I've been on something of a Whoniverse overdose the past two days. SciFi aired a marathon of the best of Doctor Who season 3 on Monday ("Human Nature"/"Family of Blood", one of my favorite things ever produced for television, plus "Blink" and "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords", "The Sound of Drums" being my personal choice for most purely entertaining piece of television ever), and this combined with the glowing reviews of Torchwood's limited season three/miniseries event thing "Children of Earth" got me to watch that, too--and, before I did, the final three episodes of Torchwood's season two, which have been sitting unwatched on my computer since they aired over a year ago due to my growing indifference to the series. (A short review: the last three episodes were better but still mostly Torchwood as usual. "Children of Earth", on the other hand, is really quite good and absolutely brilliant in a few unexpected places.)

But what I'm more interested in is the political circumstances depicted in the Doctor Who finale and in "Children of Earth". I realize I'm way late to the game in analyzing the Master's return, but as a student my work is mostly analyzing old things anyway, so whatever. What's interesting to me about the political circumstances is that they aren't unusual, or different, or new, beyond the superficialities of aliens and advanced technology.

The Master (John Simm) in Doctor Who (2007)
In "The Sound of Drums", the Doctor figures out that the Master has elected himself Prime Minister of Great Britain via embedding a psychic signal within a satellite network that controls cell phones: it's not exactly mind control, the Doctor says, just an implanted rhythm (the chilling "Sound of Drums" that also reverberates uncontrollably within the Master's mind) that contains the message: "Believe in me. Vote for me." It seems like just a science fiction plot device, but the moment when the Doctor's companion's acknowledge that even they were planning on voting for the Master (before they knew who he was) resonates uncomfortably with the modern political space:

Martha: I was gonna vote for him.
The Doctor: Really?
Martha: Well, it was before I even met you. And I liked him.
Jack: Me too.
The Doctor: Why do you say that? What was his policy, what did he stand for?
Martha: I don't know, he always sounded . . . good. Like you could trust him. Just nice. He spoke about . . . I can't really remember, but it was good. Just the sound of his voice . . .

On one level it's a merely a demonstration that the Master can affect even those who should be most resistant to his machinations. But of course on another level there's a sense that this isn't actually unusual. Martha's inability to articulate the Master's policy despite her confidence in him--her admission that she simply "trust[ed] him" based on "the sound of his voice" would not sound out of place in a modern news segment interviewing voters (or more likely, a Daily Show parody ridiculing the ignorance of voters, though the difference between the comedic farce of The Daily Show and the blatant lies of mainstream news is a thin one indeed).

Ultimately this element of political commentary is dropped in favor of Doctor Who's more usual intensely absurd character drama (which I love, no mistake), but I wish there was more of it. The political aspects of the new series--Harriet Jones, UNIT, and of course Torchwood--are some of its most interesting (at least in terms of its Earth-based stories) because they do often seem to be simply our modern circumstances with aliens thrown in.

Torchwood, indeed, deals with this a bit more often (though sometimes it dodges it when I feel it shouldn't), especially in "Children of Earth". But even in its full seasons there's an interesting arc in the background of the acknowledgement of the existence of aliens by the general populace despite governments' continued official denials. For some time I considered it simply absurd and contrived that the populace at large hadn't already simply accepted this after the events of Doctor Who's seasons--the Master himself points out a number of such incidents, including the highly visible destruction of Big Ben by an alien spacecraft, as part of a press conference announcing his (as Prime Minister) official first contact with aliens (an elaborate ruse ending with his global domination, though the aliens are real).

It seems ridiculous that after this public declaration and subsequent fallout (the deaths of the Master as Prime Minister and the American President in "Last of the Time Lords") the world's governments would refuse to acknowledge aliens and that the public would, by and large, accept this. And it should be ridiculous. But the more I thought about it, the more it occured to me that such obvious, blatant lies have always been the province of government, and though in the age of decentralized social media these lies are more visible than ever before to those looking for them, they still have ridiculous powers of persistence.


