CSI: it's all about the ladies. And the serial killers.

I was going to make a "Who" joke but they've all been done before- SPOILERS FOR CSI SEASON 1O EPS WHICH HAVE AIRED ON FIVE IN THE UK


New year, new season of CSI on Five. I wish I could say I was anticipating the start of season ten with excitement, but somehow it's just worn off a little over the years. It's so hard to keep a show like this fresh and exciting and within the realms of reality after all the many, many cases the Vegas grave shift have tackled over the years. To its credit, the minds behind CSI have realised this, and continue to include tantalising character development threads behind the gory case-of-the-week action to keep the audience hanging in there.

Season ten opens by moving Laurence Fishburne's Professor Langston from bumbling newbie to fully trained-up and newly-promoted CSI level 2. Hurrah! There was only so much of Ray getting his tie in the corpse I was willing to put up with. This also allows the show to instead explore Ray's character, starting with his relationship with his violent father and his concern that he may have inherited the same traits. In this respect, Ray has become a perfect alternative to Grissom, lending a quiet depth and tension to every scene. Oh, and did you see him kick that guy through the glass wall in the season opener? Yeah, that was cool.

Catherine is struggling to fill Grissom's shoes as head of the grave shift, whilst Nick gets to step up as the second longest standing member of the team. Fortunately for the bland twins, they're supported by the ever watchable Greg, the deliciously snarky Hodges and my new favourite CSI lady, Wendy, who will hopefully soon graduate from narrative tool to real cast member.

My favourite thing about season ten so far though has to be that Sara is back. I love Sara. I missed Sara. I know everyone loves Grissom, but Sara was the best female character on a police procedural. I could relate to her. She was strong and opinionated, and throughout her time as cast regular she struggled with a crush on her boss, an inability to relate to her coworkers, a lonely lifestyle, alcoholism, and being pinned under a car in the desert with a broken arm.



Mostly I loved Sara's interaction with Catherine. As the two women on the team, they had a relationship that seemed so much more real that the Grissom-as-father-figure theme that was the main thrust of the male characters' interaction. Sara and Catherine initially held each other at a suspicious arm's length, butting heads frequently over their styles of working. Later on, as they worked together, they developed a respect for each other as professionals that became a trust and a friendship. In the two-part season 7 opener, when Catherine awakes in a motel room suspecting she has been the victim of a date rape, she calls Sara in to help her investigate, and avoids telling her male coworkers. Right or wrong, this is a reaction and a relationship that I can believe in.

CSI might not be the most liberal thing on television (there's a fair amount of stereotypical evil women murderers and swaggering black drug dealers propping up the plots) but it drip-feeds character development in a way that keeps me watching. Not to mention that the trend towards serial killer arcs in recent seasons (the Miniature Killer was brilliant) helps to keep me tuned in. This year's Dr Jekyll, tying up a corpse's intestine in a bow, in wonderfully macabre! I can't wait to find out more.

Why I'm okay that Dollhouse is dead

This is a somewhat controversial viewpoint for a self confessed Whedonite, I know, but I'm not sorry about the cancellation of Dollhouse. If you don't mind spoilers for season one, I shall explain.

Firstly, I understand that it was meant to be uncomfortable viewing. I get that the show was about abuse, and prostitution, and slavery, and many other uncomfortable things. I like that they were exploring themes about attitudes to women's bodies, and that they made episodes that dealt with rape, and with loss, and with the struggle for independance from a force that controls your very mind. It was interesting. It was exciting.

It was seriously misogynistic. If you're going to make a show that is at it's heart about a group of women who are stripped of their free will and turned into sex toys, you are treading a fine line between showing this for what it is- a company trading in sex fantasies, but an ugly truth under the surface, that these women are enslaved- and revelling in the fantasy. I felt that Dollhouse fell wide of the mark, and as a result we spent more time being invited to look at Eliza Dushku's body parts than to consider the problems with the concept. Try watching a few eps and counting the number of upskirt shots, or times when her character needs to change on screen, or when the camera pulls back to show us that yes, that revealing outfit does indeed show off her naked bum cheeks. There is a difference between the character who is intentionally sexy in her sex-toy mode, and the camera giving us gratuitous shots of her arse. One of them is plot. The other is exploitation. Watching this show, I felt that the Eliza herself was the one who had been turned into a porn-doll for the viewer's enjoyment, and I felt myself feeling a little bit sick for her.



