Tag Archives: Review

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse… Primeval – Series 3, Episode 6, Review (Spoilers)

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Can no one put two and two together?

Synopsis

Quinn and Becker test the ARC’s security, unknown to them, Christine Johnson and her soldiers watch everything through concealed surveillance cameras.

Meanwhile, Conner and Page continue to study the artifact. Page gets the idea of passing a laser through it, and, after various attempts, the artifact projects a 3D image of something that looks very much like Cutter’s modern-art piece of an anomaly map. Christine sees this and launches a takeover of the ARC.

Quinn discovers one of the cameras and they realize the game is up. Becker helps Quinn, Conner, Abby and Page, along with the artifact, escape to a safe house Lester has arranged, just as Christine’s people take over the ARC and assume command.

Lester is fired and Becker is taken into Christine’s team.

At the safe house, there’s a mystery. It hasn’t been used in years, since before the war. It was a research base for a group of scientists working on a top secret project, who left the place as if they expected to come back, but never did.

Conner discovers the dead body of one of the scientists in a nearby bunker, trapped in a small observation room. His coded diary, which Page easily decodes, ends on the note, “oh no they’re back” or something like that.

With nothing better to do, everyone gets dressed up in period costumes and dances the afternoon away. Unbeknownst to them, and anomaly opens up right in the very bunker where they found the dead scientist and the area is now swarming with Terror Birds.

The anomaly detector at the ARC alerts Christine and her staff, and a team are dispatched. Meanwhile, our heroes battle it out, unarmed against the ferocious birds.

Christine’s team is killed by the birds, but Quinn manages to lure them back into the anomaly, which conveniently closes.

Due to some unguarded words spoken by Christine to Becker, who recorded her, the minister has her removed and Lester is put back in charge of the ARC.

All’s well that ends well, as the episode closes with a rendition of “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

(Oh, and Abby’s little brother holds a poker party while she’s out and looses Rex in a hand of poker.)

Analysis

Do I have to start every analysis section with the sentence, “There’s a lot wrong with the episode?”

So, let’s dwell on the good for a moment or two. It was a bit of an action-packed story, which. on that level, was rather entertaining.

So much for the good part.

Ignoring all the stuff going on with political intrigue and costume drama, does no one on the ARC staff have enough of a brain to realize that the safe house having an anomaly cannot possibly be a coincidence?!?!?! Is is not obvious that scientists either died because of the anomaly – or went through it, never (yet) to return? Does it not seem very, very, very, very, very suspicious to them that this was an laboratory working on top secret defense projects and yet nobody ever apparently bothered to even check up on them and clean up the food left on the tables? Or that this is a safehouse from Lester’s Ministry?!?!?!?The same people who brought you Christine Johnson – who knows more about the anomalies than the ARC people?

Hello! Even in this corner of the universe, 2+2=4, and yet no one mentioned any notion that there could be a connection between the safehouse and the anomalies, or the scientific research and the anomalies. This might even be the source of the anomalies to begin with.

Instead we get a heartwarming return of Lester and lots of applause and a musical interlude. What’s up with that?

Next week looks even better, a medieval knight and a dragon. (No, I’m not making that up.)

Are they just trying to alienate me? – Primeval – Series 3, Episode 5 – Review – Spoilers

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I’ll never look at athlete’s foot the same way again.

Synopsis

Rich Sir Richard has a groovy pad in the city overlooking the Thames, his subordinate can’t tell the difference between a piece of modern art and anomaly. He’s sucked into another time but not before he deposits spores he’s been infected with on the floor. The anomaly disappears, trapping him – presumably forever.

Sir Richard later touches the spores and becomes infected, heading into the busy, yet picturesque, St. Pancras train station.

Back at the ARC, Conner’s little pets have chewed a cable, deactivating the anomaly detector. Once reconnected it registers the now-closed anomaly, which the team investigates. Conner takes a sample of the spores back to the ARC. At the same time, Danny Quinn breaks into the ARC trying to join the team.

At the ARC, Conner discovers the spores are virulent and contains them in the new environmental greenhouse.

Christine Johnson arrives at the ARC, looking for the artifact. Lester denies any knowledge of it. While Lester is distracted, Christine’s people snoop around and one becomes infected with the spores. When Conner and Danny try to rescue him, it’s too late. At first they think he is dead, but then he resurrects as a walking fungus monster. Conner thinks he kills the creature with heat and Danny, now somewhat improbably trusted with the task, heads to St. Pancras with flame throwers to destroy the creature Sir Richard has become.

