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derryth

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  1. I've seen the film Rosewood, and wondered about that. It is on the creepy side. Loved the characters, hated the case. Maybe I just miss my favorite (cancelled) series so much, but I think they swiped or inverted a few themes and situations from Forever. Forever is the way to do this sort of series. I recall: There's a tough female cop with a Hispanic name, mourning the recent loss of her husband, who died in an exceedingly mundane way. The main character is a pathologist/medical examiner who is obsessed with death for personal reasons. He ends up "consulting" regularly on police cases. Rosewood's life situation is a reversal of Henry's. Henry cannot die and Rosewood could drop dead any second. The great Lorraine Toussaint. (Love how her character interacts with her daughter-in-law.) Problem is, there's just too much of this "genius consults with the police" stuff out there. I'll give it another week or two to see if the writing improves, and try to think that the writers loved Forever enough to rip off some of its themes.
  2. derryth

    Abe

    Our local TV station had a report on a real-life Abe, born in a train on the way to a death camp. Only he's not an orphan (his mother survived), and I don't think he has an immortal adopted father. No mention of a tatoo either. If you google Channel 3000 and do a search on Mark Olsky, you can see the video. I can't find a way to do a link. Here's the written story: {{MADISON, Wis. --It was an answer that would determine the fate of two lives. Rachel Friedman stood before Dr. Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Friedman had been sent to Auschwitz from her home in Lod, Poland. Mengele asked her a question that would decide if she lived or died. “He came up to my mother and asked her if she’s pregnant because pregnant women were just sent off to the gas chamber immediately,” said Mark Olsky, Friedman’s son. “But she knew by then why they were asking the question and she said no.” Rachel Friendman was pregnant, but only by a few weeks. Her husband, Monik Friedman, was shot and killed by a German soldier before boarding the train to Auschwitz. After Mengele was satisfied Rachel was not pregnant, she and three of her sisters were sent to a labor camp to make parts for Germany’s air force. With her sisters' help, Rachel was able to hide her pregnancy from the Nazis for months. The sisters gave Rachel some of their rations of food to keep her and the child healthy. Eight months they were sent to a concentration camp, the Nazis decided to close the factory where they were working. Germany was losing World War II and the air plane parts factory was no longer needed. The Nazis loaded Rachel and the other women into a train boxcar and sent them to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. But on the way to meet death, they met life. “I was born on the way to the death camp at Mauthausen,” Olsky said. The train trip to Mauthausen took 17 days and, without a calendar, no one is certain of Olsky’s true birth date. But a German guard who filled out the birth certificate made the choice for them. “Actually the date of April 20 was assigned by the German guard as a favor to my mother. April 20 was Hitler’s birthday. The German people were still celebrating his birthday as a great holiday,” Olsky said. The 17-day trip may have saved the life of every prisoner on that train. By the time their journey came to an end, the war was over. “When we arrived at Mauthausen on April 29, April 28 was when the gas chambers stopped working,” Olksy said. Within a few days, on May 5, U.S. soldiers liberated the Mauthausen death camp. Olsky went on to become a physician and moved to Madison in 1981. He has returned several times to visit Mauthausen and will do so again on the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. “It continues to be a sense of sadness. I wonder about the people that didn’t make it and what it would have been like to know them,” Olsky said. The story of his family's survival, and that of two other children born at Mauthausen, is the subject of a new book entitled, “Born Survivors,” written by Wendy Holden. The book is scheduled to be released on May 5, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen.}}
  3. Whoa! I thought I'd checked the TV Guide online listings for tonight. We had a marathon! I got home in time to catch the whole thing. They ran episodes 3, 4 and 6. ("The Fountain of Youth," "The Art of Murder" and "The Frustrating Thing About Psychopaths.") I wonder how the ratings will be. I don't know if it will help draw viewers, but I like what ABC chose to fill the schedule.
  4. I can't find anything about it in Wikipedia, but I fondly recall an Audrey Hepburn film, The Nun's Story, set between the world wars. Good movie. At one point her character was working in an insane asylum in The Netherlands. They treated a number of the more agitated female patients by keeping them for hours in very warm baths, which probably would take some of the fight out of them. The treatment was also depicted in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, set in about the same time period. The patients were kept in the tubs under a cover fastened down all around with just their heads sticking out. They thrashed and screamed, but this had to be more benevolent treatment than the mentally ill often received in earlier eras, or some later years, too. (In the 1940s and 1950s lobotomies were all the rage.) Not long after this, psychotropic drugs were introduced, providing symptom relief to many and doping others into submission. What Henry experienced was waterboarding, with no therapeutic rationale behind it. The problem was that Henry wasn't saying what the "doctor" wanted to hear. Maybe he was writing a book; it looked to me like a battle of wills. (Also, since this torture has been used so recently in the real world, the scene has more meaning to today's viewer.)
  5. At least two very positive things: 1) Henry didn't die in this episode. He's a little physically reckless, but not over the top. 2) Creepy immortal didn't call. Nice connection with the 1906 flashback. Back then people weren't so obsessed with youth because many were denied the privilege of growing old. I know that women dying in childbirth and high infant mortality figures into the stats, but at the start of the twentieth century, wasn't the average lifespan around forty? Fake Doctor Gardner was so dense, did Ukrainian girl really need to have bodies stolen? She could have come up with an easer substitute. OTOH, judging by first murder victim's abs, maybe the crap really worked before it at you brain. And eating infected tissue is an excellent way to catch a prion disease. BTW, what happened to dumped woman. The last we saw of her was at the party in the Hamptons where she was all confused and NOT drinking. Kind of left that one hanging. Loved Henry's reaction when Abe hit the extreme skateboard track, but there's no way Abe could pull that off. Abe is right; Henry needs someone to take care of him; perhaps Jo or Luke in future years. John on New Amsterdam had this all figured out. He's had scores of children over the centuries, and took them into his confidence once they were old enough to understand. Not only did they help him create his new identities, they helped him search for his true love. Maybe Henry can't have children; he could have been sterile all along, or he became so when he became immortal. Or maybe he's just afraid to create another person to love and lose.
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