Jane Whitefield is a Seneca woman living in NY state. She honours her ancestors and helps those who are in trouble to disappear and start a new life.
What I Liked
The premise of the main character’s “job” of helping people escape bad situations and start a new life — serving as their guide — is a fantastic premise, and the first half of the book is primarily about how she goes about doing her job. While some clients are eased into the process a bit more gradually, her latest client is all-in from day 1.
What I Didn’t Like
You know as the story unfolds that something is going to go wrong, you just don’t know what or when. Despite some initial success, some of it seems even TOO easy for her to do with a minimum of fuss. Mid-book, the type of story changes considerably, as the hunted becomes the hunter, and it isn’t as good as her other books that have a bit more mystery to them rather than action.
The Bottom Line
A great first book in the series, Whitefield is awesome.
A new trio of Jason, Piper and Leo has arrived at Camp Half-Blood and are ready to set off on a quest, but something seems off about not only them and their memories, but also about their participation in a ritual for the children of Greek Gods at all.
What I Liked
The new trio are fun, and there’s enough mystery in both who they all are and why they don’t remember to keep things interesting. Jason has a lot of power, and some knowledge but a goddess has stolen all his memories. Piper has a big secret, namely that someone is whispering in her ear and in her dreams, when all she really wants to do is be in love with Jason. Leo also has a past, too much fire, and he’s really into machines. All great powers to have, and nothing like what we had with the previous campers.
What I Didn’t Like
The amnesia thing for Jason lands a bit trite at times, as he remembers just enough to move the plot along but not enough to be totally useful. The wind gods start off interesting, as does the flying dragon, but eventually they become almost clichés. And the entire media thing is way too Neil Gaiman/American Gods for my taste.
The Bottom Line
Seven half-bloods shall answer the call but we’ll start with three for now.
I saw references to the TV show, The Crew, and I didn’t know much about it. But as with most new shows, I’m willing to give it a try for at least one episode.
The basic premise is that a NASCAR team has been doing poorly of late, and the owner announces that his daughter Catherine is going to take over running the team. Under the new management, she wants to makes some changes, including potentially firing some people, and she butts heads with the operations boss, Kevin. Most of the show takes place at the garage, and has a bit of a Wings feel to the setup, just not as funny.
The acting and writing
The main actor is Kevin James and I pretty much knew what my personal reaction to the show was going to be: meh. King of Queens, Mall Cop, Kevin Can Wait…He’s okay, but I’m not sold on the delivery. Some of it is a one-trick pony storyline i.e., “hey, I’m not the brightest guy but I’ll learn a lesson by the end of the EP”. It’s okay but it doesnt’ scream “laugh riot”. There are some funny lines, but nothing that leads to much more than a smile.
The daughter, Catherine, is played by Jillian Mueller, and I thought I recognized her at first. But after checking IMDb, nope. She’s okay but I don’t really get a feel for her in the EP. Yay, she’s smart. Yay, she’s into numbers. That’s it? Even by sitcom standards, that’s pretty lame.
For the supporting cast, there’s Jake (Freddie Stroma), who’s pretty dumb but a generally good driver, but not much to work with beyond a few throw-away lines like Woody or Coach from Cheers without the presence; Chuck (voice actor Gary Anthony Williams) as the mechanic, who has decent presence but not many lines; and Amir (Dan Ahdoot) as the engineer with a series of telegraphed jokes about being effeminate and into design. Nothing to write home about.
So who else is there? Well, let’s start with Bruce McGill. He is a regular guest actor on a ton of shows, often playing a bit of a schlub or a bit of a sleazeball, but he always nails it. He plays the owner, Bobby, and as always, he is pitch perfect. I liked him on Rizzoli & Isles, all the way back to the original MacGyver, in My Cousin Vinny, heck even Semi-Tough. But whenever I see him? All I can think of is Captain Braxton from Star Trek: Voyager, the time cop gone a bit nutty about Janeway’s involvement in timelines. He’s solid for the whole EP, and while there’s no guarantee he’ll be around much, he’s pretty good for backup.
The one that threw me the most though was Beth. She is pretty inconsistent. She seems almost like Carla from Cheers, a bit dumb, but smarter than Kevin, gets really invested in his personal life, has some sort of boyfriend or husband that could do double-dates if Kevin was dating someone, it’s a bit confused. I’m not even totally sure what she does for the team. But she has decent interactions with most of the other cast throughout the episode. And then, right at the end, small spoiler alert, she has this serious moment with Kevin that he is totally clueless about. She is basically telling him she’s into him, and he misses it entirely. But for just a moment, she goes serious, all the other attributes of the character disappear, and it’s a great scene. Her name is Sarah Stiles, and I looked her up on IMDb as well. Nothing I’ve seen her in, a moderate list of credits. I just hope they do something with the character.