Conner then learns heat helps the fungus spread and that freezing cold is the answer.

Danny captures the creature and brings it back to the ARC, where they’ve laid a freezing trap.

Jenny is nearly killed by both the creature and the freezing cold, but in the end (barely) survives. So, she quits the team and Danny is put in charge.

Analysis

Just another day in the completely illogical world of Primeval.

I’m not going to ask questions like, “What kind of life cycle does this fungus creature have? What does it gain by morphing into a man-like monster? What was the monster trying to do? Was it going to do the nasty with Jenny or was it just going to explode and spore on her? What kind of environmental pressures and conditions would lead to such a fungus to evolve? How did a walking collection of fungus make noises? It seemed like very little of Sir Richard was left, did it still have lungs? Why?”

OK, I’ll ask that question. WHY? WHY? WHY?

But most of all I’ll ask, “Why are they trying to ruin the show by having Jenny leave?” They’d just got her back to being Claudia-like and now she’s gone. Does anyone else buy this whole, “I used to be Claudia Brown now I don’t know who I am” nonsense? Obviously she doesn’t get it. No, she was never Claudia Brown. She is a genetically identical person in a different timeline. She’s no more Claudia Brown than identical twins are the same person.

At least Lester is getting a few good lines. He’s going to need them, pretty soon he’s going to have to carry the show by himself.

Here’s another one that frightens me, Abby’s little brother, Jack. So, what’s his point for being in the show? You never pay money for an actor/character if you’re not going to use them. Is it just to get Conner into a new apartment, and why would they want to do that. Surely Conner’s place for living is irrelevant. Is Jack going to be the next newest team member or is he going to be be eaten by something nasty so that Abby can decide to leave the team, too? Or… oh, no, no, no… what if Abby is killed and he takes her place on the team. That’s really adding insult to injury!

Here’s a couple things to throw out just to nit pick (and to avoid really tearing into the fungus monster). Detector? Cable chewed through? No alarms are sounded and yet, somehow the recording device still worked? I guess that idea is OK if you think of the equipment like a VCR, which typically traps the signal before reaching the final destination (the TV), but that’s not typically how ad-hoc devices like the anomaly detector are thrown together, which would do primary function first (hence the name, “primary“) and recording for analysis second.

This is a perfect example of what I mentioned in my previous review. Plot-wise, they’ve buttoned themselves into a corner. Without a stupid happening like this cable incident, they know too much, too soon about the appearance of the anomalies to tell a story that requires a “stealth” invasion through an anomaly. From now on – if there is an “on” in the future – we’re going to be subjected to an unavoidable stream of technical faults, accidents and sabotage to move the plots along.

Here’s another one: What’s that environmentally-controlled greenhouse room for? I mean apart from it’s immediate, one-time, disposable need in this particular episode? Has there ever been any indication that the ARC is attempting to collect samples from the past for research? The only specimens that I’m aware of are those that have become trapped – typically, they ones that come through and get trapped are not plants.

So here’s my last thought, my last glimmer of hope for Primeval not that both Jenny and Claudia are gone. The producers have done something admirable this year, they’ve eliminated the characters slowly, rather than waiting for the season finale. That’s depressing, because their “end” comes sooner, but plot-wise, it’s more dramatic and surprising, because everybody knows that characters (and more specifically actors) leave at the end of the season, not in the middle.

But why is that? It’s because television is a structured environment, actors are hired, usually, for whole series/seasons – typically, they’re paid for it even if they’re written out early – consequently, they’re not written out early.

I said “glimmer of hope,” didn’t I? Yes, I think we can actually count on that structure to return Jenny (or perhaps even Claudia), and even Cutter and maybe even Stephen for the series finale in about 2 or 3 episodes time. It’ll be a final farewell, and it will obviously have to involve some jiggery-pokery with the timelines again – which will perhaps “fix” some of the plot traps they’ve built into this timeline – assuming the series continues.

I wonder if it is significant that Quinn and Cutter never met?

The Mighty Quinn – Primeval – Series 3, Episode 4 – Review – Spoilers

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Danny’s back. Now there’s a surprise. (Not)

Synopsis

The devastated team keeps working after Cutter’s death, the ARC is being rebuilt. Lester’s nemesis is revealed (to the audience) to have not only a captive future predator, but an anomaly all her own – one that has a “cloaking device” keeping the ARC people from finding it.

Meanwhile, the reporter causes problems and steals a detector, allowing him and a camera crew to arrive first at an anomaly appearance.

