Dollhouse: Epitaph One

I just got around to watching the unaired thirteenth episode of Dollhouse, made famous by Felicia Day on Twitter amid some contract-related angst and FOX asshattery.

I’ve always been strongly drawn to post-apocalyptic stories (with the notable exception of zombie-apocalypse stories). It’s why I like Stephen King’s The Stand, and the Half-Life series, so much. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I’m helplessly fascinated by pondering the circumstances and events in which civilization as we know it can collapse — and what happens to ordinary people as the world falls to pieces around them.

Best of all is when, in a series of fictional works, someone stumbles across a ruined relic from the far-distant past — a relic that was covered in the present time of a previous work in the series. The first time I can remember this happening is in the Redwall series: in “The Long Patrol”, the characters stumble across the buried ruin of the castle from “Mossflower”, which appears to have been set hundreds of years before in Redwall-time. Many years after I read the Redwall books, that is the only one that truly stands out in my mind, exactly because of this post-apocalypse fixation I have.

Epitaph One does exactly this. OK, the time difference is only 10 years, but it was apparently a very eventful 10 years. From what I can gather, the Dollhouse’s technology got into the wrong hands and turned wireless, so the concept of identity was largely meaningless, and then civilization busted apart. In parallel with this, somehow Echo, Ballard, Boyd and possibly the other main-character Dolls were working on subverting the Dollhouse. I don’t quite understand what they were doing as the world was ending, but eventually they led a bunch of people out into the world, from being holed up in the Dollhouse, and we don’t know what became of them.

Quite apart from the end-of-the-world grittiness, we learn several very interesting facts about “present-day” Dollhouse-world:

• DeWitt has a conscience, and there is an ethical line she does not want to cross.
• The larger Dollhouse organization was the shady puppet-master ultimately behind the world’s destruction, and apparently the tipping point was when they started selling Dolls’ bodies for people to live in. It’s unclear (and a very interesting question) whether or not they were fully aware of the consequences of this.
• Topher was not the original architect of the Dollhouse’s technology. He made it much better, but it still means that there is or was someone else in the world who created it.
• Ballard and Boyd were apparently both double agents. Is Topher the only major male non-Doll on the show who isn’t?
• Whiskey/Dr. Saunders did a variety of things that I still can’t get my head around. She developed a way to resist the imprinting process (while imprinted as Dr. Saunders?), then remained in the Dollhouse for 10 years in her blank state? Does this mean Dr. Saunders (the original, briefly seen at the end of the season in flashback) was a double agent, and that got preserved in the imprint? Or did Whiskey somehow develop this urge while imprinted? Or something else? Who knows?
• Echo continued in her composite-of-imprints state for some time, apparently, after the end of the previous episode.

Now that we know all these facts, the futures of the main characters, and the future of the world in ten years, what is going to become of Dollhouse the show? In particular, is this foreknowledge of the future going to dampen the intrigue of the present-day Dollhouse story?

I really don’t think so. As I noted above, stories are entertaining when set both during and after apocalyptic events. I’m still interested to see what Echo and company are doing to subvert the Dollhouse, how that goes for them, and especially to see the world begin to crumble (and to see Echo and company deal with it) as the technology leaks out and starts to be used for more and more reckless purposes.

Just because the world in ten years is a total wreck doesn’t mean there isn’t still hope. This episode leaves the ultimate fates of Echo and company unknown; perhaps they’re still alive. Perhaps the world isn’t irrevocably broken. Perhaps there will be heroism in the downfall.

In fact, this glimpse of the future, of the ultimate consequences of the Dollhouse technology, serves to darken the backdrop of the present-day show. The mystery of “what trouble could this technology cause?” is gone, but the answer is rather horrifying, which puts Echo and company’s present-day struggles into perspective. We already know that if their aim is to prevent the technology from harming too many more people, they’re fighting a losing battle, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested to see how the battle plays out. It’s like watching Star Wars Episode III. You know what’s going to happen in the end, but watching it can still be entertaining.

To sum up: Epitaph One answers a lot of questions, but raises quite a few as well. This is what’s known in the trade as a game-changer: the loose ends have not been tied up, but merely rearranged.

