officetemp

I think Bill was lying when he told Tess that the fellow dreamer she had been interacting with (during that session where she was given an assignment) was "fine," especially since there have been at least two deaths now connected with what happened during [all] the dreaming periods. I'm having difficulty differentiating between Tess' dream experiences and waking experiences. She does unusual things during her waking moments, so I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that everything we've see with her so far turns out to have been dreams. Burton and Taka's dream sequences seem to be more straightforward and more obviously dream experiences. Agreed. I think "The Woman in Red"--as she's described in various places--is either some invention out of Burton's head or someone that he met while he was traveling and doesn't see from day to day in the waking world. (From certain angles, her face kind of reminds me of Juliette Lewis, actually.) Taka and the psychiatrist/psychologist? Way to end a "get acquainted" day. Though what does it have to do with his mother? I really don't like the idea of them pairing up. I've only had one lucid dream that I can recall and that was more than 20 years ago. It's almost like watching a movie while being in the same movie simultaneously, for me anyway. With this show, whenever I see more characters appearing, I'm always wondering whether we've seen them in previous episodes. Hard to keep all the characters straight, especially since they may have spent only a few seconds on screen before. [By the way, USA Network's Falling Water website: www.usanetwork.com/falling water . Contains show info, photos, recaps. The recaps seem to be as much promotional as informative, however. One of the recaps does confirm, however, that Tess' sister is the Green Sneakers girl's therapist.]

Yeah, the new stuff just sounds like bad pop music. I love Western Swing! Bob Wills, Asleep at the Wheel. . . Also, Lyle Lovett. [Yeah, I know: off-topic. I'll go back to my corner now. . .]

Yeah, hoping that they're able to resurrect Kurt Reptilian Alien. The interactions with Don White Alien and Jeff Gray Alien are some of the best parts of the show. I like how they all talk just like regular dudes. Liked the way Ozzie evaluated his potential sponsors in his notebook: "Crazy. . . Crazy. . . Crazy. . . "

I'm going to have to rewatch all three episodes to try to make some sense out of things. I think the episodes are available on the Falling Water website (USA Network).

Wyatt [re: Rufus]: "He's a smart guy--he'll figure it out." [On how to make the aqueduct escape plan work.] WRONG!! Should have been: Wyatt (as he helps Rufus position the grenades so as not to collapse the aqueduct when they blow): "Told ya these would come in handy!" I got the impression during the whole episode that the garrison was on the verge of being overrun by Santa Ana's troops at any moment. Yet, here's Wyatt--instead of reacting immediately and proactively--zoning out, staring into the middle distance and walking down memory lane whenever someone says something has to be done urgently. After we learned what had happened to his old unit, I'm kinda wondering if Wyatt's assignment to this mission was strictly a reputation choice--given that he had been awarded a medal and all--by people in positions of authority who really didn't bother to find out anything about him. (Also, I don't know about y'all, but he sure don't talk like a Texan.) I want Lucy's Alamo costume. I thought it was so flattering on her, especially the hat. Actually the costumes for all three of them were pretty cool. They seemed to be too clean and neat, however, for people who had been traveling--on foot, no less--supposedly for days on end. I think the whole time-stream is hopelessly polluted now and the reality they eventually end up with will be something with which no one is satisfied yet something for which they'll all have to settle, just to stop the madness. So Connor Mason is also being pressured by Rittenhouse. Could Rittenhouse be some kind of shadowy, rogue cabal within the government itself? Could the government people overseeing the Stop Flynn mission be working for Rittenhouse? Maybe Lucy, Wyatt and Rufus were chosen because they are the ones who need to be able to remember everything that happened prior to all the time line alterations.

Dialogue: ". . . we need to enlarge the opening!" Me: "The grenades! The grenades!! The freaking grenades!!!"

I'm in. Didn't like that the reptilian was hit by the car, though. Liked how the he, the Grey and the White interacted in the space ship and wanted to see more of the character.

I wasn't paying enough attention to see if the sister was the same person or not. But wasn't Tess's sister in the country with the rest of the family party when Taka visited the psychologist/psychiatrist at her apartment? (I really disliked the shrink's demeanor toward Taka, by the way. Hated her superior attitude toward him and the way she kept analyzing him as a means of trying to intimidate him.)

Thank you!