The United States' torture of detainees, its general execution of the War on Terror and the predatory nature of Western foreign policy in general, plus many, many others: they're a sort of step beyond "open secrets", those things like Israel's nuclear armaments that are officially denied but nonetheless widely acknowledged. They're things that anybody looking to know can know, that all the information about is out there and ridiculously easy to find, but that the vast majority of the public do not know, because the mainstream news refuses to acknowledge them and because the public in general simply do not want to know.

And with this depressing realization I accepted that Torchwood's treatment of the subject is actually probably accurate. Even after so many public images, most people wouldn't accept the existence of aliens--but it wouldn't be hard for them to accept it once forced to, as happens numerous times throughout Torchwood. It seems at first wierd that people accept so easily extraterrestrial life, perhaps just a necessary plot contrivance to keep 42-minute episodes moving, but once we see that they already know, in some sense, and just haven't accepted it yet, it becomes much more understandable (and, perhaps, frightening).

I've got more to say about politics and "Children of Earth", but it's of a more different sort, and so will be another post.

Battlestar Galactica has featured assassinations, coup d'etat, martial law, suicide bombing, torture, forced abortion, gang rape. It's a dark show. But to my mind, one of the most horrible moments of the show was not anything so conventionally terrible as the above, but a speech sometimes hailed as one of the triumphant turning points of the show:

In our civil war, we've seen death. We watched our people die. Gone forever. As terrible as it was, beyond the reach of the resurrection ships, something began to change. We could feel a sense of time. As if each moment held its own significance. We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value it must end. To live meaningful lives we must die, and not return. The one human flaw, that you spend your lifetimes distressing over - mortality - is the one thing . . . well, it's the one thing that makes you whole.

In "Guess What's Coming to Dinner", Natalie, the Six who leads the Cylon rebellion, gives this speech to the assembled Quroum, humanity's elected government, arguing in favor of a joint strike mission to permanently disable the Cylon's ability to resurrect themselves into new bodies following death. Later, in "The Hub", with the exploding resurrection hub in the background, Helo and the leader of the rebel Eights fly the last surviving Three back to the rebel base ship:

Three: And with a whimper, every Cylon in the universe begins to die.
Eight: Yes, that's right. And it's a good thing, D'Anna, because now there's no difference. We can all start trusting each other.

The first thing that follows this, of course, is Helo's betrayal of the Eight's trust by taking Three to President Roslin and denying the Cylons access (on the President's order). But there's a larger issue here than the Eights' pereptually foolish optimism. And that's the idea that the only way the Cylons can be "whole" is for there to be "no difference" between humans and Cylons.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a fascinating show. It's a show on a major network (and one notorious for canning potentially brilliant but niche shows befor giving them any real chance to establish an audience) that manages to get away with many things you wouldn't expect possible on a major network (and especially on FOX). It's a confused show, one that often seems to be at odds with itself, threatening to be torn apart by these two impulses: the desire for mainstream, traditional, escapist entertainment and the desire for a genuinely new, creative, and interesting work of science fiction. To this already dangerous balancing act is a third pillar, the nostalgic love for the first two Terminator films that presumably keeps much of the audience (and thus the show) coming back while at the same time fighting with both of the show's other main directions. If you're at all interested in the troubles of maintaining a clear vision on a network television series, this is enough reason to watch Sarah Connor Chronicles, just trying to decipher each week how the people behind the show have managed to corral all these competing impulses into a coherent series.

That's not most people, of course, and that's fine. But the reason I point all this out up front is that while I want to focus on one aspect of the show--the aspect of it that is a genuinely new work of science fiction--I don't want to pretend that that's all it is, or that the show is a particularly great one. This is not Battlestar Galactica. At times SCC devolves into a conventional if entertaining action series, or into a love song for The Terminator and Terminator 2. The series is often clumsy and unsubtle, the acting by leads Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker is uneven (though Summer Glau and Brian Austin Green are reliably excellent), and some of the first season's plot threads were too drawn-out and complicated to really work on television. Despite these flaws in execution and its confused heart, however, SCC is a show with a very strong heart, a show with something to say which, even if it's not quite sure how to say it (or perhaps even what it is that it wants to say), deserves to be heard.

