Geeky TV

I grabbed this blog address years ago when it became available and have just parked the old Stealth Geek FAQ on it, but I've been thinking it might be fun to have a blog devoted solely to my more geeky interests. There may be some overlap with my writing blog, but here I can go all-out.

Some people are comic book geeks. Others are gamers. Some might like movies. I guess I'm mostly a TV/book geek. I like my science fiction and fantasy, and one of my main reasons for diving into the Internet back in the mid-90s was to find other people I could discuss my favorite TV shows with. I had a phase where I didn't seem to watch anything that didn't involve either vampires, spaceships or aliens. I've since come to be repulsed by vampires (please, make them go away), and I've branched out a bit in my viewing.

Although the Channel Formerly Known as Sci Fi (aka -- shudder -- SyFy) has not lived up to my expectations, they do seem to be pushing all the right buttons for me in most of their summer series. I love the quirky action/humor blend of Warehouse 13, though this season didn't quite work for me and I don't think they've recaptured the essence of what I loved in the first season. The season finale was rather mindblowing, but I don't think I was as freaked out as a lot of people were by some of the events.

Like, for instance, Hitler. I had no idea it was an Internet meme to have "Hitler" respond to various things, using movie clips with made-up subtitles (this same clip seems to be popular), but this made me laugh until I cried, even though I don't entirely agree with the sentiments. It's probably funniest if you don't understand German, and it's loaded with spoilers for the season 3 finale:



I'm rather impressed with how they fit the subtitles to the rhythm and cadence of the speech and the body language.

But my real favorite SyFy summer series is Haven, and that got renewed for a third season yesterday. I'm not a Stephen King fan, but I love this series that's extremely loosely based on his novella "The Colorado Kid." Strangely, the book is a straight mystery while the series is very King-esque paranormal. I get the sense that the writers have spent way too much time on the TV Tropes site, so they know all the usual cliches and deliberately set out to undermine or break them. I've been writing long enough that it's hard to surprise me, plot-wise, but they frequently surprise me. In their podcasts, the writers refer to lots of other things I like, including The X-Files, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, so I figure they're stealth geeks, too.