For the writing? Well, it’s not funny. Which is kinda important for a sitcom. There’s a lot of one-liners, but most of them aren’t that good. More importantly, a lot of the characters seem inconsistent, which is really hard to do in 22 minutes of airtime. Most of them have only a few lines, yet even when they do, it’s hard to make it jive with the previous lines. Catherine is terrible, Kevin is one-trick, even Beth who is awesome in one scene is kind of all over the EP. Bobby is great, but the show isn’t about him. Sigh.
My prediction
I have to go with cancellation. The show is still stuck in its opening premiere “box”, I know, but there just didn’t seem to be enough funny there for me to care about any of the characters either.
Netflix released a show awhile ago called the Tribes of Europa, with season 1 consisting of six episodes, dubbed in English. The setting of the show is the year 2074 when life in Europe consists mainly of warring tribes. According to the opening explanation, something happened in December 2029 which caused a massive blackout, and the phrase for the “event” was Black December. Nobody seems to know what caused the Blackout, but countries collapsed, and Europe descended into chaos over several decades. Countries were replaced by more local “tribes”.
In the opening, you meet the Origines, a small tribe in Europe that has forsaken technology in favour of living in the forest at one with nature. They believe all life is one, and that they can generally live in peace if they avoid contact with outsiders. There are other tribes around them, but generally, everyone stays in their own area. Until the day a flying ship passes over three of them while they are out hunting far from their Refuge / home, and then the ship crashes. It is technology well beyond anything that existed back in the day, well beyond a simple plane of old. They are all too young to remember, but they know some of the history from books and things.
The three main characters are 2 brothers and a sister, and they all have different reactions to this outside event. The oldest boy is impatient to see the world, and wants to go investigate; the youngest is smart and dying to figure out what caused the original blackout; and the girl is curious but adheres to the tradition of the tribe to return back to the Refuge and seek counsel from her father, the leader of the Tribe. As the EP proceeds, they eventually investigate, make some discoveries and end up being confronted by a powerful outside tribe that wants the technology from the advanced ship in order to rule Europe.
The acting and writing
For the show, there is a bit of confusion in EP1 as to who the main character is. The show opens with a girl claiming she’s looking for her family in all the chaos, and then you meet her. Her name is Liv, she’s the daughter/sister I mentioned above, and she’s played by Henriette Confurius. She has a strong “Katniss” feel to her for a good part of the show, living off the land, shooting arrows (albeit with a crossbow), and she isn’t on fire anywhere, but she’s got some presence. She has a decent list of credits on IMDb, but given it’s all European shows, I don’t recognize her at all. And it’s dubbed, so hard to tell at times how much the acting is the voice vs. the face. She’s decent, but I would have expected a stronger presence in EP1 if she was the anchor of the show.
Her oldest brother, the one impatient to see SOMETHING or do SOMETHING, is named Kiano and played by Emilio Sakraya. He has a similar acting profile to Confurius but in EP1, he actually has some presence. It’s a bit cliché and inconsistent in places, but definite presence.
The youngest brother, Elja, is played by David Ali Rashed, and his list of credits is much shorter. As such, it’s not surprising that he comes off kind of shallow in his acting in EP1, not a lot of depth there, mostly just staring at things and looking confused. I also admit that the dubbed voice doesn’t seem to match as well, so that might be hindering my processing.
The bad guy for the EP is a woman named Ana Ularu, playing a character named Grieta. And she’s relatively terrible. She only has three real scenes, one where she is dealing with her boss and seems like a Gladiator cliché; one where she’s fighting, with no real oomph or menace; and one where she’s interrogating people, but I didn’t feel a sense of menace, dread, fear or even of command in the scene. At least I’ve seen her before though, and as an indication of how little presence she has, I saw her less than 2 months ago when I binge-watched the Alex Rider series. I still couldn’t place her as Eva, and well, that’s not surprising. She’s not terrible, but she’s not compelling either.
As for the writing, I wasn’t blown away. The TV series Revolution tread the same ground back in 2012 when everything on Earth just stopped working for power and electricity. All the machines just stopped in a single day. In Revolution, it was only 15y after the change, and this is 45, but the premise is similar. But I loved Revolution initially, and I thought, “Okay, let’s see what happens”.
But as the EP went on, it seems more like an Indigenous tribe coming into contact with modern world for the first time. I don’t want to spoil the surprise of some high-end tech (it’s not alien though), but it isn’t necessarily enough to get everyone on-board. I felt like the youngsters seem to know WAY too much about technology and the past — even knowing what airplanes are and that the new one isn’t the same level of technology — but they’re like 16 in the show. How would they POSSIBLY know? And they seem to have some pretty good stuff in their village if there’s no power anywhere. Not sure how they’re milling everything so well or getting bullets for rifles. But I digress.