This post is something of a sequel to this one.

I'm halfway through season two of The Wire (just finished "All Prologue") and I've got some more thoughts on it and David Simon's other HBO production, Generation Kill (thoughts which of course apply to television and to some extent narratives in general as well).

What strikes me now, especially after getting into Generation Kill, is that the problem I attempted to describe previously already has a perfect title, albeit one not widely used: the "tragedy of verisimilitude". Coined, as far as I know, by Battlestar Galactica's James Callis in a "roundtable" podcast of several of the show's actors and crew (a fascinating, albeit very long, discussion, you can get download it from SciFi's Battlestar site, which unfortunately prevents more direct linking), he lamented that Battlestar's oft-praised dedication to realism (or more accurately verisimilitude) was occasionally a burden, when the principles of physical reality (or the expectations of the audience) made simple stories needlessly complex (or worse, made them impossible to convey believably).

While the problem occasionally rises on Battlestar, it's much more prevalent on the much more grounded Wire and, in a twisted, more acceptable fashion due to its semi-nonfictional nature, Generation Kill. The second season of The Wire begins with the main characters of the first season, who were pulled from various disparate police units to serve on a special detail, scattered into the wind. McNulty is working the boat; Freamon is in Homicide; Kima has a desk job; Daniels is in the basement; etc. The first episode juggles the ongoing fates of these characters while continuing the story of Avon Barksdale's similarly scattered drug crew and introducing an entirely new set of characters at the Baltimore docks (not to mention beginning a plot, although that's clearly, as always on The Wire, a secondary priority). It's a clusterfuck of too many characters, too much to carry, and yet it works in a twisted way, because this is what happens. People move on, with their jobs and with their lives, and the attempt to follow that, rather than unrealistically but more simply keep them together, or bring them back together on another detail for a new case.

Having finished the first season of The Wire (and the first episode of season two), I think I've figured out what my problem with it is: I'm not engaged by the characters. I don't mean to say that I don't like The Wire; I think it is brilliant, and great, and powerful, but so far it isn't the best show on television to me, because I don't love it. That sounds cheesy and it's about to get worse. There's no beauty in The Wire (for me). I am cognizant of the quality of what I'm watching, but I don't care.

As a writer I'm a character guy. My first priority in a story is always making the characters true and real; while of course I think about themes and motifs and structure and mechanics and what have you, if it undercuts the characters, it goes. On The Wire, I can't help but feel that the characters are working for the story and not the other way around. A part of it is likely simply that the characters are for the most part quite pedestrian--McNulty, setting aside the quality of the series and simply looking at the substance of his character, is a character I've seen a thousand times before in nearly every cop show ever: self-righteous, arrogant, intelligent, divorced, battling with his wife for custody, fucking another woman. This is more-or-less the sum total of his character at the end of season one. There's nothing interesting here. And the same goes for almost all of the characters. (I find Stringer Bell fascinating, but that may just be me.)

If you somehow weren't aware, season two of Mad Men premiered last night. The episode was everything I expected and hoped for and more, with a couple of surprises along with the general thoughtful evolution of characters that have aged more than a year since we last saw them. (Season two begins in February 1962; I believe season one ended Thanksgiving 1960, although I'm not as sure as I'd like to be.) What struck me--what has always struck me about Mad Men, since I watched the first episode, even as I have grown accustomed to it--was the pacing. Mad Men is a brilliant show, and while these are of necessity rare, it is by no means alone. I do believe, however, that Mad Men is unique, or nearly so, among television shows in its pacing. At the very least, I have never seen another show like it in this regard.

When searching for a way to describe Mad Men to friends who have never seen it, the word that almost always comes to mind is "pensive". So much of the show it seems is not in the dialogue or the actions but in the inaction, the moments of quite solitude when characters simply stare off in the distance, lost in thought. Of course, describing the show like this usually makes it seem boring and dull, but because of the acting and the writing it's not. Because Mad Men is a show about characters, more, a show about characters who are trapped in lives they do not want, in a structure and society they do not like but nonetheless uphold like some kind of nation-spanning Abilene paradox, we understand why they must take a moment, or many moments, to contemplate how fucked up their existences really are (and drink a hell of a lot of alcohol).

