the time to substitute real dialogue for her allies,

she replaces it with what they represent and why they are spoken:



But the machine learns that humans are not
chess pieces,
 and they can find it within themselves
to sacrifice themselves for those they love:

Do Yourself A Favor:
You can find episodes on YouTube.
Watch them.

O is for WAY OUT!

My only memories of THE OUTER LIMITS

remains with me though I saw the episode THE CHAMELEON as a re-run when but very small.

A very young Robert Duvall is playing guitar in a rural Mexican village. 

He is attacked by enemies from his violent past.

He subdues them but at the cost of his guitar. 

A small boy hands him the broken guitar with a sad, longing expression in a silent request to fix it.

"I can only destroy, son.  Only destroy."


OPENING NARRATION:

"The race of Man is known for its mutability.

We can change our moods, our faces, our lives to suit whatever situation confronts us. Adapt and survive.

Even among the most changeable of living things,

Man is quicksilver: more chameleon-like than the chameleon, determined to survive,

no matter what the cost to others... or to himself."

Robert Duvall is convinced by the U.S. Military to be altered to look like the aliens who have crash-landed on our planet.

He goes among them, sees that they are peaceful, and want nothing but to leave our primitive, hostile world.

After giving in to his violent nature initially, Duvall decides to leave with them if they will have him.

They are more forgiving than Mankind and accept him as one of their own, leaving.


CLOSING NARRATION:

"A man's survival can take many shapes, and the shape in which a man finds his humanity is not always a human one."

It is an episode that haunts me still and influences much of my writing to this day.



CONVENTION TIME!

Tomorrow will start my 3 day sojurn through CyPhaCon.  

Wish me luck!

And now, just because it makes me so happy!

N teaches us that Literate doesn't always translate to Long-Lived

 

Night Stalker ran for only six weeks. It was based on KOLCHAK, THE NIGHT STALKER.

It was literate, the scripts actually making Kolchak sound like a thoughtful newspaper reporter. 

Sadly, literate does not always translate into high ratings.

Here is the trailer for the original series that helped spark THE X-FILES:

Do yourself a favor: if you see the 10 episode DVD collection of NIGHT STALKER in the bargain bin, get it.

 

And what N TV day would be complete without

 

 

M is to remind us that TIMING is everything

Trailer for the pilot that never aired

The trailer for the show that made it on the air: 

MOONLIGHT aired before the TWILIGHT craze went nova, 

so it died a too-early death. 

Pity.

And what "M" TV day would be complete

without

L is for TV Shows both worse and better than the books which birthed them

 Netflix has saved this excellent program

A thoughtful sheriff haunted by the murder of his wife, 

what he did to avenge it, 

and his growing attraction to his fiery deputy make this a fine program.

Longmire faces foes from without and within.  

Yet his personal code of honor, though bruised, carry him through.

So I went to the first Longmire book:

THE COLD DISH

And I found a more in-depth study of an intelligent, literate man 

struggling against the inertia of his losses 

while trying not to let those close to him down.

The end of the book will stun you. 

 It propels the series into one of a kind tales, each focusing on a different story-telling motif.  

But unlike the show, all the novels contain a splash of supernatural influence dogging the honorable sheriff.

HELL IS EMPTY is Craig Johnson's detective twist on Dante's Inferno.  Quite a feat.  The audiobooks are amazing.

AND THEN THERE IS

THE LAST SHIP

I went to the book and was ... underwhelmed. I couldn't finish it.  

An unusual reversal of the customary fact of the book being better than the show.

I couldn't leave "L" without recommending LIFE:

K is for a Show which taught as well as entertained

Some TV shows seem to have been aired longer than they were from the impact that they made on you.

KUNG FU is one of these.

Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine) is the orphaned son of an American man, Thomas Henry Caine,

and a Chinese woman, Kwai Lin, in mid-19th century China.

After his maternal grandfather's death he is accepted for training at a Shaolin Monastery,

where he grows up to become a Shaolin priest and martial arts expert.

In the pilot episode Caine's beloved mentor and elder, Master Po,

is murdered by the Emperor's nephew.

Outraged, Caine retaliates by killing the nephew.

With a price on his head, Caine flees China to the western United States,

where he seeks to find his family roots and, ultimately, his half-brother, Danny Caine.

Although it is his intention to avoid notice,

Caine's training and sense of social responsibility repeatedly force him out into the open,

to fight for justice or protect the underdog.

DID YOU KNOW?

* The show's creators picked Caine as a last name to reference the Biblical Cain.

* David Carradine only shaved his head once (when shooting the pilot) --

So you can gauge when an episode was shot by looking at Caine's hair.

* David had no martial arts experience,

but he was a skilled dancer. 

He only studied Kung Fu aggressively during the last season.

* In one scene in the Pilot,

Master Kan asks young Caine to snatch a pebble from his palm. 

That shot was filmed over 15 times because the young actor was always faster than the man!

Finally he was told to snatch it with his left hand, farther from the grown actor. 

This time Master Kan foiled young Caine.     :-)

* Philip Ahn, who played Master Kan, later opened a successful restaurant, Moongate,

and children would shyly approach him, asking if they could try and snatch a pebble from his hand. 

He always obliged.