In case you’re pretending to not be a nerd, DS9 stands for “draw out the opening credits as long as possible so we can save nine minutes worth of show production costs per episode.” ť What, are Trek fans going to complain about something being ponderous and dull? Yes.

The show is set aboard a space station that is also named Deep Space Nine. The station is partially a Benthamian hellhole, modeled on the utilitarian’s insane plans for building “panopticon” prisons because of his belief that the greatest possible aggregate utility would occur if he could stand in one place and watch dozens of people going to the bathroom at once. Also, it was critical that inmates know that they might be observed at anytime, but never know when they are being observed. True, the walls on DS9 are not transparent from the outside, but they might as well be. Anybody on the station at any time can just be like, “computer, locate Matt Cale.” And the computer will be like, “Lieutenant Cale is in the holsuite, sir. Heart rate is elevated though he seems to be laying still on his back. Probably because he is masturbating.” Nobody ever knocks because it would be a mostly empty gesture. Oh, also there is only one cop, but he can turn into anything and hide anywhere. Like, for example, a piece of furniture in your room or a glass of water in a restaurant could turn out to be a cop at any time. The authorities throw people in jail whenever they want for as long as they want and that jail cell is completely transparent and constantly under intimate observation unless the plot requires otherwise.

Somehow, DS9 is simultaneously an intergalactic bazaar where trafficking in both human beings and weapons of mass destruction is commonplace. There’s lots of drinking, gambling and fighting. Everyone acts like there’s a lot more sex than there really is. Overall it reminds me of the place where one of my favorite movies (Casino) is set, and where about 150 of my least favorite movies are set: Las Vegas. Controlled depravity under total surveillance. I would definitely go there for the holosuites and I would say that I was going to take the opportunity to fire a phaser off into space but then I’d never get around to it and then I would want to go home. In any case, I think it makes for the best premise of the franchise because the action comes to them more organically. Especially because DS9 is a point of strategic importance to various conflicts, so it saves them from having to be like, “for the 89th time, we’ve discovered a planet with a population of less advanced humanoids. The only question remaining is, will some sort of predicament arise where we have to decide if we should aid them with our technology, or will it turn out that they were actually super advanced god like creatures who will never be heard from again?”

Shatner and Mulgrew: Confrontational Sexism from Pudge, Rodriguez on Vimeo.

Captain:
We know what we like in our Star Trek Captains: grandiloquent, swashbuckling geniuses who are overly good at everything and never wrong, played by the most preposterous hams thespianry has to offer. Avery Brooks’ Commander/Captain/Emissary/The Sisko, whose side jobs include heading earth defense and Cajun and Southern cookin’ fits the bill. He’s not the intergalactic booty destroyer that Kirk was, but he does attract some of the finest sisters in the galaxy, all of whom have good hair. And when he’s not doing that, he is creating the entire universe and much of history with his imagination.

Really! At least two episodes put forward the theory that the universe of Star Trek is the story told by the Sisko’s counterpart, also played by Brooks, a frustrated black writer in the 1950s named Benny Russell who dreams of space ships and equality between races. For this, he is thrown into the nuthouse, but he completes the story on the walls of his rubber room, granting life to billions. The evidence for this theory extends beyond the those episodes that posit it. It would also explain why Sisko has a fascination with the long forgotten sport of baseball. Also, the writer in the story is kind of a hack, which explains the show’s dialog and stuff like that and it makes sense that he would think up a protagonist’s name by doing something like, “Well, he’s a master soul food chef… Crisco… Cisco. Better make it Sisko.” Plus, if Benny was wrong, how do you explain his knowledge of the scientific trends of the future? And if the world of DS9 is imagined into existence by by Benny Russell in the 1950s that would mean he also correctly imagined all of the historical events mentioned between the time he lived and the time DS9 is set. Especially those that actually occurred between the time of Benny and the the time the fictional TV show DS9 was filmed, which probably means he even imagined your birth into existence from inside the TV. Therefore, I recommend believing the Benny Russell scenario because there’s kind of a Pascal’s wager thing going on where if he is wrong maybe you would cease to exist. Further discussion of the issue can be seen here, but if I have learned anything at all, it is this: The path of The Sisko is one of madness.

Back to the racial thing. I’m sure that at the time, Fox News types were like “Oh they just HAD to have a black captain!” But to those of us who live in the realm of sanity, Sisko’s blackness isn’t really a big thing. Like, of course a Star Trek captain could be black. We rational, progressive folk reserve our “political corectness gone mad” spiels for Janeway (see video above). However, when you watch episode after episode, while Sisko being black is rarely a major plot point, you can see that a great deal of thought went into presenting Sisko as a role model for Star Trek’s millions of African American fans. His favorite baseball player–Robinson being too on the nose–is Willie Mays. And as a hero, Sisko is of a similar template, representing the best of Afro American culture, but long having shed the aspects that were vestiges of racist oppression. Star Bleks are never proud of ignorance or how many different women they’ve had kids with. If cross walks existed, they would walk through them more quickly if they saw you trying to make a right turn. But they honor the memory of the civil rights struggle and their own formidable cultural achievements. For example, Sisko is reluctant to go to Vic’s Las Vegas Lounge because the holosuite program sanitizes the discrimination of the era it portrays. But Sisko doesn’t name his kid L’Janthony or BMW, but Jake. In short, in a few hundred years everybody will conclude that the truth lies somewhere between Bill Cosby and Chris Rock. Just in case you can’t see through all of the stoned glibness and rambling, a really do believe that all of the racial stuff was handled admirably.

Sisko certainly equals or exceeds his forerunners in terms of bombast, courage, and pretension somehow coexisting with near omniscience and totally unrealistic combat skills for a middle aged administrator. I’m going to reiterate what I said before. Sisko is: 1)A Starfleet Captain 2) Promoted to Commander 3) The Emissary, which is to say the intermediary between man and God and 4) Promoted to just being God, at least insofar as being creator of the entire post-1950′s universe. Also, there’s a side story where they travel back in time and accidentally get a Gandhi-like figure in the 21st centrury killed, so Sisko just fills in for him and takes his pivotal place in history. Because creating the universe was not a big enough feather in his cap. Because of all of this, the worm whole aliens refer to him simply as The Sisko. It’s almost as bad as Jesus.

So, in terms of over the top macho awesomeness, Sisko can stand with any other captain. But what about the acting? Obviously, nobody wants to see great, naturalistic acting here. This is a question of who devours the most scenery. Patrick Stewart might be a famous, old, British, Shakespearean actor but those guys are always gigantic hams who get too much deference because SIR LORD SHAKESPEARE OF ENGLAND. So he was a fine choice for Picard. And in any other franchise, he would be cock of the ham walk. But let’s get real. This is a two ham race, between Shatner and Brooks. I’m not going to argue that Brooks is a grander ham than Shatner because that is a hell of an argument to make. I will suggest, however, that if you view both performances with an open mind, the subject is at least open to discussion. Plus, the Siskos give us three generations of hams. For a kid, Cirroc Lofton is a pretty impresive ham as Jake, the most disappointing son since the retarded Manning brother, while Sisko’s father is played by Brock Peters with every once of the hammyness one would expect from an actor named Brock Peters.

As an aside, one way to differentiate Trek captains is whether they constantly defy logic and jeopardize thousands of lives on the basis of gut or principle. Kirk is all gut, while Picard is more of a principle guy. Archer (the one played by Scott Bacula) is almost all principle. Janeway is… well, honestly I usually kind of tuned out whenever she was talking. For me, Sisko strikes the right balance. He is the Star Trek Captain I would most fear at a poker table. Kirk’s luck would run out at some point because he couldn’t just keep guessing right forever. Picard would be tough, but he would have certain limits that could be tested. Archer would be predictable and kind of an ABC player, though a good one. Janeway is a woman with babies and hormones (see her video above). Sisko is capable of anything at any time. His repertoire of decisions includes all of the good ones and very few bad ones. He is a mad man tethered by reason. The fact that gods whisper into his ear could be a problem too. I bet Avery Brooks really had to reach deep to create this persona:

Shatner and Brooks: Legitimate Mental Illness from Pudge, Rodriguez on Vimeo.

Do not skip that video.

Lamest Alien Race:

The lamest alien race on DS9 is The Dosi, who appear in the episode “The Rules Of Acquisition.” They would be horrible enough looking if they were some race of hapless peasants, but this species is meant to be tough and intimidating. The implication of this is that somebody thought “you know what springs to mind when I think ‘intimidating?’ Well mimes, of course. And LARPers. Wait, wait…. what if I combined mimes AND LARPers into a single entitiy of pure fearsomeness? I’ll even throw in some Umpa Lumpa. Look out Giger!”

Best Alien Race:

The Ferengi. For one thing, they are one of the only races humanity can look down on from a cultural perspective and would also beat at most sports. This exchange sums it up pretty well:

Kira: I don’t understand your attitude about the Ferengi

Jadzia: That’s because you don’t socialize with them like I do. Looking back over seven lifetimes, I can’t think of a single race I’ve enjoyed more….

Kira: They are greedy, untrustworthy misogynistic little trolls and I wouldn’t turn my back on one of them for a second!

Jadzia: Neither would I but once you accept that, you’ll find they can be a lot of fun.