Joss's superwomen have always been sexy. The short skirts of Buffy and the kicking-ass-in-a-pretty-dress River and all the women in between. But they were sexy, they weren't being actively perved over by the camera. It didn't feel this gratuitous. If anything, it is more important for the camera to seem an impartial observer in a world where the main character is a personality-less drone for a large part of the time, and one where the other characters mostly act on the assumption that it is fine and normal to brainwash and rape young women. If the camera seems to be colluding... well, it sort of undermines any attempt to counter the "rape and slavery okay" world view.

I really wanted to like it. Especially after the amazing Epitaph One, and a good few eps of Season 2. But I can't get over this queasy feeling that the show has already contradicted it's message too strongly in the first Season to ever feel like a feminist endeavour. It's not empowering. It's inviting us to be turned-on by women who have had all their power removed. It's a fetish about strong women made weak and abused, not weak women made strong, and I'm over it.

A splishy splashy holiday...

Hello blog, it's been a while. A while in which I mostly had a life when I wasn't watching Star Trek films and working.

I have crawled back onto the internet though, and mostly because the new seasons of EVERYTHING are starting again. Supernatural has embarked on it's fifth (and final?) season which promises to be quite theological again, with the trademark gore, bromance, and dorky references (season two sees Dean make a flippant comment about a pit-stop at Mount Doom, for instance. Where does he find the time between saving the world from demons to see all these fantasy films?) which make it the best genre show on TV at present.

Sci-fi is busting out all over the local multiplex too, with the beautifully old-school Moon (reminded me of Sunshine only with more Sam Rockwell) being followed by District 9. The latter turned out to be extremely... satisfying. A thinky opener followed by some The Fly style horror and an action movie ending that left me thinking, for some reason, of Men in Black but with less slapstick. Prawn porn which I totally loved from start to finish. And this week I hope to see Surrogates with Bruce Willis (who hasn't left the house since he can't remember when, but seems to retain his lightening quick action-hero reflexes all the same, which is lucky).

I am at home at the moment, squinting at my own skin to see if I can find evidence of a tan. I just got back from a trip to Croatia, where I spent a lot of time asleep on a beach, and jumping out of my skin when fish bumped into my legs in the sea... I'm a bit of a pussy when it comes to swimming.



Absolute highlight? Going white-water rafting with six enormous Slovenian firemen, who didn't speak a word of English. This was in Omis, (see photo) which used to be a pirate fortress in the gorge made by the Cetina River. My lovely friend Gemma, which whom I was on holiday, was all for doing some rafting down the gorge, and since this was supposed to be the best way to see it, I was rather up for it too. So we went to see a lady offering trips, who said that if we could go right that second, and fill her boat, we could go half price. Uh, provided we didn't tell anyone she was giving us the deal. Dodgy? You bet, but we went anyway.

I was wearing a skirt, which I figured was an atrocious idea, so I went next door to this little touristy shop to see if I could pick up some shorts. The girl there didn't speak any English, but she gave me to understand that she had only one pair in the whole shop, which were some white cotton kids shorts. Desperate not to have to do water sports in my underwear, I took them. They turned out to fit (the perks of being titchy) but were so short that Kylie would have been too embarrassed to wear them in public. My arse was hanging out, but it was all I had, so I went rafting in my hotpants.

The Slovenians were lovely, in a rugby-player way, with our Croatian guide acting as occasional interpreter (sometimes, when they were laughing in a rather robust way and looking at us, he feigned an inability to find the correct words in English and had the decency to look rather embarrassed. Bless). It came as no surprise to Gemma and I to discover they were firemen. We seem to stumble upon firemen in every conceivable situation, which is quite a handy skill to have.

Rafting itself was brilliant. I managed to only inhale river water once, which was pretty good going, and completely avoided falling out of the boat. In fact, I was very impressed with this fact, as the guide was sweet but somewhat patronising. There was a lot of "don't worry girls, I'll put you near me so I can catch you" bullshit, which was well intentioned but quite amusing, seeing as I have never worried about my balance or grip in these situations (years of horse riding and some kayak and sailing experience mean I'm not afraid of failing either) and Gemma used to navigate rapids on a kayak during her days as an outdoor ed instructor. We kept this to ourselves though, and just gave each other amused looks across the raft.