Overall, the writing is okay, but some of the dialogue needs work.
My prediction
The show got some buzz, and I’m curious enough to keep watching for six episodes. But I’m not convinced the show is powerful enough to hold my attention, or that of everyone else either. Despite the buzz I heard, I’m going to predict renewal for another season and that’s it.
The new show Debris debuted recently, with a strong alien/X-Files vibe to it. In a nutshell, the premise is that scientists spotted a damaged alien ship drifting through the solar system, surrounded by debris. Some of that debris has fallen to Earth, and almost all of it has strange energy readings with unpredictable impacts on the local population. For example, the first use you see of it is someone picking up a piece that lets them pass through solid matter, falling 14 floors to her death THROUGH the hotel building she’s in. Cool, huh? The two main characters are investigating the phenomenon, a joint task force of the US and the UK. He’s CIA, she’s MI6, and they’re not the only ones looking for these fragments.
So, is it X-Files 2021?
It’s hard to say based on a single EP if that will be the continued vibe, but the short answer is no. It is clear from the get-go that there are aliens and this is alien tech. There’s no “mystery” of the truth being out there. The debris is definitively alien.
However, there is a bit of an X-Files “what is this about” vibe. He’s more the Scully-type, traditional hunter, having formerly been in Afghanistan and not wanting to go to the private sector on returning home. For the debris, he wants to keep it out of enemy hands. She is the Mulder-type who believes in the power of all things, and that if they find the technology, they can improve the lives of all humanity.
The “he” in question is Bryan Beneventi, played by Jonathan Tucker. He is the co-anchor for the show, and that’s a problem. I liked him in Westworld, Justified, numerous guest shows, and all the way back to The Black Donnellys. And in almost every single show I’ve seen him in, he’s a snivelling weasel, pretty much. Spineless. Often with some drug stuff going on maybe. Untrustworthy to the core. THIS is the guy you want saving the planet? Oh, he’s got faults all over the place, but he isn’t a guy I root for, pretty much ever. If he was in a mobster show, he’s the one double-crossing the big guy or going rogue to prove himself, screwing either bit up, and getting whacked asking why everything always goes wrong for him. I like him in those other roles, but I had a lot of trouble seeing him in this one.
The “she” in question is Finola Jones, played by Riann Steele. I’ve seen her in a few things over the years, nothing that stands out as riveting. She’s decent in the premiere, but nothing particularly compelling. There’s some back history with her father having seen the debris field, he was an astrophysicist who apparently died. Spoiler alert — he’s apparently not dead.
For other supporting characters, there’s Bryan’s boss played by Norbert Leo Butz who isn’t sharing everything with Bryan. He’s been in a few things here and there over the years, nothing that stands out to me. Finola’s boss is played by Anjali Jay, but you don’t get a really good scene with her (she’s on the phone to Finola), so it was hard to place her. Thanks to IMDb, I now know I’ve seen her before on Continuum (she was good) and Supergirl (meh). Nothing compelling, and impossible to know if she’ll have much of a role in the show.
Good news though, we have a bad guy. I thought it was some sort of typo, I confess, as the actor’s name is Scroobius Pip. He’s apparently a quite well-known hip hop artist in the UK, but I have never heard of him. It explains his name, I guess, with the background. Anyway, he’s been in a few shows, nothing I have seen though, and in EP1, he has about 10 lines. His role is a bit intriguing as you find out he’s actually SAS and hunting the debris too, plus he has some sort of transporter tech they’re using (from the debris fragments). It has some bugs though, so kind of a last resort tech.
The premiere’s goal though is to grab you. To pull you into the mystery. And to be honest, it doesn’t. It’s interesting, sure. The case of the week is (spoiler alert, again!) a kid that has come back from the dead and a bunch of people are seemingly dying and floating across the ground in the same direction to the same spot. They’re not actually dead though. So the mystery is how is the kid alive, what’s the connection between the victims, how do they solve it. Well, considering the opening scene that raised the stakes took about 10 minutes (complete with Michael Eklund as a black market dealer of debris relics, and I was initially excited cuz I loved him as Bobo on Wynonna Earp, right up until he bites the dust at minute 9), they solve the rest in the remaining 32 minutes or so. Bippity boppity boo, all is right with the case, problem solved. Really? That would be like the Lost characters finding a resort to stay at on the Island rather than facing the Others.
So where does that leave me?
Basically nowhere. The writing wasn’t compelling, nor was the acting. The mystery of the week ended way too easily. And the larger mystery? There just wasn’t enough time spent on the fact that it was ALIENS for crying out loud. We have people DEFYING GRAVITY (no reference intended to the show) and people aren’t losing their sh**? Really? Okay, well if you’re not excited and getting worked up, why would I? I’m going with cancellation (which is also TV Grim Reaper’s prediction) and I won’t be watching.