What could be a more powerful endorsement than Jadzia liking them and Kira hating them? That is like if a new movie came out and Gloria Allred was suing the producers while Kreayshawn got baked and attended the premiere. We’re meant to think of the Ferengi as still battling the limitations that humanity outgrows as part of the federation: ignorance, discrimination and lust for money. As those values clash with those of The Federation, we see the first cracks in the Ferengi cultural dam, which will eventually give way to Reason.. This is dangerous territory because the defining element of the “outdated” Ferengi culture is totally unfettered capitalism. In the Ferengi afterlife, you have to bribe your way into heaven. I think a pretty sizable part of the Star Trek audience are power nerd Libertarians and you can’t risk alienating them. So the Ferengi have to make up for everything with spunk, odd charm and guile, much like the humans had to do relative to the Vulcans and this best/worst dynamic makes them the most entertaining race.

Quark is the owner of the station’s bar and casino and the show’s primary Ferengi. In the first couple of seasons they were using pretty broad stokes and about every third or fourth episode, Quark would be involved in some scheme that had implications that were far bigger than they needed to be for any dramatic purpose. When he was found out, Sisko or Odo would chew him out for, say, smuggling biological weapons for use in a genocide and say “if I ever catch you doing that again…”

As the show develops, Quark becomes the center point of clash between Federation and Ferengi cultures and they scale back on the angle of him being a soulless merchant of WMDs, slaves, drugs, child pornography and Axe Body Spray. We learn that Quark underchargered starving Bajorans in the past, and he is riven by unspoken tendencies towards compassion and justice, his adherence to Ferengi values and his personal virtues and failings. His mother is the vanguard, advocating for everything from fair trade to women being allowed to do business. Rom, (below) is the labor progressive. Liquidator Brunt is the reactionary force that initially has some sway with Quark. But his extremism and refusal to compromise ultimately makes Brunt into centrist Quark’s chief nemesis, thereby nudging him towards progress. Like many hard reactionary factions, say the KKK, Brunt eventually becomes an out of control TIE fighter (sorry for crossing streams) of craziness, spinning off into the dark space of irrelevance and compelling everyone else to move in the opposite direction. Wallace Shawn steals the show every time as Grand Negus Zek who obviously represents the elites. All of them. He’s like a business guru/king/religious figure/president, except when the story requires him to answer to some other political apparatus. He too is eventually persuaded towards progress, but that sort of seems like it could have gone either way. If Zek didn’t end up Delonte Westing Quark’s mom, maybe he would have thrown his hat in with Brunt and Ferengi progress would have been more tumultuous.

Rom:

Rom is Quark’s brother and Nog’s father. Early on, he is just sort of a groveling idiot who lets Quark walk all over him, but then it turns out that he is good at fixing stuff and he works with O’Brein, fixing stuff for Starfleet. At first, I thought this was inconsistent because Rom never seemed very smart and now here he is fixing quantum flux fantabulators all of the sudden. Then I realized that it is the future, so fixing a matter transporter then is like some guy fixing an engine now and that Nog really just has what they call “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.” Because the Ferengi only value wealth, Quark feels like Rom being a skilled laborer makes him useless and Rom feels compelled to go along with him. Contrast that with humans, where you think the guy who fixes your car is an idiot because he religiously listens to Mancow’s Morning Madhouse and he thinks you’re an idiot because you don’t know how to change your own oil. Maybe that is why, after being exposed to Federation culture, Rom winds up being a general progressive, crucial to the movement to make Quark’s a union shop and moderately sympathetic to Ferengi feminism. What can we take away from all this? The working man is only a friend to progressive causes when he has his employer’s boot on his neck. I think this is why Democratic presidents rarely do anything to actually help workers, like quintupling the size of OSHA the minute they take office. Because of Rom.

Nog:

Nog is somewhat disturbing because while Jake sprouts from a tween into UConn recruit, the actor who plays Nog undergoes no physical changes during the show’s seven year run. I wonder if he was one of those child actors whose parents gave him female hormones so that he would have a better chance to get roles and then everyone involved turns a blind eye to this horrible act of child abuse.

As the first Ferengi to enter Star Fleet, and before that, one of the first Ferengi to receive a liberal education in an earth style school, Nog represents the nerdy kid from a backwards culture who is the first in his family to go to college but his family is kind of ambivalent about it rather than proud because they are resentful rubes and then the kid comes home insisting that the earth can not possibly be 6,000 years old, just as his parents had feared. If the show ran longer, they could have further developed Nog to the point where he overcompensated and became a complete knob. Like the kind of kid who decides to stand up and louldy declare his vegetarianism at Thanksgiving Dinner and who gets mad at his dad for liking Larry Bird. So Nog is the one you identify with if you are one of the only smart kids in some hick town or if you are an Antwon Fisher. Look at this scene between Nog and Jake and pretend that instead of being a Ferengi, Nog comes from white trash, but Jake remains a black kid.

Jake: I guess humans and Ferengi don’t have a lot to talk about.

Nog: That’s what my father says

Jake: Yeah, mine too.

Jake (hesitating, but then with conviction): That doesn’t mean they’re right. We always had stuff to talk about before! So what do you say, you still want to be friends?

Nog: Yes. But when my father finds out, he won’t be happy.

It is as if DS9 is reaching out, offering that first ray of light to trapped young minds. Not just by giving them something to relate to, but by forcing them to face the tension of relating to a character that is an amalgamation of extreme stereotypes about Jews and stereotypes about the kind rednecks who believe that extreme stereotypes about Jews are true and whom I believe stereotypes about. Money grubbers/teeth that look like a candy cane you accidentally left in your back pocket; see greed as a virtue/abusive towards women; good with money/love to gamble; manipulate politicians to their interests/manipulated by politicians against their interests, eat disgusting food/eat disgusting food. And in the same way that tube grubs look like spam and mayo sandwiches on wonder bread to us, through the eyes of someone traped in West Memphis, Arkansas they look like Chinese food. And/or Jake and Nog are gay.

The Beatles, arguably the greatest band of their era, had their Yoko. The Denver Nuggets, arguably the most likely NBA franchise to exit the playoffs in the first round, had LaLa. Oh yes, LaLa. And while Yoko tore apart the rock quartet, only to steer John Lennon into shrieking solo records and head-slapping bed-ins, LaLa wandered off the set of MTV, sharpened her claws, and turned a once proud basketball star into a shriveling mess of emasculated fame-whorishness. The same young lad who once hoisted a trophy as a college freshman became a lazy, passionless ball hog, concerned with little more than padding his resume with 27 a night while spending time on the court’s other half in a blinged-out Lazy Boy. Sure, Carmelo Anthony was a human highlight reel, with touch and talent to burn, but as his wife focused on her “career” – then, now, and forevermore little more than being a pro athlete’s wife – he lost his way. The team faltered, Melo checked out, and LaLa flew from LA to New York and back again, pausing in Denver only for the time it took to attend a Nuggets game and text the entire fucking time. Oh, she was dressed to the nines, this one, and she walked in all slow like, to command full attention, but it’s just as likely that she has no idea what her husband even does for a living. In all the time I saw her at center court, she never once looked up from her phone.

Now LaLa is back full force, having sucked off a good dozen suits at VH1 to receive her 30 minutes of precious TV time each week to chronicle the least interesting life ever captured by a functioning camera. Having watched a few episodes of her last effort, which took what seemed like six months to showcase her wedding to Melo, I was prepared for 3.4 seconds of actual content stretched over several months of airtime, but the show’s opening salvo just might set a record for inaction. A filmed wall might top it for drama, and for the first and only time I sat with envy at those forced to endure an unbearable Minnesota winter watching grandpa ice fish. LaLa, wholly lacking talent, charisma, or a reason to get up in the morning, has us convinced that our week would not have been worthwhile unless we could have witnessed the arrival of a few friends, a limo trip to a Denver bowling alley, a few frames, and a snowball fight with one of LaLa’s friends running topless down the street. Throughout, Melo is almost a ghostly presence, inhabiting the edges with apathy, disgust, and an occasional half-hearted smile. I’d like to think that he too was embarrassed by his wife’s unfathomable fame, but I think that’s just how he is. You know, a self-involved prick who, for all of his sense of team, should be suffering in obscurity while reminding the public of Sam Bowie.

So while I hate Melo with the sort of rage usually reserved for guards at Buchenwald or Vice Presidents named Cheney, I must and will blame LaLa. At least Melo, one of the game’s most marble-mouthed morons, can do something with his time that entertains the masses. LaLa, on the other hand, so revoltingly dull that VH1 might have considered a documentary on Melo’s fur coat as raising the stakes, brings us nothing. This season premiere, however, brings us less. Must we endure an exterior shot of Melo’s home, all 25,000 square feet of it, to remind us that America, above all, is a land where the least deserving spend their evenings playing golf indoors while most of us suffer through meals of macaroni and cheese? Or inside, where we stare in stupefaction as a woman who, a mere two decades ago, would have been jerking off transients for bus fare, makes pancakes for a pampered creep? The worst part of it all is that LaLa admits she’s rarely in this airplane hangar of a home because she’s too busy on the coasts. Why, then, the estate? Also weighed down by a diamond that rivals a nearby grapefruit, need you ask? So am I just jealous? Hell yes, but murderous first. At no point was I not rooting for little Kiyan to drive his little vehicle straight into that motherfucker’s knee, forever ending his dream of bringing a title to New York.

