"We're gonna have a TV party tonight!"

(Which reminds me, I haven't seen "Repo Man" in ages...)

Well, now that Blogger has finally let me on today, I can get around to recapping the "non-anime" on my "watched" list:

"Battlestar Galactica" -- The finale's tonight. Last week's episode opened with this sequence of events that was just mesmerizing. It's such a fun-to-watch show, and now that I've got the hi-res downloads, it looks good too! At any rate, probably the best sci-fi show in a long time. At least since the time when Stargate SG-1 still held my attention; it lost me a couple of years ago for some reason.

And speaking of sci-fi, the new "Dr. Who" episode was readily accessible via Bittorrent. I used to watch a lot in both highschool and college, but hadn't seen anything but the really awful made-for-American-TV-movie since maybe 1989. Well, it's still a bit of a campy show, but entertaining enough that if I can find a reliable source of torrents, I'll try to keep up with it. At least for nostalgia's sake.

"Carnivale" -- the season 2 finale. Well, I mentioned before that the second season seemed to be lacking a little bit of the "edginess" the first season had. The Ben Hawkins character just got too "wordy", I think. Maybe too "clever". But it was still a visual treat of a show, and had some of the best surround-sound atmospherics I've heard yet. And the story, while a bit watered-down, was still far more interesting than most dreck on TV. I've heard it called "Twin Peaks-lite", which I guess is fair enough. No word on if there'll be a season 3, but they left it on enough of a "WTF?" note that there'll be fans pestering HBO constantly until they commit one way or another.

Finally, another HBO goodie: "Deadwood". Where "Carnivale" got weaker in the 2nd season, "Deadwood" gets amazingly stronger. The dialogue in this show is an absolute wonder to behold! I called it "curse-tastic" before, and yes, the density of "colorful metaphors you wouldn't want your children saying" is quite thick indeed. But it's so, how can I put it... poetic the way it's delivered. I mean really, there's actual iambic pentameter in some of the exchanges. The cadence of speech, the twist of vulgar and formal language -- it's like some mischeviously lewd English-language Ph. D. was given carte blanche to write a western any way he or she wanted to! It's funny, it's brutal, it's kind of gross, and it's absolutely delightful. Word is that it was just renewed for a 3rd season, so there'll be plenty of chances to see it (and a lot of DVD boxsets when it's done).