bonkers day

Yesterday was a little bit bonkers at work.

Basically, the person who handles a particular side of the RED business had a day off, and for some reason everyone chose that day to start sending her new requirements. I won't explain the boring tedium of it all, but basically it meant that I was running around like a headless chicken doing loads of stuff that I've never done before.

It wasn't too bad in a way, because otherwise I was waiting on loads of other stuff and so would have had not much to do. Thankfully they're now back in work today and also my other stuff has come back to me, so I can get on with it.

I also got a phone call late in the afternoon from Aldershot Parcel Force depot (I noted it was not from the number given to me and that was causing me all sort of problems) about my problem. Basically, the guy said that the payment had worked. Something he said made it sound like actually it was my re-attempts to pay that had worked, but, confusingly, he also seemed to imply the original payment had worked.

There's also the option that they've decided to wave the charge or there's some system error or something, but either way I guess I don't have to worry about it any more.

In the evening I just laid in bed and watched telly as I was a bit knackered after the bonkers day.

Normally Wednesday would be film review day, but as mentioned on Monday I didn't get a new review disks (it actually turned up in the post Tuesday) and didn't watch any films. As such, I thought I'd discuss a couple of the telly programmes I've been watching instead.

Dollhouse

I'd heard mixed things about this.

The show's actually by Joss Wheddon, who did Buffy, Angel and Firefly, all of which I enjoyed to varying degrees and I think that might have been part of the problem. See, the feeling I've been getting from the show so far is that it's an interesting idea that isn't explored enough in these earlier episodes.

The basic idea is that the Dollhouse is an organisation that can manipulate people's minds, wiping them and implanting new memories and personalities. They therefore recruit people who become the dolls of the title and then very rich people pay for them to fulfil certain rolls.

This could mean anything from them being a master thief to a hired assassin.

And that's sort of the problem - the show starts off too focused on the idea of being something different each week. It's kinda wrapped up in its own conceit - it's like normal telly, where at the end of the episode, the show resets and next week everything's back roughly to where it was.

Which is okay for normal telly, but being Joss Wheddon I think people were expecting more. It also didn't help that the resetting got it back to a weird position of implying "everything's worked out okay", yet you've got these girls who are essentially being abused and it's not making any real comment on that.

However, in more recent episodes, there's been a bit more of a hint of a longer story and it's actually started to focus a bit better on some of the moral issues as well as suggest there's more to the Dollhouse than it appears.

I've heard it gets quite good towards the end, but I'll have to wait and see.

Paradox

The other show I wanted to mention was Paradox.

This is essentially a new crime thriller type show, but it's tried to wrap itself around a bit of Science Fiction. In some ways it's like Bonekickers in that regard, but although I avoided Bonekickers like the plague, I thought I'd check this out.

My feelings are mixed - it kinda works and doesn't work in equal measure.

First up, the actual crime thriller type element combined with the premise (images from the future are downloaded by a scientist) works quite well. It's an intriguing way of providing a twist on the "whodunit" format.

You're effectively being given all these clues as to what's going to happen and then you have to try to work out what it is and how to stop it. It's quite satisfying on that front, in that it's a fair puzzle and you watch the police try to work it out too.

One of the big problems is with who they've decided to use as characters. Two of the worst culprit's are the Scottish detective, who always seems to be cynical about everything, but is also shagging Outhwaite in a "let's make the relationships complicated" fashion, and the Black detective. The black guy seems to be a sort of "always by the book" character so that the maverick Outhwaite can clash with him all the time.

Outhwaite's character and the scientist are actually okay, although again their kinda drawn from a pool of predictable character types, they don't clash with the basic idea of the show. See, the problem is that the way it's being presented is very much from their point of view, in that they believe the images are genuine and that they should try to stop them. The other two go against this and while that might suggest some good tension, in reality, because the scientist and Outhwaite are continuously proven right, it just makes the others seem a bit stupid.

There are also some problems regarding the whole paradox itself. My main one is where are the images coming from?

Weirdly, as they become real things, the camera does a sort of "photo still shot" effect as if it's the camera that took the picture that's been beamed back in time. But how does that work?

Are we supposed to believe that these people are watching grabbed moments from the telly show they're staring in? Very meta-textual, but also very non-sensical. Or in this universe is everyone chased after by film crews?

And if it's meant to be that they're photos taken by normal people or photographers, then how does that work? Some of them are so utterly random no-one in their right mind would take them.