Eventually, LaLa and Melo hit Lucky Strike, a downtown bowling alley only slightly less expensive than a night at the Pepsi Center. A ball or two is thrown, with most of the time spent watching LaLa try to set up her equally idiotic friend with Aaron Afflalo. Shockingly, she’s not interested, proving that she’s likely not her actual friend as much as hired talent. Even the girl who eventually bares her chest is a cipher, and probably the last one we want to see naked who’s not JR Smith. Why are they bowling? For charity? Not bloody likely, unless you count a vanity project as LaLa’s contribution to the poor. And so it is. My wife, for reasons both masochistic and insane, follows LaLa on Twitter, and for at least two weeks, Melo’s wife has been devoting every last character to the show’s promotion. “Eight days to go! RT! RT! RT!”, she roars, minute after minute, hour after hour, until we relent. Kind of like Melo after LaLa withheld her vagina until he forced management to send him to the Big Apple. Since she always hated Denver, or at least never paused to give it a fair shake, she wanted to make sure she could keep an eye on her man while she went on talk shows to discuss being on talk shows. I’d call her a vapid cunt, but that grants her a personality. She registers as if asleep at the wheel, smiling and eyelash-batting with such force that we know she’s like a desperate real estate agent trying to unload the Clutter farmhouse.

Clearly VH1 is contractually obligated to air this thing in its entirety, though no doubt they learned early in the editing suite that, to their horror, they had no more than 15 usable seconds amidst 11,000 hours of footage. What does a full season hold? Melo and LaLa playing Monopoly? LaLa teaching Melo how to read? The purchase of Kiyan’s first gold chain? A dramatic re-creation of LaLa’s stressful day of being forced to wake up before noon? The father and son tattoo adventure? All and more, along with Melo’s eventual trade to New York, at last relieving Denver of the biggest baby since Jay Cutler and his diapers were shipped out of town. But as much as I’d like to think that they’ll get theirs in the end, “theirs” just might be the fame and fortune they’ve always coveted, with Melo’s Times Square billboards being trumped by LaLa’s battles with the paparazzi. Fair enough on all counts, so long as Melo is forever and always denied a championship. Sure, a season finale whereby LaLa has acid thrown in her face by a crazed fan might generate a hard-on or two on this end, but above all, Mr. Anthony must end his days bereft. A loser. An empty millionaire, eventually forced into bankruptcy after buying one gold bathtub too many.

Isolated from the African mainland and marked by extraordinary geographical variation and seasonal extremes, Madagascar has been the stage for a unique evolutionary direction for its plant and animal life. Far from adaptation dead ends, these organisms have found ways to endure the most hostile environments. In the event of a global catastrophe, this unique island will suffer its share, but the great variety of life and their methods of survival would have little difficulty in recovering. A spine of mountains runs the length of Madagascar’s north-south axis, splitting it in two for both climate and animal populations. The moist air and monsoon rains bathe the lush tropical forests of the east, while the west is shielded from water for the most part, a land of dry groves of thousand-year old baobab trees. The southern aspect of the island is an alien world of salt, and dry, gnarled woodlands. The center of the island is a plateau of rock plagued by earthquakes, rending the surface with cracks and valleys; the center is occupied by a lake born of this upheaval. The Western edge is a series of limestone reefs, resembling an ancient skeletal leviathan. Each habitat is rife with extraordinary species; more than 80% are found nowhere else on Earth.

When Pangaea broke apart 90 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, Madagascar chipped off the Indian subcontinent and sat astride Africa’s east coast, the world’s oldest island. At some point in its history, plants and animals were swept across the ocean onto the land, for the most part remaining isolated from the rest of the African continent since. Some of the inhabitants are similar to animals found elsewhere, but genetic drift has crafted something other entirely. Extreme forms of life have come to being here. There are eighty different species of lemur, primates that live nowhere else. Half the world’s chameleon species can be found here, with brilliant coloration that matches any tropical bird. The giraffe necked weevil can be found here, an odd insect whose neck takes up over half its body length. Reed lemurs spend their entire lives on mats of reeds in a lake. Sifaka lemurs dine heartily on Euphorbia cacti, which are filled with a milky poisonous fluid that burns human flesh upon touch; they are able to leap at speed upon cacti without impaling themselves upon the dangerous spines. The elusive Fossa, a distant relative of the mongoose, is the largest predator, and hunts the lemur. Underground rivers are filled with ancient fish unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Radiated tortoises live in scrub brush, living as long as 180 years. A vast salt lake oversees a spiny forest of arid extremes. The variation in landscape and the effect it has on the climate are why this island has among the greatest diversity of any place on Earth.

The impeccable photography captures a strange world unlike anything you have seen before, with intimate images , but with a distanced sensibility. Attenborough manages to reveal Madagascar as hostile, yet deeply intriguing, and from a wildlife perspective a coveted destination. Environmental degradation has taken its toll on the whole of the island, fragmenting habitats for farmland and charcoal production. Deforestation has succeeded in eroding what viable farmland there is. The rural Malagasy population is amongst the poorest in the world, and such poverty serves to further degrade the land with badly planned efforts to feed the people. In the recent past, Madagascar’s government had taken greater steps toward conservation; land had been set aside for parks to drive ecotourism, with half of set fees returning to local populations to incentivize conservation. With the coup that chased President Ravalomanana into exile, the park system and conservation efforts have collapsed, allowing gangs to sack the forests for lumber and endangered species for pets. Of course, the outgoing President was well on his way to reversing his own work, attempting to sell half his nation to Daewoo for export-only crop production. Protected rosewood rainforest was cut to the ground, sold to China, making more cheap crap for Americans and Europeans to buy. All of this serves organized crime traffickers, leaving the domestic population worse off than before. This has served to convince, to some extent, the Malagasy people that it behooves them to protect the biodiversity as a valuable investment, rather than selling it off to soulless foreigners.

Madagascar gets across all too well the importance of the natural habitats here. Elephant birds, at 3 meters in height, were the tallest birds that ever lived. They once lorded over the southern beaches, until they met the first explorers to reach Madagascar. Now all that remains of them are eggshell fragments on a southern beach. This story has repeated itself since across the whole of this fragile nation, erasing forever innumerable plants and animals that fought for survival. Conservationists and the local population have a renewed passion to create a more sustainable model, and the most important agents are the people of Madagascar. Understanding of this land has only just begun, and such learning is more than academic. The Rosy Periwinkle, found only in Madagascar, is the source of a chemotherapy agent used for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and pediatric leukemias. The struggle to preserve Madagascar is the same as that all over the world – it is to preserve ourselves.

Tourism is one of the best ways to get involved – to learn about this strange and beautiful land, contact one of the many tour operators: Rainbow tours (www.rainbowtours.co.uk), Cactus Tours (www.cactus-madagascar.com), or the tourism board (www.madagascar-tourisme.com). The high definition version of Madagascar is not much of an improvement upon DVD quality, but it is still in equal turns breathtaking and illuminating.

Yes.

Episode three: The Children of Jamestown

Hopefully I won’t shatter your faith in artistic integrity by revealing this, but 80′s Action TV sort of, kind of, recycles plots. “Airwolf,” “Knight Rider” and “The A-Team” all have episodes that deal with cults and the cults all wear the same monastic, brown robes, probably from the same props department. Also it seems like there is always at least one van. I miss vans. How are SUV’s better than vans? I don’t think they are at all. Like, according to SUV commercials you can drive them up sand dunes and mountains and shit, though if you actually do use an SUV for that it will break. But even if that crap was real, I’ve never seen an SUV with a boss wizard from a Rush song painted on the side.

You can get with this:

Or you can get with that:

Case closed!

Also, as I’ve grown older, I have come to kind of see the appeal of joining a cult. You grow some vegetables, catch some Z’s and look the other way when the cult leader rapes a twelve year old girl. Hey, that’s an easier life than I lead. But the A-Team is composed of individuals far more scrupulous than myself. The introduction of Dirk Benedict as the new Face Man really does constitute a huge upgrade. The man just oozes a mix of charm and smarm that I like to call schmarm. And he plays a key role in initially duping the cultists and snagging the kidnapped girl the team have been hired to retrieve. This is the first episode in which the plans that come together actually seem thought out instead of created ad hoc to meet the story arc. Like the whole set up with Amy, Face and Hannibal staging a false three way confrontation in the general store to distract the cultist must have taken minutes of forethought. I like this still because of how Hannibal is lurking in the background, masterminding.

Worth noting: Amy is underrated as an 80′s fuckshell. Our own Wax wears the exact same jacket as Face is wearing in this still. I’m not 100% sure but I think this cult leader is based on Jim Jones, and they just changed ‘Jones’ to ‘James.’ I know it seems crazy at first, but mull it over. Masticate.

So after they rescue the girl, the A-Team, minus Murdock are captured by the cultist. The cultists have no idea who they are fucking with and the A-Team smash their shit as though the were Delonte West and the cult was LeBron’s mother. Also, after they are captured the A-Team explain the basis for their courage to Amy in what I found to be a very profound scene. Their basic message was best articulated by Face: “Accept death. It calms you.” It’s like a cross between Mel Gibson’s speech in Braveheart and Gore Vidal’s Messiah.

Best B.A. Line as nearly as I can decipher it: Hannibal why you go busting Face man in the lip for? You know you can’t go ???? making a mess of my meal ticket. Won’t be able to get no good hotel rooms!

By the way, I went with good old Olde English for this installment. Solid alcohol content, rancorous taste. This is the one malt liquor I believe to be deliberately designed to taste horrible. I’ll still take it over King Cobra’s weak ass, but getting it down is not fun. Also, if anyone can come up with a recipe for worse farts than OE and hard boiled eggs, I’d like to hear it. After Mengeling my second floor apartment, I walked about four blocks to the store and when I came back I could still pick up the smell about half way up the steps to the place.