Out from the anomaly comes a giganotosaurus, a giant Cretaceous theropod. He eats some people – even that guy from Chased by Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park – attacks a plane and generally causes a nuisance.

Conner and crew battle the creature, and have their bacon pulled out of the fire by Danny Quinn, who has been following them.

Conner succeeds in locking the anomaly, and it appears the nosy reporter people are killed.

Analysis

I’m really not happy that the actor portraying Danny Quinn has been billed as the first name on the credits. Surely he’s not to be the new star or the show and leader of the squad? As previously pointed out – he’s totally unqualified to be anything but a gunman/detective. They proved to us that Cutter’s art sculpture could predict anomalies, meaning they aren’t random and now they tell us Cutter didn’t bother to explain it to anyone, so the secret is lost. I don’t think Danny Quinn is going to piece it together, that’s for sure.

Although it appears that the reporters are squashed under the giganotosaurus’  feet, in the next shot, the floor underneath is remarkable clean and reporter-smear free.

Here’s a question. Just as the anomaly opened, why did the shipping crate shake around? Was that from magnetic force, or something else inside it? Why then did the giganotosaurus happen to attack the airplane that was carrying that same crate? What possible interest would a plane be to it?

Has no one on the team noticed that this series, for some reason, the anomalies are now “sized” to match the creature that comes out of them? First the little tiny anomaly for the diictodons and now the giant one for the giganotosaurus. Unless that’s just bad production design, it must mean that there’s some advanced thought that goes into the opening of an anomaly, but by whom or what? And wouldn’t that invalidate the notion that Cutter’s model was accurate?

Actually, it seems that the series has been cornered into an ever-restricted space. Consider: Originally, they didn’t know when an anomaly opened, they didn’t know where they opened, they didn’t know what came out of them and there was nothing they could do with them.

Now they know immediately when one opens, they can track it, they can close it and they’ve already stumbled upon the secret to moving one – even if Conner hasn’t implemented such a device yet, it’s only a matter of time. Really, what’s left for them to do? Oh, I know, let’s throw in some secret government intrigue!

Primeval – Cut Down – Series 3, Episode 3 – Review (Spoilers)

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I didn’t see that coming.

Synopsis

The story opens with Helen drilling her Clone Troopers and demonstrating that they are mindless zombies by having one kill himself.

A reporter who has been unsuccessfully on the trail of the anomaly story stakes out the ARC in the hopes of getting the biggest story of all time.

An anomaly opens in a London hospital, Cutter, Conner, Abby and Becker go to investigate. The reporter follows them.

Inside the hospital, a small anomaly has opened and a hatching of baby Diictodons have come through and are chewing through the hospital’s wiring. Posing as a doctor, the reporter nearly captures one of the creatures after he locks Cutter and Abby into an operating room with a pregnant mother and the anomaly.

Back at the ARC, Helen reveals her secret weapon. She has cloned Cutter and uses him to infiltrate the ARC and shut down its defenses. The Clone Troopers move in, plant explosives and capture the remaining members of the team.

After Abby births the baby, Becker frees Cutter and the anomaly closes, leaving two diictodons that were captured by Abby and Conner. The return to the ARC, where they are all quickly captured by Helen and her boys.

Helen reveals to Cutter her motives. The future has been destroyed and it was the ARC that bred the super predators that destroyed the world. She has decided to destroy the ARC and stop Cutter’s work to save the world. However, she thinks Cutter knows the secret of the artifact both she and Lester’s boss, Caroline Steel, were trying to retrieve from the future. Cutter feigns knowledge of the artifact to stall for time.

Back in their cell, Becker helps everyone escape and then he and Conner try to the PA system to play a faked recording of Helen’s voice. They’ve determined that she has voice control over the soldiers and plan to broadcast new orders to them.

The plan works and the soldiers stand down, Helen commands Cutter’s clone to destroy the building. The clones are not mentally the same as the original and Helen considers them to be “living machines”. While Helen escapes, Cutter tries desperately to convince his clone that he is a real person and should not give up his life. Although he cannot convince him to abandon his programming, the clone gives Cutter a chance to escape.

Everyone gets out except Helen and Cutter goes back into the burning building to save her. He finds her unconscious and hides the artifact before he wakes her up to save her. What he doesn’t expect is that Helen is as determined as ever to stop the destruction of the world and she fatally shoots Cutter and then escapes.

Conner re-enters the building to save Cutter but finds him dying. Cutter shows him the artifact and tells him he has to carry on without him. Cutter dies in Conner’s arms.