I have a few other random notes. Eliza Dushku still can’t act, though fortunately this episode let her play to her (few) strengths. She also probably didn’t speak Russian very well. I don’t know Russian, but I know that she sounded like a person making sounds she doesn’t perceive as words. And I’m still scarred from the French incident, so I assume any foreign language spoken on Dollhouse is done badly until proven otherwise.

Speaking of which, the dialogue writing is still bad. A lot of the worst writing was during the future scenes, when during an otherwise intense moment, some guy in the group would spew out a line that sounded like something written by a first-year poetry major. When I heard someone say, “Nice little display case for our potential corpses,” I had to pause it and yell out “WHAT”. Then I replayed it to make sure that was what he actually said. I swear, Dollhouse in its 13 episodes has racked up more People Don’t Talk Like That violations than basically all the episodes of every TV show I’ve seen.

Near the beginning, when Felicia Day’s ragtag group of “actuals” is approaching the Dollhouse, they come across an old radio blaring something meaningless. I can’t help but be reminded of Portal. I know the chances are slim, but I’m choosing to believe that was a deliberate homage to Portal (a post-apocalyptic story of its own, in a way) because that makes me happy.

This surprised me: even though I’ve only ever seen Felicia Day in “Dr. Horrible”, I could take her totally seriously in this episode. This is in contrast to Neil Patrick Harris, although to be fair I’ve only ever seen him in things where he’s in a role that makes it impossible to take him seriously anyway (like the Harold and Kumar movies).

Dollhouse sure does have a deep and enduring love of shower scenes, doesn’t it? Especially shower scenes where someone bites the dust. (Speaking of which: how did a person in a child’s body manage to reach high enough to conk that girl on the head? And how did she do it with enough force to knock her down?)

I sure feel sorry for anyone who actually wants to follow the plot and starts watching season 2 without watching this episode.

I will certainly be watching season 2. If only this show can be like “Chuck” — stumbling at the beginning, picking up towards the end of the first season, and knocking it out of the park in the second season. I’d be pleased.

My Bucket List of Concerts

Well, I just bought a ticket for a concert that will complete the “bands I want to see live at some point” set.

The part of the set that I’ve already seen:

• Rush
• Dream Theater
• Tool
• Queensrÿche
• Yngwie Malmsteen

The two I’m seeing in the remainder of 2009, to complete the set:

• Def Leppard
• Metallica (just bought)

Yes, I’m finally seeing Metallica. I don’t know what I’ll do after I complete the set. Actually, I have a couple of other bands that weren’t in my original goal set, but I would definitely go see: ZZ Top and Journey.

And I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing Rush again, if they don’t die of old age before they can go on tour again. Plus I plan on seeing Trans-Siberian Orchestra every year until I leave the country.

After the Metallica show, I’ll have seen basically all the bands I listen to regularly, except for ones that are impossible to see live anymore: Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses (I know they still exist, but their lineup is so not even close to what it was in their heyday that it’s a stretch to even call them GNR anymore).

Well, there. Metallica, bitches. Now I need to figure out how to dress for a Metallica concert before December 12.

On Japan

I recently came to the conclusion that if, in the next, say, 10 years, I get the chance to live in Japan, I will take it.

(BTW: I will strive to avoid making this post entirely about me, because I am a boring topic, and nobody likes a self-indulgent blog post.)

For the longest time I’ve assumed that if I moved to Japan, I would swiftly die. Unable to communicate with anyone, I would be rendered helpless, hopeless and isolated. Overwhelmed by the inherently stressful nature of life in Japan, I would succumb to the ineluctable forces of language barriers, zillions of people, and stomach ulcers.

I thought this up until two months ago, when I actually spent two weeks in Japan, having not been there for at least five years previously. And shockingly, I found the whole thing very pleasant. Maybe it was because I was traveling with someone fluent in both English and Japanese, but I remain convinced, however foolishly, that if I were left to my own devices and had to avoid swiftly dying in Japan, I could.