I'm wondering what happened to John Wilkes Booth, since Flynn knocked him down in the street before going to kill Lincoln himself. In the original time line, Booth died 12 days after the assassination at the end of the manhunt for him--after he was shot and paralyzed. I don't think Flynn caused any injury when he knocked Booth down. Did his co-conspirators implicate him in the assassination plot, was he arrested and did he stand trial? If he was convicted, was he executed? Or did he manage to elude capture and flee out west someplace and live out his life in obscurity under an assumed name? Did he have any descendants?

Just some random comments: The wardrobe room scene was something I would have expected to have occurred in the Pilot episode, but maybe the wardrobe room didn't exist until after one of the earlier missions. I'm assuming that the formulae that Rufus jotted down in von Braun's notebook were the calculations that enabled the time machine to be designed and constructed. I would think that von Braun's possession of such information would be much more significant than the novels that Ian Fleming chose to write in the 1960's. And how twisty would it be if that notebook with the notations in Rufus' handwriting were discovered among von Braun's papers after von Braun's death? (And that Mason industries acquired the notebook and Rufus' notes were what led to Mason Industries' development of the time machine before Rufus was even recruited to work on the project. . ..) Lucy's demand that they get her sister back is pretty problematic. It's not as if Lucy's sister had been plucked out of the timeline and stowed in some extra-dimensional stasis chamber outside the space-time continuum by some omnipotent time-traversing entity (a Time Lord, if you will) so she could be kept in storage until the moment when she could serve a useful purpose. Lucy would have to pretty much become a Time Lord herself to isolate the occurrence that would most likely lead to her sister being conceived in the first place. If Lucy succeeded in ensuring that her sister was born, then she'd also have to make sure that sister would survive all the obstacles--anything as mundane as the flu or as random as a traffic accident--standing in the way of sister making it to adulthood. And they've already altered the timeline four times, so on which event do you concentrate to ensure that sister is restored? Or do you go back to before the Lincoln assassination to pre-empt everything that follows? Speaking of journals, shouldn't Lucy have started her journal by now? She'd have to have it on/near her person at all times to make sure it didn't change when they altered the past. Unless, of course, she has perfect recall/eidetic memory and wrote everything down once the whole situation with Rittenhouse was/is resolved. Also, when Lucy writes the journal, does she write things only from her point of view, or does she also chronicle Wyatt's and Rufus' recollections of what happened during each mission? Also, why does the show not depict any type of debriefing after each mission? I thought it was pretty pitiful that the Nazi's special rocket was set up on a patch of ground that was part dirt/part grass and hardly even looked level. I would have thought that they'd at least have a reinforced concrete pad from which to launch the rocket.

By chance, I happened to see the second half of Episode 3 this morning when USA rebroadcast the episode. Noticed in Taka's dream that the green sneakers girl exchanged her green sneakers for black booties before she went upstairs to the bar/restaurant. Also, those faceless creatures were wearing green sneakers, too. Then, the Belgian Ambassador to the UN got up and put himself between Faceless and Tess when Tess entered the restaurant (pub?). So, I guess the Belgian Ambassador perceived and/or recognized and/or knew that the green sneakers cult is dangerous or a threat? And the green sneakers girl changed her shoes so she could get close enough to the ambassador to kill him without him thinking she was a danger? Also, why is Burton's coworker both a customer and the bartender at Pub Dream? ("I'm allergic to peanuts!"--that could be another drinking game.)

So confused!! With the last episode, I thought that things were finally starting to be explained. This episode, another trip back to puzzlement land. Okay, so members of the green sneakers cult were both the people who were found dead and the people who blew up the house across the street. Was Taka's mom a member of the cult before she went catatonic? If Mom Taka had been a member, then was the green sneaker girl there in the same facility just to keep an eye on Mom Taka? Was the musician who made that extremely rare and expensive LP and later died horribly also a member of the cult and maybe that's why Taka's mom was in the album liner photo? So the green sneakers also are capable of lucid dreaming. And they combine and scatter the ashes of their dead in some clearing somewhere out in the woods. And the ashes later find their way to sprinkle themselves on Tess. Why doesn't Taka have a partner, especially since he's investigating such a high-profile and potentially dangerous case of multiple deaths. Very strange. Is chronicling your child's life so extensively in the way that Tess' mom did/is doing a sign of motherly love? Or is Mom using her own children as study/test subjects for a future publication? What's going on between Tess and her agent? It seemed at times that the agent wanted more than a professional relationship with Tess. Feel bad for Burton having to clean up after everyone's messes. Nothing seems to rattle him, though. Okay: Alien conquest plan? Sinister Government experimentation and manipulation? Or control of the human race by more highly evolved, previously unnoticed earth life? Whatever it is, this show can get really creepy at times. Those faceless men(?), creatures(?) in the dreams are really scary. I'm glad that the protagonists have at least become aware of each other so early in the series, even if it's only within the context of the dreams. I hope that they meet in the waking world soon. The bar/restaurant seems to be a safe zone between the dream world and the waking world. (Not for the ambassador, though.) Of course, everything that happens in the show could just be a dream.