Analysis

Things are obviously changing in the series. It’s no more mystery now about the cop from the last episode – he is undoubtedly going to come join the team in Cutter’s absence. Will the ARC be rebuilt? Should it? With all the workers walking around the place, none of them seem to do anything. Will Lester’s new boss and her hidden agenda prevent them from rebuilding. Will our team become rebel good guys, hiding from the law, just like the A-Team?

I do like one thing the writer has done in the episode. Helen has been increasingly appearing to be the over-the-top diabolical crazy villain that appears to want to take over the world. If we can take things at face value, now it would appear that her agenda is to save the world. She simply differs with Cutter over our place in the grand scheme of things. Can we be agents of change in the future for good or must we face the future and accept it meekly?

Amusingly, Cutter is on the wrong side of that argument, but one wonders why Helen cares? Being that she’s seen the depth of time for herself, she must also understand that nothing can last forever – including herself, and while she might be able to change the future, she can never live long enough to guarantee that it continues to lead to a future she desires.

Still, it’s nice to see Helen slightly less one-dimensional. It’s a pity she’s obviously not read any time travel fiction, or watched Doctor Who or she’d realize that history isn’t always right. The predators won’t have been created by the ARC (although the might escape from there) they’ll be released somehow by the very artifact that she took to ARC, meaning, ultimately that she will be culpable in the downfall of man through her own actions to save it. History is probably wrong because of some ill-informed journalism by the reporter who is dogging the team now.

I’ve had my misgivings about the make-up of the team for some time, and Cutter’s death doesn’t bode well for the future. Consider the first series team, A Paleontologist (Cutter), a second Paleontologist with big game hunting experience (Stephen), a third paleontology student with some computer skills (Conner), a zoologist (Abby) and two mandarins (Lester and Claudia.) Not exactly a crack squad of experts, but at least they were there because they were Johnny-on-the-spot.

Series 2 gets difficult. Conner certainly seems to have changed his specialty, now seemingly an electronics whiz, but apart from the Claudia/Jenny fiasco, the team remains much the same. Basically unqualified to investigate temporal phenomena, despite the vast resources of the ARC, the team has added no experts in physics, for example, or any other field that might help.

Now, we’ve added Dr. Page, who, as professor of mythology is… sorry… worthless, and we’ve lost Cutter, the brains of the outfit. They’re going to bring back that cop, who, while perhaps handy in a firefight, will be worthless at figuring out anything about the anomalies.

It doesn’t bode well.

Life on Mars (US) – From Write to Wrong

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When first I heard about a US version of Life on Mars, the excellent, if ultimately depressing, British show about a modern-day police detective trapped in 1973, I thought, “there’s nothing they can do to justify a remake, and there’s no way they could end the show the same way.”

I watched the first episode of the US version… or, at least, I watched the last half of the first episode. I never watched another.

Sadly, a friend, with a wicked, evil sense of humor (well, he’s British, so I suspect he was just trying to rub BBC superiority into my face) compelled me to watch the finale of the US version. The show was mercifully cancelled but they allowed them to “finish off” in the final episode.

Now, I’m not going to reveal the US ending, but… never in my life have I been as irritated, annoyed and pissed off at such a stupid ending. What a total (unexpected) load of cop out!

You can watch it here at ABC’s Life on Mars page. I’m not sure if ABC blocks out-of-country viewers, but it would be a mercy if they did.

Time is Like Modern Art – Primeval – Series 3, Episode 2 – Review (spoilers)

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If mythological creatures are manifestations of anomalies, are haunted houses, also?

Synopsis

14 years ago a magnificent house stands empty. Teenagers break in, but they don’t get out.

Back in the present, Cutter has used the data from Dr. Page’s research to build a new model of the anomalies, with it, he is able to make a prediction of a location for an anomaly. Jenny, Conner and Abby go to investigate. The site is the same house, still abandoned and now in disrepair. Something is still in the house, something fast and able to camouflage itself at will.

Adding to the mystery, a hard-nosed copper tries to keep the ARC team from researching the house.

Meanwhile, Helen steals Dr. Page’s access pass to the ARC and sends one of her clone troopers to steal Cutter’s clothes. The intruder is detected and killed. Cutter begins to get a glimmer when he recognizes the dead man as the same guy who was killed in the Silurian desert in series 2. And why does he want Cutter’s clothes?

Abby discovers a little girl who is feeding the creature back at the house. The girl does it so the creature won’t eat the neighborhood pets – or people.

A showdown happens at the house, just as an anomaly opens and, at first, the creature finally goes home – then it decides to come back and kill people, so the cop pops a few caps in its ass.