I’d had horror stories in my head, told to me by what I thought was “a bunch of different people”, but I now remember to be just one excessively negative person. The horror stories generally revolved around the constant presence of a meaningless cacophony in a passively hostile society. There were always too many people around. You couldn’t understand anything, and couldn’t make yourself understood. It was so crowded. There was no space. Everything was expensive. On and on.

I’ve since realized that I’ve only heard such horror stories from one excessively negative person, and that the rest of the accounts I’ve heard of living in Japan (as a non-Japanese person) range from mixed at worst to overwhelmingly positive at best. That one person was making a critical mistake: trying to adapt her surroundings to match what she was used to, instead of adapting herself to match her surroundings.

Yes, Japan is very different from Western Europe. If you try to live a Western European existence in Japan, you’re doomed to failure. The food is different. The buildings are different. The society is different. Obviously the language is different. Even the tiny things you never think about, like ironing boards, are different. (Japanese ironing boards stand about a foot off the ground — you’re supposed to use them kneeling down. Also, they’re tiny, to save space.)

It’s a matter of changing your expectations. If you judge the quality of the food based on how similar it is to Western European food, well then of course it sucks. For example, Japanese people really should never have been allowed to get their hands on the concept of pizza. If you try eating pizza in Japan, then you’ll rapidly become convinced that the universe hates you. You have to let go of Western expectations. Once you do that, you’re set. The one lasting impression I have from my most recent trip to Japan is that if you’re having a subpar gastronomic experience there, you must be putting some serious effort into it. You have to really try to find poor-quality food in Japan, or else you have to have a seriously wrong definition of quality.

For the two weeks I was there, excluding breakfast, I almost never ate the same kind of dish more than once. (And to all my readers who conflate “Japanese food” with “sushi”: despite eating about 20 different types of Japanese food, I never once ate sushi.) All of it was invariably great or better, all of it on a higher plane of quality than I’ve been used to in the US. Uncharacteristically, my happiest memories of this trip all center around food, not trains. I had a couple of culinary experiences that I have no words for other than “foodgasm”. The best was at a sukiyaki restaurant on the top floor of a building on the central plaza of Kyoto. When I first bit into the meat, I literally gasped. Normally very reserved about showing enthusiasm for anything, I had to try very hard not to giggle and moan as I ate.

Every night I went to bed feeling pleasantly fat and vacantly happy. More than once I was squarely sloshed on good sake. But the most incredible part was that every lunchtime and dinnertime, we could wander around and choose a restaurant pretty much at random, with total assurance that the food would be excellent. Even the tiniest hole in the wall was guaranteed to be great, more so because you could watch your food being made and maybe chat with the cooks as they made it.

What I was trying to say without too much irrelevant gushing was that I am not worried about starving to death if I lived in Japan, or even about being dissatisfied with the food. In fact, if I had to choose a cuisine that I had to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Japanese hands-down. (Real Japanese cuisine, though — not the bogus pseudo-Japanese stuff they have outside Japan.)

I imagine it’s much easier to let go of your expectations when you’re just visiting than it is when you’re moving there long-term. I say this only in fairness, because I really think I could enjoy life in Japan without changing my mindset at all. Sure, I can’t speak Japanese very well, which is a major downside, but the upside is that I would be forced to learn it very quickly, and I can think of much worse things than being forced to learn a language. But I like good food. I like big cities and large crowds. I like good public transport and a conspicuous lack of car culture. Strangest of all, I had an indefinable sense of being at home in Japan.

Japan really isn’t my home though. I lived there from birth until the age of 18 months, and then never lived there again. I’ve visited a handful of times before — few enough to count on two hands. None of these visits lasted longer than three weeks. Japanese was the first language I spoke in life, and I spoke it exclusively until about age 4, at which point I switched to English. English is obviously my native language, but I do still retain native speaker-like instincts in Japanese. It almost feels like Japanese is a native language that I know very little of.

But when I walk around in Japan, I feel deeply comfortable. I don’t fit in there and I never will in the same way that a fully Japanese person does. But when I was there, nothing bothered me. Things that might seem odd to a Westerner, like the near-complete lack of swinging doors in residences, seemed eminently normal to me. Being there felt natural and somehow right.