John Slattery as Roger Sterling in Mad Men (2007).
And it couldn't be done any other way. If Mad Men were a fast-paced show about action and snappy banter, full of people walking down hallways, issuing quick orders, and exchanging rapid barbs, the characters would never get anywhere, because without those moments of reflection they would never come to the piercing self-awareness whose tragic juxtaposition with the flashy, glamorous action of the ad agency is the heart of the show.

I don't mean to say that such a fast-paced show can't have strong characters--Battlestar Galactica has proven that many times over. Although now I can't help but wonder, considering other things as well, if Battlestar's characters really came across as well as Mad Men's do in its first season. I suspect the answer is no, but I think that's more because Battlestar, as much as I like to think of it as a character drama (and the people behind it, according to press, do, too), in many ways it's not, or at least it's trying to do a lot more than just character drama, and it loses some of the character development in order to further those other goals in the limited time that it has. However, I think this, too, ties into pacing, because could a show really focus on its characters without a slower pace that allows them moments of reflection? A character study or portrait, perhaps, but not any show in which the characters were expected to change and grow, I think.

Pacing doesn't just apply to the style and structure of individual episodes, of course. The pacing of seasons--or even an entire series (here's looking at you, Babylon 5)--also deserve consideration. Episodic series, obviously, don't have any real seasonal or serial pacing, but shows with long-term arcs (sometimes referred to as "novelistic" series) do. Several years ago, following the unlikely runaway success of Lost, "arc-based" shows briefly became a fad on the major networks, with shows like Threshold and Invasion trying to repeat Lost's success by replicating its long-term story (with almost no success). On cable and premium television, of course, there was nothing new about arc-based shows, and arcs have been a fixture even of network television for decades. And the existence of arcs themselves doesn't necessarily constitute a sense of pacing, although it does force those behind a show to at least consider it (I hope).

One of the best examples, or at least one of the most extreme, of such seasonal pacing is The Wire. In the past couple of days I've watched the first ten episodes of season one. The Wire's creator and show-runner, David Simon, has famously compared each season of The Wire to a novel, with each season telling a single long, over-arcing plot and (somewhat infamously) early episodes being devoted (as in the early chapters of a novel, the analogy goes) to character development and exposition rather than direct plot development. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the "novelistic" moniker: yes, it's closer to a novel than anything else I've seen on television, but nonetheless it's not a novel, and the comparison tends to be used more to implicitly reference the supposed superiority of literature to television rather than any real commentary for the structure of the show.

At left: The Wire (2008). At right: a book (photo by Lars Aronsson).
Setting that aside, however, The Wire does demonstrate a very deliberate and slow seasonal pacing that marks it from other shows. After watching as much as I have, I'm honestly quite glad that I never tried to watch this show as it premiered, because the individual episodes are so obviously simply a part of a larger whole that I'm not sure how satisfying it would have been to watch only one a week. It's not uncommon in The Wire for details mentioned in one scene of one episode to come to bear relevance on the plot three, four, or much more episodes later. Several times, such details are startling "cliffhanger" revelations in the final scene of an episode, which are then never mentioned and have no obvious impact on the next episode. Watching it as I am, in close procession, this isn't particularly bothersome, but it does at times feel like sloppy television. The Wire is supposed to be the best show on television, and I'm not denying its brilliance, but even the best have flaws, and to me this seems one of them.

I don't mean to degrade arc-based plotting in general; in fact, quite the opposite: I love arc-based shows and strongly prefer them over episodic series, which tend towards popcorn entertainment. (This is intrinsic to the nature of episodic television, I think: in order for a show to be episodic, to begin with the same premise every episode, it must end with the same premise every episode. Nothing can change, leading usually to the frequent usage of a "reset button" that fixes whatever changes might have occurred as a result of the episode's events and prevents any real development of the plot or characters.) But the episodic nature of television cannot be ignored or denied.