Ah! Quite the condemnation. However, a 'dumbed-down, painfully unfunny, screwball "joke-of-the-week" sitcom' was not what I had in mind in my previous post. (In general, I heartily dislike the current sitcoms because most of what goes on in those sitcoms are the characters either insulting each other or trying to get over on each other or both.) What I did have in mind is a thoughtfully-written, thought-provoking, intelligent hour-long comedy that gets the scientific details reasonably believable and the historical details correct. No slapstick, no overtly physical comedy, no laugh track. Let the scripts and the stories and the direction and the acting and the dialogue lead to laugh-out-loud moments when appropriate and to more subtle bits of humor in other scenes. Indeed. The show's IQ could stand to gain upwards of 20-30 points.

I'm mostly watching this series for Will Yun Lee ("Taka") because I liked him in Witchblade. This show is fairly interesting, I think. I like the way the dream imagery is portrayed, because, to me, it does kind of have the randomness that dreams tend to have. The only thing is that I'm never sure what's a dream and what's not. I'm still not convinced that the guy shooting himself in the first episode was a "real world" occurrence or not. Also, wondering what those people who blew up the house are up to. (Actually, the show kind of puts me in mind of Ursula K. LeGuin's novel, The Lathe of Heaven.) Will probably stick around for a few more episodes, at least.

Even though this series is supposed to be a drama, I would really love it if the showrunners decided to turn this series into an off-the-wall science fiction screwball comedy, similar to the type of stuff that science fiction author Connie Willis writes. The scriptwriters would have to be extremely skillful, however, because really effective comedy is much more difficult to write than mediocre drama. One of the running gags could be that Lucy's fiance is a different person every time she returns from a mission. Think of the guest star cameo possibilities! And the world really isn't in danger of coming to an end--things just get more and more absurd every time the team goes back and tries to fix things. . ..

No problem! All they have to do is dress up in Nazi SS uniforms and speak English with fake German accents. Hey, it worked on Hogan's Heroes!

Yeah, in the same way that Hodgins just helps himself to the stuff in the exhibits at the "Jeffersonian" in Bones whenever he wants to conduct an experiment with an obscure piece of historical equipment (which is always[???!!!] functional, by the way) or has to generate power during an outage or when the interns need dress-up costumes to attend Brennan's wedding. Re: Lucy's fiance--maybe he's not a Rittenhouse plant. Maybe he's Rittenhouse. (If this series ends up being all about Lucy and her Family Drama, I'll be very annoyed.)

Still no word from my local PBS station on when or if they intend to start showing Season 4. In the meantime, I happened upon A Place to Call Home and the actor who plays Munro plays a good-guy doctor in that series. I have to say that I prefer him playing a good guy--the character is much less cartoonish than Munro turned out to be. Maybe that's why they eliminated the character in the first place. Doesn't it seem as if quite a few of the actors on Dr. Blake are moving on to other series? I'd love it if Lawson came back.

Yeah, that's what got me--what is it with Matt Frewer, atom bombs and Vegas, anyway? First The Stand, now Timeless! Speaking of miniseries, I think Timeless would have worked better as a miniseries with a definite beginning, middle and end. As someone mentioned previously, the whole series' continuation hinges on the team not being able to stop Flynn. The actor that plays Lucy's surprise fiance just played an undercover detective infiltrating a white-supremacist organization in Major Crimes. Guess he's spending his off-time between seasons on this show. I watched the Pilot episode attentively, Episode 2 peripherally, this one kinda-sorta. Time-travel stories give me headaches and I can't get over that Flynn is depending on Lucy's journal to guide his moves, since one would expect that the contents of the journal would change with each trip that they all make. Not to mention that Wyatt has got to be the most ineffectual Delta Force person ever. When Lucy started out her little talk with her fiance with: [paraphrasing] "I met a woman at work today and I realized. . .", I was thinking that the fiance might have thought that Lucy was going to break up with him because she had realized that she was gay and the fiance was so sweet to her because he was just so relieved when she just said that she needed time to think things over. Anybody else?