Analysis

There’s a lot going on in this episode, little of it good.

But first, let’s digress for a few moments and discuss brilliance. Brilliance is tough for some writers – perhaps most writers – because, by definition, brilliant people are difficult to follow for the average person. It follows that, if the writer cannot think brilliantly, it would be difficult to put thoughts in the head of a brilliant character. Difficult, but not impossible. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a classic example. Holmes’ brilliance is apparent in his almost magical ability to discern things others cannot see, but ultimately, they are explained as reasonable and understandable manifestations of human capabilities, used more effectively.

Sadly, Dr. Cutter’s character isn’t done this justice. The writer’s have confused preternatural clarity of vision with “anything unexplained thing Cutter says must be brilliant because it doesn’t make sense.”

Case and point, his new 3D model of the anomalies is just idiotic. What does it represent? Are we really supposed to believe that bending a few plastic rods around the room yields a meaningful model? What are the X, Y and Z axes in that sculpture? Surely, if time and location are factored in, it would have to have four (or more) dimensions, something that would have to be done in a computer to conceptualize. Certainly a three-dimension model would be wholly inadequate. The writer’s throw a bone to the audience when Jenny asks if it couldn’t be done on a computer. I suppose that was their way of justifying the real-world model, trying to stave off critics like me, but Cutter’s reply shows they gave the concept of the model no thought at all, they just wanted to give him a set-piece to brood over visually. (Another writers’ short-cut for portraying brilliance.)

New rule at the ARC: All employees must be shown a picture of Helen Cutter as a condition of their employment. (Obviously, they don’t have that rule, but I think they should.)

Even after Dr. Page’s badge is stolen and used to infiltrate the ARC, it doesn’t appear that (a) she either put two and two together and realized the woman that knocked her over was the pickpocket that stole her pass or (b) anyone at the ARC was remotely interested in how her pass ended up in the bad guy’s hands.

Cutter even deduces that Helen was the culprit, but doesn’t bother to show her picture to Page after the fact. Sloppy. Really sloppy. I hope that doesn’t mean Dr. Page will encounter Helen again and still not know who she is, thus allowing other needless plot complications.

Let’s turn our attention to the anomaly in this episode. Cutter’s model “predicted” this anomaly, but not when it would arrive – or so they stated. Did his model predict that it would reoccur? That would have been something worth mentioning.

We’re given no information about where this anomaly is connected to, but it seems reasonable to assume that the creature was a future-creature. At times, it seemed to speak English. Certainly, I thought I heard whispery sounds that were like, “not time yet” presumably referring to the return of the anomaly. This would imply that the creature was intelligent in the human meaning of the word. If so, it was pretty dumb and animalistic in its behavior. Surely an intelligent creature could do a much better job of hiding and waiting for the anomaly to return. Being lured out like a trained animal by the little girl to get food was completely foolish.

Here’s another problem with Primeval – the things from future seem to be intelligent and menacing. The bat creatures were once even described as possibly the predators that evolved to prey on humans. In the last episode, we saw them slaughter a squad of soldiers who were on a “suicide mission” to the future. Was anyone else unconvinced by that? One unprepared squad of soldiers might be wiped out, but these creatures aren’t immune to our technological weapons. Bullets kill them, and we’ve got lots better weapons than bullets. They aren’t a credible threat, unless, of course, you’re a writer and you’re not going to let the human characters win by making them not try their best.

What about this cop? He’s obviously been setup as a future character. Will he be ally, foe or wild card that Helen doesn’t know about that ultimately saves the day?

At the end of the episode, Helen succeeds in stealing Cutter’s DNA. What ever could she want that for? Wasn’t it clever of her to risk so much, steal Page’s pass, send one of her minions (to his death) into the very heart of the high-security ARC just to get Cutter’s shirt to get some DNA, when all she had to do was slip into his unprotected home and get some out of his his brush? (Couldn’t she have done that during the day and had even less chance of getting caught?

I’ve got to stop know, my head hurts.

Book Recommendation – iPhone Development

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Since I started programming computers a scant 31 years ago, I’ve had to learn many different programming languages – from ancients like COBOL, FORTRAN and RPG to more modern languages like Java. It’s all part of the game, but undeniably the programming paradigm has shifted beyond all recognition since I wrote that first TRS-80 Basic program all those years ago. They are increasingly more complex.