A television season is not a thirteen-hour movie (and even a thirteen-hour movie would have its own special pacing requirements rather than simply being a feature length film extended so many hours); it is a progression of thirteen, or twenty, or however many episodes, each of which are a contained unit. While nowadays sales of television DVDs are strong and growing, and many people are encountering critically acclaimed but popularly ignored series for the first time in this format that obviates some of these pacing concerns, this is still true. (Watching a season on DVD could be directly compared to watching a thirteen-hour movie--but again, that's not the same as a regular movie.)

Mad Men knows this, as does Battlestar. I honestly think the best example of such episodic yet arc-based television may be the first season of Veronica Mars, a critical darling that skirted cancellation for three years before finally (and tragically) losing the battle. While the following seasons were questionable as to their greatness, the first season is to me among the best ever on television, and it perfectly balances a season-long mystery plot, with a slow progression of clues, red herrings, and true revelations, with cleverly done individual mysteries in each episode, along with seasonal character development and well-developed guest characters in individual episodes. While I watched the first (and second) seasons on DVD, I never felt that the series would have been difficult to watch weekly (and I did watch the third season weekly, which handled the structure about as well, if the actual plots and characters were not as well-done).

Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars (2007).
Ironically, the first season of Veronica Mars was developed from an unpublished novel by creator Rob Thomas; supposedly most of the progression of the seasonal mystery was taken more-or-less directly from this novel. (This also to some degree explains the quality of the first season's big mystery in comparison to the next two, which were developed on the time of the series.) But Veronica Mars is not a novel, and doesn't try to be, and that is its strength. I have never seen anything pointing one way or the other, but I assume that the vast majority of the individual episodic mysteries were written specifically for the series and the general pace of the novel greatly slowed in order to accommodate the new format of the story. It is because Veronica Mars recognized its format and didn't try to pretend to be something else--regardless of its origins--that it succeeds so well (in addition to brilliant writing and acting, of course).

For years there have been (at least to my perhaps biased perceptions) two shows that have dominated television critics' articles as the "best shows on TV": Battlestar Galactica and The Wire. I've watched Battlestar since the beginning (and fallen completely in love with it, and become known as something of an evangelist for it), but I was never able to watch The Wire because it's an HBO show. Recently I've finally been able to start watching it--so far, only the first episode--and I've been trying to put my reaction into words. It's a very weird thing, to read about the greatness of something for five-odd years before finally getting to experience it; it's a recipe for overhyped expectations, disillusionment, disappointment. I'm not disappointed, so far; but disillusionment would be a fair assessment. I don't mean that in a bad way--the first episode was great--and to be honest it doesn't so much have to do with the critical praise as it does with the show it's paired with.

Battlestar is a show about the nuclear annihilation of humanity by killer robots and the human survivors' attempts to find a new life and a new way to live. It's a character drama of the highest caliber, yes, but it's also a show with space battles and nuclear showdowns and sex (surprising amounts of sex, really) and all a manner of infantile geek fun. Watching Battlestar, I get to indulge both the intellectual, artistic, philosophical brain and the instinctual, visceral, kiddie brain. And that's not just a great package, it also allows the show to occasionally transform visceral fantasies into their horrifying realities in a moment, twisting the infantile pleasure of watching spaceships blow up into a shocking moment of self-awareness. Which is great and lovely and awesome.

That's not what The Wire is. This should be obvious, of course. The Wire is, after all, a cop show. It's not about nuclear showdowns and killer robots. But somehow, in the years I spent hearing about the other best show on television, I connected the two in my brain, or at least got used to the idea of great television being both entertaining and intelligent. I don't mean to say that The Wire isn't entertaining (even though that's what I just said), but that--well, it's not visceral. There's nothing "awesome" (in the popular sense of explosions and sex) about The Wire, or at least not the first episode. It's very well-written and touches on a lot of important themes and says a lot of important things, but I didn't get a spectacularly wide grin on my face when I watched it like I do with Battlestar or even (to reference a previous post) The Dark Knight.