Episode 4: Pros and Cons (that is a very clever title)

So this episode is about is about how one of the many kids who looks up to B.A. has an older brother who is imprisoned on false pretenses in the South, where he is forced into gladiatorial fights. One thing I’ve come to realize about 80′s Action TV is that, although it is right wing in it’s overall tone, it caters to prejudice more than anything. Like, in this case, the South of United States is depicted as a backwards world beyond the rule of law, where hillabillies who have stumbled into money, perhaps earning their fortunes by combing the highways for picture books and bars of soap that have fallen of trucks traveling between the coasts, bet on human cockfights. The A-Team infiltrate the hick prison system by 1) Having Hannibal and B.A. deliberately arrested and 2) having Face come into the prison as a bogus, federal investigator named Doctor Pepper. Of course, B.A. is chosen as a gladiator and the A-Team turn the hillabilly fiefdom upside down and sodomize it. The best part is when Hannibal and B.A. first enter the prison and some fool steps to Hannibal and declares him a fish. Hannibal disagrees. The dude asks if he is a tough guy and Hannibal points to B.A. “No, he’s the tough guy.”

How fantastic would be to have Mr. T covering your back in real life? Because I work in the filth of the California gambling industry, I used to be a friendly acquaintance of this gang of Laotian bloods, headed by a guy who was basically the Asian version of Mr. T. I’m not saying we hung out or anything , but we were on good terms and I always wished someone would cross me so that I could kick Bune a few hundred bucks to correct them. Unfortunately, I’m an easy going and likable person, so it never came to that.

Best B.A. Line: Like them gladiators in Rome, man.

Episode 5: A Small And Deadly War

This one is about about a cop who hires the A-Team to catch a corrupt unit in the LAPD. You heard me right. Crooked cops in the Los Angeles Police Department. Ah, the magical realm of the human imagination: where anything is possible, except for dying in a dream but not in real life. Basically, the captain of the SWAT team has recruited a bunch of guys he has dirt on and blackmailed them into becoming a hit squad. Some random Sarge catches on and hires the A-Team to flush out the only crooked cops in LA. Murdock is conned out of the psych ward for the 38th time in five episodes and the A-Team set about proving themselves against the elite of the LAPD. The best line by a cop who doesn’t really dig the whole operation: “Eight grand to blow away your brother so you can take over his stinking laundry.” Even in ’85, or whenever those seem like pretty low rates for a SWAT team to bump someone off. But in the 80s and through the 90s TV shows would consistently condescend to viewers by regarding any sum of money from the perspective of a homeless person. I remember both “Rosanne” and “Married With Children” having episodes where everyone acted like landing 20 grand would make them “rich.” I mean, my dad made 20 G taking a dump, but that wasn’t what was so annoying about it. It was annoying because even viewers who made $20,000 per year knew all too well that falling into that sum would not make them rich. And indeed, even figuring for inflation, $8,000 dollars seems like a paltry sum to hire a four man SWAT team for a killing. I don’t really know about such things, but I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find a hard core gangster to risk the gas chamber for so little. This episode also contains an explicit reference to The Seven Samurai. Pretty cool, especially since 80% of A-Team episodes rip it off.

Anyway, Face infiltrates the LAPD as a roach killer by planting literal bugs and this allows him to plant figurative bugs, created by B.A. Look out, Bela Tarr! The A-Team catch on to their game and send them up the river, just as the deserve! This also, as nearly as I can remember, marks the first use of , “on the jazz,” the catch phrase that just wouldn’t catch, no matter how many episodes they wedged it into.

Best B.A. Line : Look, we don’t work for no Po-lice!

Jesus Fucking Christ, “Hard Knocks” is pretty goddamn awesome. This motherfucker might be the best fucking show currently airing episodes on TV. Since I spend my entire day impersonating Rex Ryan, I’ll stop doing it now. Except for the part where I continually gorge on junk food. OK, one more. I’m gonna write this shit like it’s going on fucking Ruthless Reviews and not some fucking slap-dick site. In case it has somehow escaped you, Jets coach Rex Ryan is the star of the show and one of the most entertaining people on earth. I’m going to dedicate the next few years to creating a spermal fusion process so that we might have children together.

The greatness of “Hard Knocks” can be boiled down to two facts- First, that HBO and NFL Films are an absurdly good documentary team. It’s almost kind of a Wade/LeBron thing where you’re like, “will it work, given that they both need the ball?” Uh, yeah. It will work, you jackass.

The second thing is where I want to reel in the non-NFL fan, if I haven’t lost you already. Maybe you are part of our 93% Scandinavian readership. Maybe you are part of our readership of women who somehow clicked on the site by mistake while trying to buy shoes online because you are a bit shaky with any kind of technology not directly related to food preparation. But this is primarily a drama and it just so happens that the NFL offers the best potential drama of any sport in the world due to it’s scale and magnitude.

Football is the most popular sport in America and America is the richest country in the world. So the analogy of football players to Roman gladiators runs well. Episode one gives you a really good sense of this, in how the locals and media swarm about the Jets, perennial also-rans who have a chance to do something this season. But “Hard Knocks” is about the preseason, and this swarming occurs before the preseason. Which touches on a second point that many will miss: this is largely a fabrication, in the Romareican tradition. Part of the awe factor is the incredible size of NFL stadiums and the number of people they hold. But oddly enough the stadiums are filled with mostly dupes who’ve been drawn in by the hype. Having attended sporting events from college football, to minor league baseball, to horse racing, to soccer in a country where they care about soccer, I can say that the NFL ranks a distant last as a live event. It is a great sport only when filtered through TV and it really shines in this tripple filtered format. All of the schmucks who fork over hundreds of dollars to fill out the stands and scratch their asses during the 19 commercial time outs are crucial props. So what you wind up with is millions of people watching 80,000 people watching 22 guys play a season that lasts only 16 games, which makes every one important. And even those late season games that aren’t very important have the GDP of El Salvador bet on them. And the majority of us are smart enough to stay at home or hit a bar, having bet a week’s wages on a band of hulking illiterates, wallowing like pigs in cubes and mini kegs of beer, salted fat and one of the very most intense athletic displays in the world. This is the basis of a multi-billion dollar enterprise. It must be.

Now, the show isn’t really about all of that directly, those are just the stakes.That is the weight of what these men are playing for. Because of the 53 man roster and a mediocre union, most NFL players aren’t very well paid and the violence of the game means short careers. But to make a regular NFL roster is to touch the sun. When some girl asks you what you do for a living, there aren’t a lot of answers that beat, “I’m on the New York Jets.” Even if you are the 53rd guy. And suppose your career is short and soon forgotten. Apart from having had sex with roughly 4 million models, if you have any kind of head on your shoulders, you will be starting out life at 26 with, say, half a million dollars in the bank. Or, you could be a big, condomlessm talented, horror show like Antonio Cormarte and have seventeen kids whose names you can barely remember. Either way is pretty interesting TV.

So far, most of the same could be said of international soccer. And for what it’s worth, I would cut off my arm to see a version of “Hard Knocks” about a Premersop team. But the second thing that makes the NFL so perfect for this show is the cliff these guys are standing on. The cut off they are looking at isn’t Man City to Hull City, or maybe some team in Russia. Yeah, there are a couple of pro leagues that pay a bit above minimum wage and nobody cares about. But the real line here is between playing for The Jets, a feather you can wear forever, and working at Wal-Mart. Ask Curt Warner, who literally went from grocery clerk to NFL MVP and deca-millionaire and national celebrity whose wife had to revamp her looks for the cameras, just because some random guy correctly thought he might be good enough for the NFL. If that random scout hadn’t taken to him, he’d probably still be bagging Apple Jax. And that is what is unique about the NFL and makes this such great TV. While future hall of famer, Kurt Warner was once bagging groceries., some guy working in a video store is not going to emerge as the next striker at Real Madrid or hit 45 home runs for The Mets.. And, no matter how much he fucks up this season, even though he is fucking great so far this year,there was always a 0% chance of Theo Walcott looking for a job at a hardware store from the time he was thirteen or so. The same goes for Bryce Harper, John Wall or Taylor Hall. Those guys are already set for life. But this edition of “Hard Knocks” features their NFL equivalent, Joe McKnight and his fate is far less certain. He was once the best high school player in the country. He’ll be paid this year and probably next, but not money he can retire on. And if he doesn’t pan out, he won’t go play in Italy or Japan. He’ll have to fall back on the degree he got from US… oh wait, he doesn’t even have that. Here’s a picture of him. This is a picture of a man who failed an NFL conditioning test.

So that is the stage. The actors are sublime and HBO really just gives NFL Films the freedom they never had before. The saga of an NFL team is best told bleeplessly. One star is special teams coach Mike “I don’t care what they do. Do what we do well and we can win… Redskins/Fuck Them” Westoff. And the show is packed with such moments of greatness.

How does America’s potential answer to David Beckham, Mark “Sanchize” Sanchez bitch about having to pay 49 cents for dipping sauces from Pizza Hut and still come off as likable?

There’s a definite racial component to the show. It’s manifested in many ways, but one that strikes me is how a black guy who wouldn’t even consider backing down from a fight with Brock Lessner holding a machete, is terrified by a water slide. It’s a classic “white people crazy” moment.