Thanks, Pickles. So, it's been about a month since the local PBS station showed the final episode of Season 3 here, and, so far, no word on when/if they plan to show Season 4. In the meantime, they've been filling the timeslot with Rosemary & Thyme and, in the last two weeks, Shetland (which I like, by the way). I agree that the the Season 3 finale was jam-packed with the show trying to tie up the loose plot lines. As with everyone else, I was glad that Munro was exposed as a bad guy (associating with people known for their questionable activities, right?). As usual, though, there were a couple of things that were a little confusing to me. Was Hobart just pretending to be Munro's ally the whole time? I saw the look on his face after the Munro/Lawson confrontation and it seemed as if Hobart was glad that Munro had been toppled. Also, I'm assuming that the phone call (a few episodes back) when Mattie overheard Charlie saying, "Yes, I think he trusts me," wasn't from Munro in regards to Blake (as it seemed at the time) but actually from Lawson with regards to Munro. The whole thing with Blake's mother was strange, I thought. The way everyone kept talking about her, it seemed as if all the men in Ballarat were in love with her or had been at one time or another. And, I was so disappointed when Ashby was killed because I liked the character and wouldn't have minded seeing him in future episodes. I thought the depiction of the Masons with their secretive practices was a little bit on the stereotypical side--Masons being routinely portrayed as this diabolical organization with ambitions of world domination, their presence at the highest levels of government, etc. Blake getting on the bus with Jean headed to Adelaide seemed a little bit soap-opera-ish. Hope they settle that plot line soon! Really looking forward to Season 4. Hope we don't have to wait too long before it's broadcast here.

I can't remember whether Maddox said "a year" or "two years." Either way, not sure if her marriage is not in trouble. With the discoveries last episode of her tattoos and her familiarity with S&M bars/clubs, then her showing up for work in this episode hungover plus the frequent mentions of her "Girls' Nights," she seems to not feel any type of constraints, regardless of her marital status. May provide quite a lot of material for a new series, though such a series would be quite a bit darker in tone, I think, than Lewis has been throughout its run. DHDancer, you and maladroit are right! It is the same shirt he wore in the first episode of the entire series!

I was so afraid that someone--Lewis or Hathaway or both--was going to be killed off because of a mail bomb. When Maddox was running through the station after the second explosion, I kept thinking, "Well, this is it." Glad I was wrong, especially after Lewis had said that they were going to have to carry him out of the station in order to get him to leave. (I have no doubt that if this had been a US series, someone would have been killed off.) I really liked it when Hathaway forced Lewis to reconsider his choices re: staying because he was afraid of losing his resurrected career vs possibly losing Hobson forever just because he didn't want to put his consulting detective position aside. Happy that he chose in the way that he did and thought that it was pretty decent of the new chief to tell him that they'd be happy to have him back. That flowered shirt was a little jarring, though. Don't know how I'd feel about having a Hathaway series; I'm kind of intrigued, though, at the possibility of a Maddox series if she ever attains her DI rank. However, which may or may not make for some interesting character studies depending on her issues. Kind of feel sorry for husband Tony. A very subdued series finale.

Thanks, Ceindreadh. Watched Season 3, Episode 6, "Women and Children" last Saturday night and Re: "Women and Children"--Since she's one of my favorite characters, I was glad that Alice Harvey had a lot of on-camera time; however, I found some of the writing/direction decisions kind of puzzling. Good to know. Also, just a general question not really connected to the episode, but just curious: should I continue putting spoiler tags on stuff? This series is pretty much all over the place, as far as which season is being shown, depending on which country is broadcasting the episodes. It doesn't bother me to read spoilers because I intend to watch every season eventually anyway, but some viewers would rather not know what's going to happen in future episodes/seasons. Any opinions, anyone?

Yes, I really dislike it when the big baddie goes around all arrogant and sneering condescendingly at Our Heroes because the Baddie is so obviously superior intellectually to everyone else in the whole wide world. It's the kind of character that makes the viewers (or this viewer, at least) hope fervently that something extremely horrible happens to the Baddie by the end of the episode and he/she finally gets what they deserve. It made me appreciate how Hathaway was so unemotionally non-reactive to Lawrie during the session in the interrogation room. Hathaway just kind of expressionlessly gazed at Lawrie with kind of a bored look on his (Hathaway's) face instead of being baited and responding as if his buttons were being pushed. I was halfway expecting the female psychologist (psychiatrist?) to be killed by that awful student when they showed him going up the steps to her office. Wondering how Morse would have reacted to the pork scratchings/pork rinds. Love Maddox and felt so sorry for husband Tony. Poor guy.