At left: "The Target", The Wire (2002). At right: "Exodus, Part II", Battlestar Galactica (2006).
That's not a bad thing, necessarily, of course. Or maybe it is. One of my other favorite shows is/was Firefly, the infamously short-changed sci-fi/western from Joss Whedon. Firefly and Battlestar have often been paired as the vanguards of a new type of science fiction. In the sense of "actually really good", that's true, but beyond that there's not a lot to compare them, I think. The striking thing about Firefly (although it's not really striking to anyone familiar with Whedon's work) is its method of combining moments of seriousness and comedy, transitioning between the two smoothly and elegantly, and using the combination of the two to elevate both of them to higher levels. (Whedon talks about this in the director's commentary to Serenity, the Firefly feature film.) Watching Firefly, the drama is more dramatic because of the comedy, and vice versa, much in the same way as the viscerality and intellectualism of Battlestar complement and elevate each other.

I used to just say Battlestar and Firefly were different shows and that's that. I still agree with the first part, but after watching a recent episode, "The Hub", penned by regular Whedon writer Jane Espenson I came to think there's more to say on the subject. (Espenson maintains a blog on writing that has discussed this subject in more detail and with her own expertise weighing in. I whole-heartedly recommend it for any aspiring writer.) While Espenson wrote several Battlestar episodes prior to "The Hub" (she's now a co-executive producer, I believe), this was the first in which a substantial amount of comedy is present. And it made the episode one of the most memorable of the series, as well as making some of the dramatic moments (particularly between the characters of Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar, around whom most of the earlier comedy is based) strikingly poignant.

Battlestar attempted comedy once before, in a season one episode called "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down". It's one of my favorites from the first season, and I think it's hilarious, but it's a very odd episode, very obviously different from the rest of the series, very obviously intended to be a comedy (albeit, in Battlestar fashion, a very, very dark one). "The Hub" is not like this: the humor doesn't stand out, and the episode contains some of the most serious and important scenes in the series.


At left: Edward James Olmos in "Pegasus", Battlestar Galactica (2005). At right: Adam Baldwin in "The Message", Firefly (2003).
I like Battlestar more than Firefly, but I'm the first to admit that a large part of that may be the fact that I have four seasons of Battlestar to love and not even one complete season of Firefly. I have often wondered if I would have liked Firefly more had it survived--a pointless question, taken superficially, but what I really want to know: is Firefly's style of blending comedy and drama (and not in the asinine "dramedy" that usually manages to accomplish neither, but in a more natural sense) better than the hardcore bleak blackness of Battlestar and (even moreso, it would seem) The Wire? Is the blending of the visceral and the intellectual on Battlestar better than the so-far almost purely intellectual of The Wire?

Since I'm posing the question, of course, I lean towards yes. I won't pretend that I'm sure of that. (And since I'm rather terrible at writing comedy, there's a part of me that would really prefer the answer be no.) But I think what the essence here is not so much comedy and drama, or the intellectual and visceral, but just the idea of combining, blending, mixing. I think that truth, what's right, is in general terms a matter of openness, acceptance, reconciliation. I won't explain fully here--because doing so would be an entirely other, very long essay--but I tend to see things in terms of apophasis (defining things through negatives, or just defining things, putting limits on them, categorizing, and so on) and entanglement (embracing differences, undefinability, the vagueness of existence, and so on). Society, structure, systems (not to mention "the plan") are apophatic, while life and reality is entangled.

Fiction, or art, or any construction (including what is generally termed "non-fiction") lies at an interesting point along this spectrum. As a construction there's an inherent amount of apophasis to a work--there is only what the creator created, right?--but in the end, like everything else, it always becomes entangled. Works come to mean much more than their creators ever intended. And to embrace that, to embrace the undefinability and not try to limit a work to one specific frame, is what's right.

That's a far cry from the difference between comedy and drama or between viscerality and intellectualism, of course. I don't mean to suggest that they're equivalent--or maybe I do. To be honest I'm not sure what I think about all of this. I'm basically just talking out of my ass and hoping to find a solution as I write. It hasn't worked--it rarely does--but I have, I think, managed to organize my thoughts on the subject better. And that will have to do for now.