One of the most interesting things about professional sports is that the ability level and compensation are so far our of whack with the rest of the world that the guys who make it to the top are pretty arbitrary. The whole jock/nerd thing falls away when you have to run a 4.3 second forty yard dash or throw a ball eighty yards. I think the heart of the Terrell Owens story line, which epitomizes this point, is that the guy is just a nerd born into one of the best jock bodies of all time. You catch glimpses of this throughout the show. Damian Woody seems clever enough to succeed in some other business, which is probably why he’s done so well in the NFL. You wonder, would “Sanchize” do better if he was famous for touring the famous sewers of Paris Hilton or something. And maybe McKnight’s lifelong status as top jock will be his undoing. But then Nick Mangold, who comes across as a meathead’s meathead has a contract that should mean his great grand kids never lift a finger.

Thinking back, it seems like most of the NFL greats have some element of social awkwardness. Maybe it is because they aren’t christened as future millionaires when they are thirteen. The poster boy for swaggering to stardom, Joe Namath, does put in a cameo. But when I think of most NFL greats, like Montana, Peyton and Rice, they seem like guys who could just as easily be working at a car rental business.

So, what am I getting at here? The fundamental appeal of the show is watching such a wide range of guys who happen to have very particular, freakish athletic abilities competing for just about the highest stakes imaginable. With Rex Ryan as the MC, I can’t think of anything I’d rather watch. You know, besides pornography.

Really good comedies don’t come along very often and when they do so on television, they usually turn to shit in a few years. So thank god for FX finally giving Louis C.K. another show. Whatever you might have thought of “Lucky Louie,” (I enjoyed it, others didn’t, most simply did not watch), this show is of the opposite approach. It’s still about a man with children and self-loathing, but, instead of a “back to basics” sitcom that grossly exaggerates how poor a working white couple with one kid can possibly be, it’s centered very heavily around stand-up and it feels like Louis is using all of the ideas he’s had over the years to fill out the rest of the episodes without worrying about coherence. And it works, because, as you might have heard, he’s pretty funny.

I’ve heard people reverently compare his stand up to Richard Pryor’s in terms of quality. I don’t generally like stand-up all that much so I don’t feel reverent about any of it. Maybe because I’m not so stupid or ignorant that a comic (any more than a rock lyricist) could present me with a way of looking at things that I found groundbreaking. I just want them to present their own outlook entertainingly. Louis usually makes me chuckle more than most guys, so it’s fun to watch. Woody Allen seems like a more reasonable comparison, and it’s one Louis seems intent on making with some pretty heavy allusions. As I’m sure Louis realizes, nobody can touch Woody, but Louis is a worthy apprentice. A lot of the episodes seem based on that Marshall McLuhan premise from Annie Hall. What if you were really handed the will and the ability to fully carry out on what you are thinking and all social barriers were magically removed? Which is sort of to imagine life as a stand-up act.

So, in case you aren’t familiar with Louis C.K. at all, his basic shtick is to up the ante on “tell it like it is” comics who tell us that there is no God or that the Spanish American War was unjust to almost the maximum possible level, but Louis makes it personal instead of about politics or some other shit that he doesn’t understand. Maybe his best known line is, “the other kid we have, she’s four, and she’s an asshole.” There was a point during one episode where I thought he might, on national television, admit to the fact that he has considered molesting his daughters. It would have been through his character, but all of the characters say what the real Louis thinks. Asked what the worst thought he’d ever had about his daughters was, he begins talking about when they turn eighteen and… he pulls back at the last moment, but the fact that I even thought this was possible says a lot. It’s probably also why the guy widely thought to be the best stand-up comic alive had to wait so long to get a second shot at a show and then, only on FX. It’s all for the best though, because anything he’d have done on NBC would have probably been terrible.

So from one episode to the next, people fade in and out. All of the characters, other than Louie, are peripheral characters, occasionally playing an important role, then going back to the background. It’s basically Louie and a parade of Apus and Ralph Wiggums. Having given himself carte blanche, Louis makes one episode surrealistic and the next a more standard spoof on social realities and the next bittersweet, though there are usually elements of all three. The opening credits might appear right off the bat, or they might show up seven minutes into a twenty-two minute episode. His daughters, who he would never dream of molesting, seem like they are going to be central characters, then they disappear for episodes at a time. We don’t know if his mother is dead or alive until she shows up to announce that she is a lesbian, even though the real outing is in her depiction as a self absorbed, unloving cunt who is making a last grasp at attention. Maybe making this kind of show is cheating, but it doesn’t bother me. I was laughing out loud for minutes when Louis was sedated at the dentist’s and had this vision while the doctor was face raping him.

So you can hopefully see all of the directions in which the show is pulling. There’s the stand-up comedy, that Woody Allen stuff I mentioned, some fairly earnest observations, some flippant ones, surrealism, extreme bluntness about the suckiest aspects of life and so on, plus the occasional bit that, even given the show’s open format, is too forced and indulgent, like Louie taking on a heckler and saying everything every comedian has ever wanted to say to a heckler even though nobody else gives a shit about hecklers. “Do rude people bother you at your job?!” “Yes! They do Louis. At every job I’ve had since high school! And if I called the cunt a cunt I’d be fired and probably not be able to get unemployment, you cunt.” Rather than trying to squeeze that all into a consistent narrative, Louis just gives us his best material or the material he most wants to give us. I don’t know, maybe if the show runs for eight years it will gradually create a narrative arc that a more typical show would create over one year. That would be pretty cool and make for a more experimental but less good “Peep Show.” More likely we are getting a creative show we can run through once or twice for some real laughs, which I don’t mean as a putdown at all because that is a rarity.

Oh. Well, you and I might look and that cap and see some kind of weirdo, but whatever makes you happy is OK by me. And our reflexive derision raises the question: do we secretly envy these people and their ilk? Maybe we just wish things could be that easy for us. They’ve found one, simple, obtainable and easily controlled resource for contentment and even happiness. They’ve found the miraculous intoxicant that gives you pleasure and escape, costs nothing, is legal and needn’t destroy your life.  Are they the lucky ones?  The answer to that question is, “no.” I mean, look at this shit.

Going Fishin by airwolf addict

Story Eighteen. Hawke puts aside his own illness to go after his family. Even though it’s an impossible task to save them, he must try even if it costs him his life for fear that he wouldnt ever be able to be put himself back together if they didn’t make it

Rated: T – English – Adventure/General – Chapters: 12 – Words: 15,669 – Reviews: 7 – Updated: 8-18-08 – Published: 8-11-08 – Complete

Airwolf is an X File by SheenaBean

Cross over story between characters from Airwolf Hawke, Caitlin, Dominic, ArchAngel and Marella and the X Files Scully, Reyes and Doggett ! Is Airwolf herself an X File?

Crash and Burn by Cascade Waters

Episode 19: Dambreakers

This combines all off the kitschy staple villains of 80′s Action TV into an evil amalgamation- cultist, nazi, terrorist, paramilitary freaks with a plan for mass murder who all live on some goofy compound. The show begins with a flashback to one year ago of some of the freaks blowing up a dam with a WWII bomber and proclaiming, “the revolution has come to America!” 25 minutes in and I’m still not clear what revolution they are talking about, as they prepare to blow up another dam. The anti-dam revolution? The anti-dam revolution that believes in destroying dams at the rate of one a year? The head of the cult looks like Mark Eaton. Come to think of it, you look a little like Mark Eaton yourself. So. What are your views on dams?

Best JMV line: Those people are rough. If they’re the ones that blew that dam, they don’t give a hoot about human life.

Episode 20: Severance Pay

Hopefully they are picking things up for the end of the season. This is one of the better episodes, featuring a disgruntled FIRM agent who is denied his retirement benefits on a technicality. At first, they think this must be some kind of computer malfunc. It turns out, however, that it is actually an extension of FIRM policy that denies benefits to part time employees. His partner drops dead of a heart attack while screaming about how they are being shafted. The surviving, enraged nerd blows up some computers and releases some embarrassing information to the media, which turns out to be good because it flushes out a mole deep within The FIRM. Plus he’s a pretty good guy, so his acts of treason and terrorism are forgiven and forgotten. So, it’s a pretty good episode driven by spy shit like shoe bombs, stealthy assassins and triple crosses. Again, kind of a dark note at the end as the ultimate source of all the problems is weeded out and says “well, I’ll just wait for the next prisoner exchange.” Archangel, who has a deep streak of Ruthlessness (it has even been suggested that he has known the location of String’s brother all along, but has withheld it in order to manipulate String) says, “we don’t exchange prisoners who we’ve already terminated,” and a couple of goons grab the guy and lead him off for summary execution.

Best Borgnine Line: “Oooohh you’re the guy who gets all the little pieces of this and that from all around the world, puts ‘em together and gets all that important stuff.”

Episode 21: Eruption

Not as good as episode 20, and lacking its broad scope, I’m not sure why they made this the season finale. It does have volcanoes and one of the more brutal deaths of the season when an eruption kills a local cop. This is followed with one of those moments where it’s hard to believe that so many people were paid fortunes for working on this show, when String and Dom bring the cop’s body into town. There is some disorder in the town because of the eruption, but nobody else seems dead and it’s not exactly in a state of chaos. Basically, it’s the atmosphere one would expect after a medium-sized LA quake or tornado touchdown. Then here’s this five second scene wedged in for no reason that throws the time line of the story hours out of whack. Borgnine is working on a generator and String and a local walk up. Borgnine is like, “So did you bury the officer?” and JMV is like “yup” and you’re like, “wait, there was a small natural disaster that killed one person and they just decided to bury this guy on their own in some spot of land behind the local supermarket? Good call.” String and Dom discover that the town they are in is a mining town run by a corporate despot who has reduced his employees to indentured servants. Airwolf intervenes (Commie!). It’s amazing how often helicopters happen to turn up, because I don’t remember there being so many helicopters. Like in this episode, the bad guys use three helicopters with rocket launchers… for mining. Airwolf Factoid! …Wolf creator Donald Bellisario himself comes from a coal mining town in Pennsylvania!