What I’ve found is that, with each language, there’s usually a key concept or concepts that “flips the light switch” to understanding. My latest endeavor, iPhone programming, involves learning both XCode development methods and Objective C. Objective C being an extension of C and a cousin of C++ – neither language is one that I’ve had much call to use. So, I’m really starting from scratch on this one.

Now, this “flip the switch” concept is probably different from one person to another, and, of course, it reflects certain cognitive biases towards certain forms of language and means of explanation – in short, your mileage may vary.

I was struggling trying to use Apple’s documentation, and even some of the other books on the market were not doing whatever it was that I needed. My latest acquisition, though, Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche’s “Beginning iPhone Development – Exploring the iPhone SDK” has finally done what I needed to do, and the light has finally dawned.

Therefore I’d recommend this book to others looking to get their start with iPhone development. They do a nice job of explaining the (frankly bizarre) drag and drop use of Interface Builder to link the nib files to the Objective C code, which was one concept that was really giving me grief. (It all seems almost logical, now.)

Pity my plans for an iPhone Duckworth-Lewis calculator were scuttled to trade secrets. It’d be a handy tool for non-professional teams for use back in the pavilion.

Cutter Needs a Cut – Primeval – Series 3 – Episode 1 – Review

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Primeval returns for a third series!

Synopsis

The episode starts with a new member of the military (Captain Becker) being added to the ARC team. His job, keep them from getting killed like poor ol’ Steven.

Meanwhile, at the British Museum, an anomaly appears and a prehistoric crocodilian (Pristichampsus) kills one of the employees. Cutter’s team arrives and meets the new woman on the team, Dr. Sarah Page, who works at the museum. The croc escapes to the Thames with Cutter and Abby in hot pursuit.

Lester has got his hands full, too. He’s got a new… boss… or liason… or something at the Home Office, named Christine Johnson. He doesn’t like her and there’s even a hint it might once have been romantic. She’s got some secret military stuff going on with fighting the future bat creatures, and a mysterious artifact that they failed to retrieve.

Conner and Dr. Page investigate the anomaly, which is sealed inside a magnetite Egyptian statue. Not only do they discover that magnetite can somehow trap an anomaly (and move it) but that electricity can somehow “lock” the anomaly down for a period of time.

After some heroics, the croc returns to the anomaly to go home. For a few moments, it looks like there’s going to be bloodshed, but then Page suggests that they all bow, like the Egyptians would have, and the creature leaves peaceably.

Cutter realizes that some mythology may have been influenced by anomalies and so Page joins the team to research past anomalies.

As the episode ends, we learn that Helen Cutter is still out to cause problems, and that she and her crew of clone soldiers retrieved the mysterious artifact and now posses it… even though she doesn’t know what it is. It’s further revealed that the British soldiers that had been trying to retrieve the artifact were operating through an anomaly, somewhere in the future.

Analysis

It’s good to have Primeval back on the air. This is a show that a both absolutely love the premise and detest some of the gross gaps in logic in the screenplay. The second series was an absolute train-wreck of illogical plot lines.

In this, the first episode of series three, there wasn’t much plot, really, and so there wasn’t much to pick on. I’m not sure if I’m pleased or disappointed.

I do have a few observations: Even if she’s still Jennifer Lewis, it’s good to see the character now back to looking, dressing and acting like the first series’ Claudia Brown. It seems like they might even being trying to bring back Cutter’s romance with her, but of course, work got in the way in this episode. It seems that now she knows about Claudia Brown, whereas in series two, even though Cutter tried telling people, they kept acting like he’d never told them.

Cutter seriously needs a haircut this year. Perhaps he can lend some to Abby who needs to grow some back.

It’s good to see that Helen Cutter finally changed her clothes. That half-torn, bust-augmenting jungle gear just didn’t make sense when she’d be back in our time driving cars and such.

I suppose when they started searching the British Museum at night there was a good reason that Job One wasn’t to turn on the lights? Can’t think of one, though. Most people search for things better in bright light rather than flashlights.

I’m a little disappointed that, knowing the anomalies are magnetic, they hadn’t tested their responses to simple magnets.

Conner’s plan to “block off” the anomaly using all those boxes or artifacts at the British Museum was a little cavalier with things which we no doubt fragile and potentially priceless. I can’t see the military tossing them around and stacking them up as the did.