We were also told that it was great for us to go with these firemen, as we wouldn't have to do much paddling. It turned out the guys couldn't paddle for shit and the guide had to keep telling them to watch us, and do it like we were doing it. Oh dear.

Anyway, during one particularly exciting set of rapids the boat tipped and started to flip. I managed to slide into the bottom where I would be safe, as did Gemma, who had to throw herself upwards to make it, whilst the Slovenian firemen hit the water and floated downstream. Cue much hilarity from our guide, who had us help him steer the raft to catch them before they hit the next lot of rapids, and some jokes about how the pretty little girls were considerably better at this than the bit strapping men.

During one set of rapids we missteered round a rock and I was slammed bodily against a tree. Which HURT, and caused me to squeal in surprise and pain, for which I was roundly mocked. I carried on paddling though!

There was a wonderful calm section through a forest, where I felt like I was in that bit in The Fellowship where they paddle down river from Lothlorien. Gemma informed me I was a massive geek, but I knew this already. Another slow slide through a canyon-like section of the gorge with sheer rock walls broken by the occasional waterfall was particularly impressive.

At the end of the trip, the Slovenian firemen drove us back to town, squished in the back of their van, making cracks about the improvements we'd all made in European relations thanks to being impressively composed English chicks who out-paddled them.

This week I also devoured Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box as one of my holiday reads. It's amazing, a horror novel that is subtly scary and actually deserves to be called a page turner. I became an anti-social nightmare whilst reading this book. Also, I'm the kind of person who digs all the nerdy rock music references.

Supernatural: The Monster At The End Of This Book

It's been a little while, hasn't it blog? Well, I've been busy, and I'm still waiting on the extra RAM I ordered to make my beautiful Dell run at a halfway decent speed (1gb with Vista, are they joking?).

In this time, though, I have been watching an awful lot of good TV. Today I shall mostly be spoiling for Supernatural, up to and including episode 18 of season 4. Consider that fair warning.

Supernatural is by far the best genre TV show currently in production. It may well be the best TV show on air full stop. I just can't fault it. Okay that's not entirely true, I can fault on it's epic white male bias (women and characters of colour are mainly evil or they die. Fail, SPN, epic fail) but for storytelling this show is top. And each series just keeps getting better!

Season four has been spectacular so far. From the opening revelation that angels exist in the SPNverse, to the latest episode in which we discover the existence of prophets that receive the word of God, the show keeps coming up with exciting new moments where it could potentially jump the shark. But it doesn't. The writers make it work! And they do it by never forgetting that essentially their show is about two brothers with enormously depressing and fucked-up lives.

As funny as the "our lives are books, and there are Supernatural fans, and they slash us" opening was, I was a teensy bit scared that they weren't going to make it work in the context of the show. How was this going to be explained in a cheese-free way? In the end, I absolutely LOVED the prophets angle. The show considered how difficult it would be to live your life with too much knowledge about your destiny, and finally went to a really dark place with Chuck deciding to kill himself rather than be a helpless observer of the Winchesters' (apparently not so cheery) fate, only to be told by the increasingly creepy Zachariah that he had no choice.

Despite this doom and gloom, Supernatural always brings the comedy and this episode had more than most. I have to say, I loved the "I'm the Prophet Chuck!" line, and "M Night level of douchiness" as well as the Winchesters discovering the existence of slash fiction about themselves.

In fact the postmodern nod to fandom was quite touching really. Kripke keeps an eye on his fans, obviously, and validates them with a lovable piss-taking on screen. Compare this to the hatred of fanfiction you get from the likes of Anne Rice. Yeah, Kripke loves us. Also, commenting on the terrible writing of episodes like Bugs? Genius. And true. We've come a long way since those days, thankfully!

Castiel had an interesting role in the episode too, developing his relationship with Dean and seemingly showing more disobedience than he ever has before.

Some minor plot niggles. If Lilith wants to stop bringing about the apocalypse because she knows she won't survive it, why would she decide to make a deal with the Winchesters? Surely that's not much of a deal if it's something she actually WANTS to do anyway? So now she got turned down, does she intend to sacrifice herself to free Lucifer to spite the boys? Makes no sense.

I'm loving this season so much! I can't wait to see what the horrific prophecy Chuck had will be. I heart the Winchesters, and I heart watching them suffer, in a really sadistic way. I agree with the publisher lady, it's always best when they're crying.