BBL: Mama Mia! Hey, this looks like the surface of the moon!

Episode 22: Short Walk to Freedom

OK, the reason “Eruption” seemed like an odd choice for a season finale is that it wasn’t the season finale. The season finale is “Short Walk To Freedom,” which concerns the wacky misadventures of a few students who go on a dig with their professor at some Mayan ruins, only to be captured by a Cuban-backed rebel played by Jenifer Aniston’s dad. One of the themes of “Airwolf” is the use of missile and machine gun fire to puncture fabricated moral ambivalence. While there is a clear right-wing slant to this episode, just as the previous episode was sort of leftist, it goes out of it’s way to articulate the grievances of the rebels and we can easily sympathize when the Colonel gripes about some dumb American kids coming in on vacation to loot his country’s heritage as though it were their birthright (which of course it is) because it still must be very sad to not be an American. But Airwolf is like, “look, whatever, you just don’t abduct children,” and it intervenes. The rebels manage to hit Airwolf during the rescue and it must land in the desert where Borgnine comes up with the brilliant plan of having four college kids drag a ten ton, cutting edge piece of military hardware through the scorching desert using some rope, hoping to cross several miles before the rebels catch up to them so that the mechanic in a small Peruvian village can repair it. Naturally, this works out somehow. I never understood why people in the desert don’t travel by night and sleep by day.

Best Rebel Line: “You know, it is not hard to kill a man. But you… do not deserve a man’s death. Take him away! He offends me!”

BBL: “Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this — and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed — and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing…”

See you for PCP and “The Jeffersons” in 2013!

Most natural history programs examine a particular organism or habitat and consider how the elements have shaped their evolution. Series such as Planet Earth or David Attenborough’s Life exist to explore how the basic factors of land and weather determine the choreography with which flora and fauna dance endlessly amidst one another in a battle for survival. In Earth: The Biography, geologist Iain Stewart (who exhibits a pure childlike joy in these discussions) laid the groundwork of the elemental forces defining this complex planet – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. How The Earth Changed History brings this series full circle by reconsidering how these have shaped human history, and how dissonant human tribes struggled with one another for local, and eventually global, supremacy. Ethnocentric accounts of history would have you believe that one’s own culture and intelligence were the sole agents of change. It turns out that humans tended to gather in certain areas to maximize their use of natural resources, and luck often played a tremendous part as to which came out on top. The disparate disciplines of geology, geography, history, and anthropology are weaved effortlessly together in what is a dizzying spectacle that regards where we are headed. Documentaries of late tend to focus on our future with either conservative blinders or progressive gloom; this series comes to the conclusion that mankind itself has become a force of nature that has changed the Earth, and such enormous control is reason for optimism.

One is reminded of the approach of Jared Diamond as How The Earth Changed History considers resource management in the rise and fall of civilizations and explains why certain nations are at the top of the game in this uncertain world. It is an unforgiving place, and humanity along with the rest of the animals was forced to adapt or die. Though the forces that shape the Earth are familiar, the way they interplay shifts inexorably. In the introductory chapter, the fate of all life is linked to water, which is always in motion; this is made clear as Stewart examines rock carvings of crocodiles – in the middle of the Sahara Desert. The water cycle moves the relatively small amount of drinkable water useful for human activity from sea to wind to mountains and rainfall, rivers and lakes, and back to the sea. This cycle was notoriously difficult to understand and control for prehistoric man. History is defined by hardship, demonstrated as the last ice age precipitated a drought lasting centuries in the fertile crescent. The hunter-gatherers there adapted by fashioning stone tools to become more efficient hunters, and then invented the sickle, sparking the agricultural revolution. Growing crops necessitated a ready water supply, beginning mankind’s connection to water, namely rivers, that brought a predictable source. This in turn drove the development of an organized society, as only a high degree of organization can deal with water shortages.

The Nile River valley benefited from the river rich in volcanic minerals originating in Ethiopia, and business, taxation, and societal hierarchy were driven by the water. The Garamantians established an advanced nation in the Sahara desert through the cunning use of deep boreholes that were the first use of groundwater. One civilization after another is examined for their methods of adapting to volatile water supplies, and often their failure to continue that adaptation and outstrip their resources in lean times. This includes a fascinating section on how the British empire’s failure to manage India’s water supply provided the spark for the resistance movement. This is not only a look at the past, but at our very near future, considering the increasing global tension over the water supply that will eventually lead to the next world war.

And so we continue through Deep Earth, the source of the minerals that yielded the Ages of Bronze, Iron, and Plastic; Air, the wind power that gave birth to maritime superpowers; and Fire, the catalyst for converting stored carbon into the energy that drives industry. All of these forces converge upon fault lines – the cracks between intercontinental plates allow magma to the surface, carrying precious metal, providing a surface to trap groundwater, and can act as a reservoir for fossil fuels. Indeed, fault lines are the hub of civilizations. It is fair to say that the vanguard nations were those able to best harness these elemental forces to power commerce, organize society, wage war, and drive further intellectual pursuits into improving upon their ability to harness those forces.

The series is peppered with anecdotes that are not only intriguing, but are relevant to our current resource management problems. The Minoans of Crete had a tremendous navy until their neighbor and trading partner was buried in a volcanic explosion, eventually sending a tidal wave that smashed the Minoan fleet, a loss from which they never recovered. Los Angeles obtains its entire water supply from distant areas, draining communities to feed the desert in a way that could become problematic, but for the present this unsustainable metropolis thrives from the gold and the oil brought to the surface by the fault line. The first energy crisis occurred hundreds of years ago as Europe was depleted of wood, which drove the search for another fossil fuel. This turned out to be coal, and the harvesting of this from water-logged mines required the development of the steam engine (the first use was a mine pump) that sparked the industrial revolution. Interestingly, Britain had coal that was easily exploited and close to urban centers. China also had massive coal reserves, but they were hundreds of miles from any city, behind the Yellow River. This delayed China’s industrial revolution until the mid 20th century. The most sobering strands of this massive story relates to our dependence upon oil – it takes 3 million years for the Earth to convert dead material into a one year supply of oil. This segues neatly into climate change, and the final chapter of the planetary force of the Human. The cautionary tale here relates to the Sidoarjo mud volcano that erupted in Indonesia in 2006, expelling 30k cubic meters of mud daily, anticipated to continue for the next 30 years. The cause was a blowout in a natural gas well. In 2010, the Deep Water Horizon disaster has given even greater food for thought about the cavalier way we view our extraordinary power to shape the planet. Add to this the 26 million tons of plastic we add to the oceans per year and the degradation of more than 25% of the planet’s farmland, and this should paint a fairly dire picture.

Iain Stewart, however, finds this impact to be cause for concern, but also sees it as an opportunity. Time is spent on the technological efforts to reverse this damage, and this is an industry that has only begun to grow. The Svalbard seed vault is not a sign that plant life is being wiped out, but rather that the nations of Earth are cooperating to ensure humanity’s agricultural future. The drive to find an alternative to fossil fuels is at a fever pitch, for both political and practical reasons. As Dr. Stewart puts it, “As a species, we think we are special. Now is our chance to prove it.”

Though you may have heard some of these stories before, what is fascinating is the way they are strung together into a narrative spanning prehistory to the modern. And in our present age, termed the Anthropocene Epoch, Man is truly in command of this world, for better or worse. It is poetic that just as we have truly come to understand just how much of an impact we have, we are now able to more precisely control that impact. How The Earth Changed History is about as epic in scope as a series can be, and the cinematic treatment is pure entertainment that stays with you long after the closing credits. It is difficult to watch this feature and not have its ramifications inform your behavior, and perhaps regard our might as a species with some well-heeded caution.

Smoking a fairly expensive cigar that I’ve had sitting around since New Year’s seems like enough of a substance abuse pretext to also binge on another long canceled TV show and document my findings. Since I’m not actually intoxicated, there is a very small chance that this article might be almost coherent, unlike the “Knight Rider” Journal. I apologize for that in advance and I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. In the spirit of drunken revery, however, I’ll share the finest joke that’s ever been conceived. Visitors to our forum have probably heard it, but it’s been my experience that many normal people have not.

Q: What is the difference between a dead baby and an apple? (You’ll have to shovel through some of my tripe to get the answer.)

Most Americans have never heard of “Red Dwarf,” while for the British it is as much an institution as the Guy Fawkes day or blood and spleen porridge. I’d never seen an episode until today, so for folks like me, here’s the basic premise, as surmised from the first two episodes- the British have submitted totally to American supremacy once and for all. I know, that makes it sound like the show is set in 1950, but the stars of the show are the British underlings on a giant, American-captained spaceship in the future of the future. Also, everybody loves American football and soccer is a thing of the past. Even though he’s a scouser, one of the characters is a London Jets fan, which is a shame because the Liverpool Eagles is such a natural fit. On the other hand, Holly, the ship’s AI computer with a 6,000 IQ, is British and the talking toaster is American.