The dumbest idea may actually have the most interesting concept. Page demonstrates that the Egyptians thought the crocs coming from the anomaly were the god Ammut. The dumb part is that she convinces everyone to bow to the croc because they are no doubt used to being worshipped by the Egyptians. It works, and it leaves them alone. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

What’s interesting about that idea is the notion that time does not run parallel on either side of the anomaly. It’s been over 3,000 years since the Egyptians were worshipping Ammut, so if time ran parallel 3,000 years would also have elapsed in the Paleocene, too. If that were the case, the crocs wouldn’t be conditioned to people bowing. Of course, that’s no real surprise. We already knew that the “back ends” of the anomalies weren’t fixed, since revealed in Cutter’s first series, non-linear excursions into the Permian era demonstrated.

Still… it’s good that it back on the air. It’s something to do for the next few weeks.

iMovie ’09 – Review

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It’ time to review iMovie ’09, the only other piece (apart from iPhoto) that has much interest for me in iLife.

In the interest of full disclosure, I made the move to the Macintosh just so that I could use Final Cut Pro. I learned to edit video on an ancient linear U-matic editor. I learned to edit non-linearly on Adobe Premiere and then stepped up to Final Cut Pro. ([1] Final Cut Pro is a huge improvement over Premiere [2] Windows sucks (or at least sucked at the time) as the basis for an editor.)

I’m no pro. not by a long shot, but I have developed the mindset that goes along with the traditional style of video editing.

iMovie ’09 is not at all like that… or, I should say it’s a different paradigm.

iMovie ’09 is the “fixing” of iMovie ’08, the complete new version that introduced the current scrubbing workflow but completely eliminated all the good stuff. For me iMovie ’08 was unusable. ’09 has fixed most of the problems and, once I got my head wrapped around it, works fairly well.

Today, I took some crap footage from my 2005 trip to Taiwan and began to edit it entirely in iMovie ’09. I started by capturing all three Mini-DV tapes from the trip. iMovie had no problem with the import, and it has a very nice feature in that not only does it read the time code and split the videos out into individual clips, but it also organizes them into daily events alà iPhoto. This makes locating and organizing video clips from a large capture much easier.

iMovie shines at rough cut edits, which some editors love, but I typically don’t use. I prefer to make each edit as close to the final edit as possible and this caused me some initial grief in iMovie. What it does best is to allow you to select and grab rough sections of your raw footage and toss it onto the timeline.

That’s great when you’re working at making a sequential piece from disparate clips, like this perhaps: First I toss in a shot of the park, then I grab a picture of my daughter running, then a long shot of a slide, then my daughter climbing a slide, then her sliding down. Makes perfect sense but you’d be surprised at how often you have those clips, but they aren’t in that order, so you’re looking at visual representations of the clips and you scrub a small section as you see them and put them one after the other in the timeline – then you watch and it is painful. The long shot is too long, she takes too long climbing the slide, there’s too much running and she’s facing the opposite direction when she’d climbing the slide.

Here’s where the precision editor kicks in. In the older version, all the editing had to be done with imprecise broad mouse strokes, with the new version, editing can be done with more precise, fine mouse strokes. Zero in on the transition between two clips and move the edit to the precise frame you want, click and the change is made. That’s a huge improvement over ’08, but they go further.

Now you have overlays, which can simulate an A-B roll (Final Cut Pro doesn’t use A-B rolls, either, so I’ve gotten used to the overlay system, but it still foxes some people I know.), green screen, Picture in Picture, narration (with automatic ducking) and separate audio control.

Plugin support for special effects and transitions is missing, so you’re stuck with the provided ones, and there’s still no keyframing mechanism. Keyframing is probably most often used in home movies to rubberband the audio track, although the concept can be applied to application of special effects and other post-production effects. I really miss that, but at least the narration (and other) tracks can be designated to cause other tracks to hide behind them.

Clearly the engineers at Apple figured out that people shoot lots of “event” footage – trips, birthday parties, weddings, etc. and this package is really geared towards trying to polish the typical turds that people with camcorders usually record.

They also figured out that, if you look at YouTube, and subtract all the completely pirated and illegal postings of music videos, there’s a massive number of homemade music videos (usually set to pirated and illegally obtained music.) iMovie’s new edit to the beat feature is phenomenally simple. Simply lay down an audio track, play it back, tapping out the beat with your finger, then start dropping video footage into your project. It’s automatically cut on the beat. Even random footage laid down to the beat of music looks great.