For some reason I've been thinking about D'Anna again (partially I'm sure due to the recent release of The Golden Compass, the source material of which features an explicit parallel to Eve). And I think I'm able to better detail just what the difference between the three (original Eve, Battlestar's D'Anna, and His Dark Materials' Lyra) is, and why I prefer D'Anna's story. I'm not going to make a lot of sense here but I'll give it a shot.

Okay, so I think I figured out why Heroes appears to oscillate between strong women and traditional sexist tropes... and it's a simple reason that people have already figured out long before me and even coined an aphorism for: "always assume incompetence before malevolence" (with variations, of course). In a nutshell, sexism such as in Heroes isn't the result of deliberate intent; it's just stupidity and laziness.

Mad Men's first season ended tonight. The confirmation of a second made me grin with giddy enthusiasm; the date of summer 2008 barely dented that smile, since I knew that would the likely date anyway (and I'm used to long waits from Battlestar).

It's interesting that while I've fallen in love with Mad Men over the past thirteen episodes, it wasn't until tonight, after it had ended, that I began to realize how truly transcendent it is as a television show. I submit that it is not just the best new show of the year, which I think is without question, but I think that it may be the best television show I have ever seen, better even than my golden babies of Firefly and (gasp) Battlestar. Both those -- and other brilliant first seasons I might name, like Veronica Mars' -- had their ups and downs, with the downs simply being greater than nearly everything else on television and the ups being some of the best productions ever put to film. But with Mad Men -- and perhaps this is just the rose-colored glasses of post-finale bliss -- has never hit a wrong mark.

I don't want to seem alarmist so early on, but what started as a few sour notes in the premier seems to be continuing without abate in the second episode:

• First, most obviously, is our new characters, the Wonder Twins Maya and Alejandro. Not even touching on how this plays into the diseased immigrant stereotype, Maya has an uncontrollable power that kills people by making them bleed out of their eyes (which is not as creepy as I think it's supposed to be due to both Firefly and The 4400 having already done it, and from more than just the eyes), and the only way to stop her is for her brother to be around. So her brother follows her everywhere, insists that he always be with her, constantly tells her that he's going to make everything okay . . . which would be perfectly acceptable, even interesting, since that is almost certainly what the dynamic between a pair of South American siblings would be, except that for the show this is apparently all true. Again, it's early in the season, but we've no indications that Maya will learn to control her power without her brother's help, which is . . . disturbing.

Over the past three days, I have, along with a group of between ten and fifteen other people, rewatched the entire first season of Heroes. A good show, especially for network television. One of the things I was struck by while rewatching is its thematic coherence, something I'm fairly certain is quite rare for television in general: from the beginning, the message of love through togetherness and the need to unite to overcome is clearly emphasized without hitting you over the head with it, dealt with in a number of different ways without it getting monotonous. The themes themselves are not particularly original (indeed, are glaringly unoriginal), but my point is that they're presented well.

I previously mentioned that D'Anna is my favorite of Battlestar's recurring characters. Hers is to me one of the most simultaneously beautiful, tragic, and inspiring stories I have ever watched on television. D'Anna's story is one we all know -- it is the story of Eve, and all the others who have reached for the forbidden fruit --yet it deviates from the archetype in important ways that make D'Anna's story not one of a fall, but an apotheosis, an elevation to divinity.

For most of the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the show's supposed "bad guys", the Cylons, remained a mysterious, malevolent force, striking out from the shadows like the bogey man of children's nightmares. The few glimpses we had into their society -- notably "The Farm" -- suggested a foreign culture that enhanced rather than diminished the alienation Battlestar's characters, and its audiences, felt towards the Cylons. Then season two's "Downloaded" offered an open view into life of three Cylons, showing them to be not as different as we had thought, and humanizing them. Season three spent an entire story arc on a Cylon ship, a decision that generated much controversy. Many, including the show's own Jamie Bamber (Lee "Apollo" Adama), thought that the unknown, mechanical nature of the Cylons had been their greatest asset, and that by stripping the mystery away, they had been weakened as enemies. While I understand this point of view, I personally disagree it with it.