One of the underlings on the ship, named Dave Lister, is sent into stasis as punishment for sneaking a cat on board. Without Lister’s help, his work partner, Arnold Rimmer, accidentally releases radiation that kills everyone on board including himself. 3 million years later the radiation has subsided and Holly, by now driven somewhat to neurosis, releases Lister from stasis and generates an AI hologram of Rimmer to keep him company. The cat, which was preggers, also survived the radiation because it was hiding somewhere and it’s descendants (somehow surviving 3 million years of lethal radiation) evolved into a black, American man from the early 1940s with a fried hair and a huge collection of Zoot Suits. At this point, it seems very possible that Lister and Cat are the only intelligent life in the universe. Lister still wants to check out earth, so that’s where they are heading, but it’s 3 million light years away. The primary engine of the show is an “unusual pairing” scenario with the lazy, sloppy and thick sculled Lister and the uptight, wannabe authoritarian Rimmer, who is also an idiot but doesn’t realize it.

Let’s get some of the Brit stuff out of the way. Thanks to socialized TV, the production values are, of course, at about the “Small Wonder” level. They’re arguably even lower, as the android on “Small Wonder” is far more human-like than the androids on “Red Dwarf.” Once you get used the lack of slickness, it’s oddly satisfying because it creates a feeling of stagy intimacy that I like in British TV and the two or three black and white era American shows that aren’t terrible. Obviously, the show lacks the gloss and sophistication we Americans were accustomed to in our late 80s television, propelled to slick perfection by the free market, for example, in Lifetime movies like “Kate’s Secret.” But where is the love?

David Foster Wallace said the key thing about any great writing is that it makes the reader feel less alone inside. Maybe he wouldn’t have hanged himself if watched more TV, the medium where we have the most prolific and ongoing relationships with characters and the creative elements behind them. Why else does everyone still concern themselves with the lives of the “Diffrent Strokes” and Brady kids, while nobody gives a fuck about Eliot from E.T.? So the point is, I like the coziness of British TV and know at least one David Foster Wallace quote and it would be reasonable to infer from this that I have finished all of his books. The exception to my embrace of the more “casual” British production of “Red Dwarf” is the theme music, especially for the closing credits, seriously sounds like it was improvised over a preset track on a Casio and recorded on an answering machine. Does the BBC really not have decent facilities for recording music? And what is the fucking obsession with horns? Has anything ever been broadcast in Britain without a shitty theme song featuring a trumpet or French horn?

So, to begin approaching the point of this article, so far “Red Dwarf” is pretty funny. I know there’s a backlash against sitcoms with easy jokes and laugh tracks because we’ve totally moved past that thanks to the revolution triggered by “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.” But for old people such as myself, it’s just what we grew up with so I barely notice. You might say that my generation’s acceptance of cheap jokes and laugh tracks is equivalent to the shocking racism that you let slide when it comes from the mouth of a grandparent. It’s like when my grandma, who could not have been a better grandma, and who was rarely anything but kind to people of all creeds and colors, with the exception of my grandpa, wondered aloud if they still sold roasted Brazil nuts at a marketplace in downtown Detroit. She used a slightly antiquated term for the snack, so what she actually said was “Do they still sell nigger toes here?” But she wasn’t murdered on the spot because she was a sweet old lady. I do, however, think she might still be alive today if she didn’t address her doctor as “Dr. Chink Chink,” intending to “tease” him. Anyway, the laugh track makes a certain amount of sense because this is the theatrical tradition and, in the theater, people laugh. It’s just natural that when moving from theater to television viewed in the home, it would take a generation for people to realize that including audience reactions on television shows is usually stupid. And when “Red Dwarf” was made, nobody realized that people would be downloading TV shows and watching each episode 20 times, so it made more sense to go for a quick, easy laugh, assuming the viewer would have forgotten most of the show within a week. Plus, people instinctively laugh more when they hear other people laugh. Big fucking deal. You’re also more likely to buy a set of tires if you see a hot piece of ass standing next to them in an advertisement. You aren’t the coming of the fucking ubermensch, impervious to suggestion and conformity, so settle down, asshole. Yeah, I have a preference for no laugh track, especially when it there is obviously no studio audience, but it’s not a big deal. I’m more worried that there are an awful lot of pitch-and-catch jokes like:

Captain Hollister: Just one thing before the disco. Holly tells me that he has sensed a non-human life form aboard.

Lister: Sir, it’s Rimmer.

And that’s one of the better ones. But for this early in a series, there are a good number of authentic chuckles. Plus, this is probably going to be a show where characters and story matter more than the jokes; more of a “Full House” than a “Step By Step.” The premise is outstanding. A sitcom about the last man alive in a godless universe, with all intelligent life on the brink of extinction. I know there’s a lot of sci-fi parody, and I’m geek enough to get more than half of it. Good start, I expect it to become excellent.

Episode 3

I’m not 100% sure if “smeg” is real slang in England, or if it’s a made up profanity for the show. If it’s the latter, as I suspect, it’s a hell of a lot better than “frak.” Every time I heard “frak” while forcing myself through the” Battlestar Retardica” pilot I’d physically wince so hard that I’d have to replace the toothpicks holding my eyelids up. Lister gets lonely and pines for the woman he loved but never approached. He attempts to create a woman hologram. Holograms can talk and have emotions but you can’t touch them. Great plan. My favorite line came when Rimmer was chastising Lister for his vulgar taste in music. “Why don’t you listen to something really classical, like Mozart, Mendelssohn or Motorhead? ” Ha ha.

Episode 4

I thought having Cat as an ongoing character was going to be a terrible decision. Like, every episode is going to have a joke about a how he is a vain dolt who likes fish? Sounds great. But actually, he’s panning out pretty well. I like how Cat and the humans just kind of talk past each other and the cat is about as interested in human affairs as its ancestors were. Episode four also has a sacralicious bit about how the cat religion is based on misinterpretations of their actual history and Lester is their god, but Cat scoffs at the idea that Lister is the Lester from the cat bible, though they are identical in appearance. Before the disaster, Lister’s plan was to do a couple of space tours to save up money and and buy land in Fiji, where he would open a hot dog and doughnut shop and this became the cat notion of heaven, as predicted by the biblical figure, Lester. The doughnut diner uniforms, specifically, contention over whether they should have red or blue hats, led to a holy war that killed off most cats. Ha ha.

Joke punchline: I don’t come in an apple’s face before I eat it.

Also, instead of plowing through my ramblings, you could just watch this clip. It’s a pretty good indication of what the show has to offer:

Episode 5

The intros to each episode, wherein Holly gives the basic premise of the program and a recent update are often the biggest laugh of the episode. Episode 5: “Additional. Last week we discovered the cryogenically frozen body of tycoon Albert Nimble. He’d been launched into space in hope of encountering a life form who could cure his terrible disease. We revived him, explained we were the last human ship in existence, and we just wanted to let him know, we couldn’t help him. He was furious and died almost instantly. There’s just no pleasing some people.”

I used to smoke cigars in college for a while because it made me stand out and gave girls a reason to start a conversation with me, but I no longer know anything about them. This one is an Avo Uvezian, recommended by the cigar store guy. Maybe it’s because the cigar is kind of old, though it was in a protective tube, but this cigar is a bit mellow for my taste. I would have infused it with a hint of peach or a note of sour patch kids. Still, even in Southern California, smoking something heavy duty during winter is one of life’s few rewards.

Episode five takes a harder sci-fi turn that I hope continues. Lister catches a space-cold that makes his fevered hallucinations materialize, including manifestations of his confidence (a George-Hamilton-orange American football coach) and self-doubt (a pasty Brit). As I said before, the dark, kinda philosophical premise of the show is it’s greatest strength and the more it builds on that and plays with the genre the funnier, more interesting and occasionally bittersweet it gets. Please note, however, that I automatically believe that any film or TV show that is bittersweet is fantastic. Any objective observer would conclude that I vastly overestimate “Extras,” for example. I continue to enjoy the fact that, even after 3 million years of evolution into humanoids, cats are idiots.

Episode 6

Somehow a second Rimmer AI hologram comes into being. I missed how this happened, but I really enjoyed this episode. Allusion, homage and theft are a dizzying maelstrom in science fiction. Was the 2012 partially lifted from a relatively mediocre “Simpsons,” Tree House of Horror, or was it lifted from something before that, that “The Simpsons” was making fun of? In either case, I am strongly inclined to believe that Ruthless favorite, Moon, would not have been made, or at least, would not quite have been the same without “Red Dwarf,” especially this episode. We learn that Rimmer has a video tape of his death at the beginning and by the end Rimmer is hoping to happily watch Rimmer’s execution after quickly realizing that he hates himself. The tone and scenario both bring Moon to mind.

