Category Archives: TV and Film

The #BuffyRewatch is part of a big birthday week @tordotcom

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Tor Shorts2My wife, my niece and my brother-in-law all have birthdays this week, and so does Tor.com. To celebrate, the latter has collected all of its original fiction into one great big free download of love. You can get it here by registering at the site. It includes three stories by me: “The Cage,” “Among the Silvering Herd,” and “Wild Things.”

Back in Sunnydale, meanwhile, it’s Halloween, and Dawn’s feeling all the way frisky, if you know what I mean.

Bring on the Trio in the #BuffyRewatch

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slayerWe get our first good look at Andrew, Jonathan and Warren on “Life Serial” this week on the Buffy Rewatch. I call it “World’s Silliest Jobs, Slayer Edition.”

An excerpt: Even the Trio has noticed, by now, that our Slayer’s a bit unfocused.
That doesn’t stop Jonathan from taking up his magic bone and tossing Buffy into a service industry version of the film Groundhog Day. Warren and Andrew are delighted because this gives them a chance to talk about Star Trek: TNG and the X-Files episodes that also riffed on this idea of, as they call it, looping.

On a personal note, yesterday marked my 52nd day in the Toronto version of Chez Dua and the first day when Canada Post actually sent someone to our building with mail. That’s right, folks–I no longer have a two hour round trip to Leslieville each week just to see if RONA has sent me snail spam.

Irrelevant bonus question: can anyone think of a reason why I shouldn’t freeze ricotta for later use?

Things get nerdtastic on the #BuffyRewatch on @tor.com

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slayerOne hundred short days ago, I was in Vancouver, working to finish the draft of a novel, and my plan for this week was to go to San Francisco and see my cousin. We had Monterey Bay Aquarium plans, and San Francisco Opera plans. It was all very exciting.

(And then I was gonna come back to Vancouver and just kinda keep living there and start working on something else! I had no idea things were about to change.)

That trip got put on indefinite hold April 1st, and so much has happened since then! But this week is nevertheless my only real vacation opportunity for awhile, because of the teaching schedule, so I’ve been slacking in various ways. Including not getting the weekly Buffy Rewatch announcement posted until now.

But it’s up! It’s happening! And it’s called… We Three Nerds of Sunnydale Are.

Buffy’s back from the dead and ready to rewatch on @tordotcom

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This week’s rewatch covers “After Life,” from Season 6. It’s a Jane Espenson episode and so, despite the bleakness, it has its moments of funny.

Telewitterings: The Killing, S3

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Somehow I didn’t mind all that much that the first two seasons of The Killing were slow-moving and, in their way, low on plot. I find Mirielle Enos fascinating and once he finally won me over, I became inexplicably charmed by Joel Kinnamon too. Plus, Michelle Forbes! She was incredible. As a bonus, Michelle was screen-married to Brent Sexton, who was awesome on Life and who deserved a meaty role, despite his total lack of what are sometimes called leading man looks.

Kelly was not so engaged, and so S3 has been quietly piling, like snow drifting up, in our DVR queue. Then, Thursday, she had to go to a work retreat. So I watched it. I watched four episodes. And Holy Carp.

Okay. First, the casting mancakes. Hugh Dillon will always be Joe Dick to me, and well-beloved at that. I heart him. So–Joe Dick as, well, a dickly prison warden. He is still a thoroughly charismatic gargoyle.

And as his minion? The Chief from Battlestar Galactica, otherwise known as Aaron Douglas.

But wait! Buy now and instead of a set of steak knives you get Elias Koteas! (Of TMNT, and The Prophecy, that Elias Koteas. Many of the actors I love are undeserving, or at least hard done by in terms of the roles they get offered.) As this season’s love interest for Linden, if the foreshadowing hasn’t misled me.

And as a special extra bonus, they’ve thrown in the current reigning Olympic Gold Medalist in Scenery Chewing (Team USA), Gregg Henry. So far he’s kept his teeth off the desks at Seattle Homicide, but he’s eyeing those desk chairs hungrily.

What about women? Yes, it has some. They are far less recognizable to me, since most of them are teens. But I have been amazed by Bex Taylor Klaus, who plays the butch street kid Bullet.

And that’s the other thing: street kid. The Killing has a big ‘examining the family torn apart by homicide’ schtick going, and this year, having wrung Forbes and Sexton dry, they are doing a microscopic examination of a chosen family of street kids, some of whom are in the sex trade. This pairs well with the kind of angsty human drama the series tends to inflict on its crime victims. They’re young, vulnerable, constantly at risk and often their only–very frail–safety net is each other.

Finally, in The Killing, Seattle is played by my former stomping ground, Vancouver. The kid gang spends major time in a walkway I call The Cage, in old Strathcona. The Cage turns up on TV almost as often as Aaron Douglas–it’s that striking, visually. I used to walk through it every Tuesday on my way downtown. I know I have a photo of it, but I’m having trouble finding it, sorry.

So. Anyway. I inhaled those four episodes on Thursday and I’m hungry for more.