A lot has been said about the new automatic image stabilization feature, which analyzes more of that turd footage and makes it look steady. I’m not so enamored of this feature. In a camcorder, digital image stabilization (as opposed to the good stuff: optical stabilization) has been around for years. It’s a cheat. What it does is capture a larger area (or shrinks your available image area) and then essentially moves the image around based on an algorithm that tries to identify objects that ought to be “fixed”.

iMovie is doing the same thing, only it has no choice except to shrink your original footage to give itself room to work with. In other words, it’s applying digital zoom to your recorded images. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – turn off digital zoom on your camcorders. It makes the pictures look like crap (not just turds). Depending on how unstable your footage is, iMovie has to zoom in enough to compensate. Jerky footage rapidly looses image quality. That said, it does work nicely for slightly unstable footage, although it does make the occasional digital foobar with the image for no apparent reason. Best suggestion, buy a tripod or learn some tricks to stabilize your camera when shooting.

The other digital effects work well. The filters, the speed controls, the titles and transitions all worked smoothly.

It’s not without bugs, though. One bug in particular is nasty. Sometimes when making edits to clips that are already in the timeline, they don’t seem to take, and then the audio starts acting weird, and you can’t undo the changes. After fighting with this for some time, I discovered that if you close iMovie and restart it, the problem goes away and your change is probably still there – but not always.

All-in-all, it should be simple and easy to use for most home users, and once the bug fix is out it should be less frustrating.

The future of creepy weird

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I’ve been playing around with iPhoto ’09 for the last few days and, on the whole, I’m impressed. Unlike some claims I’ve heard, it does not cause my (1st generation) MacBook’s fans to spin up or even seem to bog down the computer.

Faces is an interesting technology and it makes a pretty good shot at figuring people out, although, it seems to have trouble telling my wife and my mother-in-law apart, and in one case, it thought I had a second face on my knee. (We aliens do, but they’re invisible to the camera.)

My photo library is huge. Oh, maybe not huge by a professional photographer’s standpoint, but huge from the standpoint of available disk space on my MacBook. I’ve had to break my albums apart in single years’ albums, and my 2007 album is over 42gb. 2008 is smaller, but still over 30. Earlier years, taken with smaller-resolution cameras or scans weigh in around 10gb each.

I had to convert each and every one of them into iPhoto ’09 format, and the face scanning process (which looks at each photo and identifies potential faces) took several hours on some of the albums. If Faces misses a face, you can add it manually, which is great for the occasional miss. It sucks though when Faces seems to fail miserably, as it did with my 2004 album. Only one in 10 photos is tagged for Faces – and there’s no way built-in way to re-initiate the scan to try again. You can; however, go into the photo package and delete the faces.db files. That causes it to rescan – with equally bad results. Before I invest a lot of time tagging faces, I’m going to wait for a bug fix to come out.

More interesting (and useful) to me is Places. iPhoto has got this right – at least that’s my impression so far. I do geotag some of my photos. I use a nifty piece of software called HouDahGeo to map the track log of my GPS to the date/time stamp of my photos. It sets and saves the GPS coordinates right into the EXIF data. That’s great when I’m out with my GPS and the GPS is turned on – not so good when I don’t have my GPS with me. My iPhone stores geotagged coordinates, but the GPS functionality in an iPhone 2G is pretty slack.

What do you do when you don’t have GPS data for a photo, but you want to add it? Well, it’s a tedious process and not worth the effort. iPhoto has gone and fixed that. Pick a photo, or group of photos, hit the info button and start typing in the name of the place. Ofttimes it will find it, but the mix it knows about is eclectic. Why does it know where Heritage Square (a ratty old park in Phoenix) is, but doesn’t seem to know where Los Angeles International Airport is? No problem, you can add frequently used places to your list and then adding them to photos is a snap. Further, the places you add can have a range of precision, for example, if I wanted to tag my house, I could expand the zone to just the house, but if I wanted to make a place for a park, or a city, I could expand the zone accordingly. I’m not entirely sure what effect that has on the coordinates just yet, but the idea sounds good.

Here’s when it gets creepy weird. For the first time, to my knowledge, someone has made a program that makes geotagging old photos easy. In fact, I’ve geotagged all the photos I’ve got of my childhood. Of course, I don’t live in those houses anymore, and if I upload to flickr… what would the people living there think if they go to “their” house and see it populated with dozens of strange photos?

This will only accelerate. Soon it will be YouTube videos too. Already I’m seeing lots of meaningless personal videos on Google Earth (if you have the YouTube channel turned on.) The usefulness of geotagging visual information will rapidly decline. For example, what if a company decides to make a commercial for their product – let’s say it is food powder – what’s to stop them from geotagging the video at the location of Eiffel Tower? People going to Google Earth to see videos about the Eiffel Tower will be presented with foot powder ads.

It will all end in tears.

But for now, it’s pretty cool in iPhoto.