It’s also no secret that “Futurama” was influenced by “Red Dwarf.” I’m going to drop the episodic entries as I roll into season two, largely because I’m very tired at the moment. But it was the first part of the first episode when I was like “OMG Calculon!” Really, the premise of the whole show is similar to “Futurama,” though both shows are largely pastiche. Red Dwarf isn’t as funny, but it’s a lot more sciencey. I know the word ‘sciencey’ makes it sound overly serious, but the a big part of the appeal is the levity it uses for subjects like traveling into the future during cosmic contraction. Everything runs backwards, so the incalculably distant future is the recent past, but backwards. They’re looking forward to WWII, when millions will come to life and Hitler will be beaten back from the brink of empire to being a failed artist in Austria. That aspect, namely, references to the 20th century, gets kind of out of hand. I imagine Hitler will be remembered for some time, but Marlyn Monroe? I guess it’s possible. But I’m very certain that they won’t be making Brigitte Neilson jokes on interstellar flights. It would be stupid to make up too many references to fictive artists in the 23rd century or whatever, but they should have just skipped some of the 300 jokes about things that happened within the writers’ lifetimes. Also, I partially retract what I said about ‘smeg.’ It is still infinitely better than ‘frack’ but it must have become a catch phrase on or something on The Isles because as the show progresses they use it more and more and it approaches ‘smurf’ levels. “Lets go smeg some smegberries Pappa Smeg!” Fuck off.

Of all the words the Brits say wrong, ‘condom’ is the among the most striking. It’s so awkward and takes as much effort as saying something in Chinese. Why do they say it like it’s two separate words? It sounds like you’re trying to swindle an old Italian man. Con. Dom. So much effort put into a two syllable word is especially jarring to me. As a speaker of the California dialect, with a bit of a Southern background I have one of the world’s laziest tongues. Just ask the little lady! This humorous observation transitions flawlessly to a discussion of one of the things I love about this show, namely, listening to all of the accents and all of the actors attempt them, to varying degrees of success. I was able to pick out the one actor who actually was American, rather than a Brit doing an impersonation. He was pretty ugly, so I double checked to be sure. The non-Scottish actors did pretty good jobs at faking Yankee accents, but phony accents fascinate me because it’s a little window into how other people perceive your culture. This is doubly true if they are doing the accent derisively. And, whereas a lead actor really flubbing an accent in a major film just reeks of failure, like in 21, here it’s just another layer of fun. While I might be going on about this stuff too much, the internationalism is an easily missed, but important layer of the show. “Red Dwarf” is all about differences in perspectives and perceptions and attempts to build fragile, uncertain connections from behind them. At least half of the episodes involve strained attempts to relate, for example, between artificial intelligence and organic intelligence, male and female analogs from different universes, different species and characters from time periods separated by millions of years. It all comes back to Wallace’s observation that writing or art can make us feel less alone inside. “Red Dwarf” is about trying to achieve just that. If you want to spin the fact that sci-fi, in particular, so often seems to fill this inner loneliness and that it also caters to nerds into your junior thesis, you don’t even have to cite me.

Season two is also where we meet Kryten, in episode five, which is a nice confluence of all of the things I like about the show. There’s the integration and stereotyping of various English speaking cultures and dialects: America, Britain, Denmark. Kryten is an android governed by his desire to be polite and servile, so they gave him a Canadian accent. He summons the crew to help the women he’s in charge of “protecting” though they have been dead for centuries and he prepares their skeletons by dressing them up and putting lipstick on their skulls–pretty dark, but the levity is never lost. And of course, almost by default, an android raises all kinds of issues of identity and free will. Melancholy, sweet, prejudiced, morbid and funny. What could possibly go wrong?

Epilogue:

After that I got all the way through the third “series.” As predicted the show continues to improve and reaches the height of it’s powers when Lister breaks into a spontaneous rap, “The Red Dwarf Shuffle” which is the culmination of all of the play about the various English speaking countries because it is clearly based on the Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle.”

How English audiences were supposed to get the reference, I have no clue. So I thought I’d point it out. It’s too bad the show came out pre-internet because it deserves a nerd driven website to sort out and explain all of the references across cultures. I’ll explain things to the young/foreign this far, as I am a Bears “supporter.” The ’85 bears are generally considered to be one of the best American football teams of all time, and delusionally considered to be the single best team of all time, by fans like me. Here are a couple of points about the video- if number 45 seems somewhat out of place, that is because he came out of Yale and picked up an MBA from Northwestern in ’85 while the rest of the team was strapping prostitutes to their feet to ski down mountains of cocaine. Number 72 attempted a second career as a competitive eater. I would probably read a book that did nothing but flesh out all of the cultural allusions from this show to a ridiculous extent.

Also, when Rimmer takes possession of Cat’s body, he uses it to gorge on fried chicken and waffles. Someone involved with this show is a hard core Ameriphile. I don’t think most white people over here had even heard of the fried chicken and waffles thing until Jackie Brown came out. So if you thought I was overdoing the whole inter-anglo dynamic, you were obviously wrong.

Anyway, the series really reaches it’s potential here. Everything good about is epitomized by one of the best pure sitcom back-and-forths ever, in an ongoing exchange between Lister and Krysten over silicon heaven and human heaven, each thinking the other is quaintly ridiculous.

Lister: I don’t mean to say anything out of place here, Kryten, but that is completely whacko Jacko. There is no such thing as ‘Silicon Heaven’.

Kryten: Then where do all the calculators go?

See you for Punky Brewster and Heroin in 2012.

• Earnest Borgnine and Jan-Michael Vincent were reunited on a special episode of “The Simpsons,” though they appeared in separate scenes and did not record together.
• I know that some of the things I say here seem made up, but Stephen J. Cannell’s teenage son really was tragically suffocated by a giant sand castle.
• I had a dream that I was jumping up and down on a bed with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. It was fun for a while. Then we accidentally killed Larry Bird when he fell and then one of us jumped on him and broke his neck. We thought nobody would believe it was an accident. I was relieved to wake up and find myself in the clear.

Episode 15: Santini’s Millions

Borgnine is transporting a human heart to the The Windy City in Airwolf, which makes absolutely no sense, seeing as Airwolf is supposed to be a top secret vehicle that doesn’t officially exist and if it landed on the roof of a hospital in the middle of Chicago, somebody might see it. Plus, there were more suitable vehicles for such tasks, even back in the 80s. I was alive then, and I clearly remember there being commercial jets.  It’s even possible that some made that very same flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. But then again, String and Dom also use Airwolf to break up disputes amongst local farmers and to settle 98% of their personal problems in their favor, so what are you gonna do? So, Ernie’s flying across the desert and his scanners see a small plane crash, he checks it out and it turns out to be the richest man in the world. I mean, he is literally supposed to the richest man in the world.  Who Dom just happens to find in the desert while using a secret military aircraft for routine organ transportation.  The Richest Man In The World offers Borgnine $50,000 to delay the organ transport and fly him to a business meeting in Los Angeles, and Borgnine declines because he’s incredibly noble. I mean, I would totally accept a medium sized bribe to indirectly kill an innocent person with an act of heartless negligence. Who wouldn’t? Because of this act of divine moral fortitude, The Richest Man In The World wills Borgnine 40% of his empire which turns out to be worth $40 million which would mean that, even in the 80s he wouldn’t have been close to being the richest man in the world. The rest of the episode makes less sense.

Best Borgnine Line: The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

Episode 16: Prisoner of Yesterday

If it wasn’t so meandering , I’d think this episode was meant to launch a spin-off because the regular cast only gets about half the screen time. The real star of the episode is Doc, or rather, whatever actor played Doc, one of String’s friends who is kidnapped to help an ailing revolutionary leader in a fictionalized Latin American country called “Argentina” or something. Once he’s back in the country, he meets an old flame, the revolutionary’s daughter, Lilly. He somehow wins her heart but no one gives a fuck because he is neither Jan-Michael Vincent nor Ernest Borgnine and this episode suffers from a severe dearth of helicopter footage. What the fuck is going on? I think I’m going blind in one eye.

BBL:  Hey!  Where are the sissy and the bald guy going?

Episode 17: Natural Born

Sigh. Was Jan-Michael wrecked all of the time at this point, or something? “Airwolf” seems to be in short supply of Airwolf. Another episode featuring a one-off guest star who gets most of the screen time. Drug dealers kill his dad… …. …. …. finally, Airwolf intervenes. It does have a drunk clown and some especially nice stunt work. One would hope so because this is the episode where the stunt man was killed. Instead of dicking around with some stupid kid, I think Airwolf should have blown up the CN tower which was, at the time, the world’s tallest “building.” How dare the Canadians try to usurp the status of the Sears Tower with that ugly, useless grab at the record? Like, if you glued a bunch of Pringles cans together, stuck a Frisbee on top and it was taller than the CN tower, would the Canadians concede the record to you? Airwolf could have swooped in at the base firing rockets with JMV screaming “Muuulroneeeeey!!!” I’m sorry, that was the beer talking. It’s all been the beer talking, but on other occasions it’s been funny.

Best BBL: Now, stay as close to my bird as possible.

Episode 18: Out of The Sky

This episode opens at a country concert, a generic setting where the series has spent time before. I feel like “late century rube” is an underrated set of 80s aesthetics, as a good portion of action heroes eventually find themselves in a hick-infested dive where slide guitars are blasting and everybody’s clothes are too small. I don’t blame them because I think it would be kind of fun to go to a bar like that, especially since country music was so much better before it just became pop music for the functionally illiterate. Santini Air is working on the production of a concert for country super star, “Roxy” and the rest of the story elements are basically the same as “Colonel Homer.” Suspiciously so. Well, there is more kidnapping and helicopters. Also, it has this scene. Yes, judging by the rest of the actress’ performance, which demonstrated a range not seen since Harrison Ford played Han Solo during the period when he was frozen in carbonite, this is an actual vag grab and this is her genuine reaction. I’ve viewed this sequence about 1,700 times. I suggest you take at least a few run-throughs to drink it in.