I know consciously that Japan is not my home. Belgium is. But I bet I could eventually feel unequivocally that Japan is home, and if I get the chance, I’ll try.

Stupid birds

Last night I had one of the stranger dreams of my life. Perhaps you can understand what it’s about better than I can.

I was standing in a field next to a dry creek bed. On the other side of the creek were some power lines. The power lines were riddled with little birds making lots of bird noise. There were also some hawks cruising around. I’m not sure how I knew they were hawks, but I definitely thought they were hawks, even after one of them dived onto some prey near the ground in the manner of a peregrine falcon. The hawks were generally sort of snapping at the little birds, occasionally grabbing them. The little birds didn’t seem too concerned by this, which I thought was rather odd.

Then there was the mind-bendingly bizarre part. I watched this one particular hawk. It landed on a power line, directly above another wire where there were three little birds perched in a row. I knew (somehow) that the little bird on the right was the mother of the other two. The hawk’s feet were literally a couple of inches above these other little birds’ heads, but they didn’t seem to notice. Then, the hawk just sort of casually bent down, grabbed the middle little bird in its beak, and flew off. It was a very lazy beak-grab, sort of in the manner of a person absently chewing a pencil. Anyway, the hawk flew off a little ways and then settled on a pylon, where, after struggling a little bit, it swallowed the little bird whole.

I kept watching that hawk. It stared around regally, then took flight and cruised around aimlessly for a bit. Eventually, it landed back above the remaining two little birds, who were still oblivious and had apparently not noticed the absence of one of them. The hawk stared deliberately down at them, first one, then the other. Then it hopped down, between the two little birds. It turned to the child bird and lazily beak-grabbed it. But it just stood there, holding the bird in its beak. Then the mother bird suddenly noticed the hawk and started yelling at it in a very strident manner.

Now I remember finding this next part absolutely unbelievable: the hawk, after a few seconds of being yelled at, let go of the child bird (which did not appear to have noticed anything), lazily turned around, opened its beak impossibly wide and ate the mother bird. It was the motion that was the strangest part. It opened its beak, positioned its head directly above the mother bird, and then just moved its head downward. GLOMP.

I remember it all very vividly, probably because it was so very remarkable. I’m mildly concerned that I may be insane on the inside. But I tell you what: if in a future life I come back as a hawk, I aspire to be like this one.

Dollhouse finale

You have to be cynical about the chances of a show like this, so I imagine that this was the last episode of “Dollhouse” that will ever air on TV. You have to keep this context in mind when considering the implications of the finale, and the creators’ intentions for this episode.

My lasting impression was simply that they tried to do too much in too short a time. And you can understand why. They wanted to bring the story to the kind of point you’d like to leave it at for the end of a season. The story needed two episodes to cover that distance; FOX wanted one.

It does seem unfair. While it lasted, “Dollhouse” developed enough of a world, raised enough questions and provoked enough thought that it deserved a proper ending, even after such a short run. I don’t mind the fact that the story was left completely open — they had to allow for the possibility of more “Dollhouse”, however remote it is — but I do mind the fact that whatever led up to this point in the plot was not adequately explained.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Ballard tends to serve as the audience’s representative because he seems to be the only good guy. And at the end of this episode, now he’s working for the Dollhouse? I feel like something must have happened between him catching the hard drive with Caroline’s brain on it and him agreeing to work for the Dollhouse and all of a sudden wanting to free November instead of Echo. (This is one of the more obvious casualties of the time constraints: Sierra and November get imprinted, and then what? Sierra is never seen again and November is suddenly being freed. Buh?) And what about Echo? What made her decide to just remain a Doll? I’m sure with her multiple-personality badass powers she could have escaped.

On the plus side, if the show does return, this gives us the dynamic duo of Boyd and Ballard, who for some reason I really enjoy seeing working together. I get the feeling that neither really understands the other, but they have a quiet confidence in each other nonetheless. And now they’re both centers of considerable moral ambiguity, which is always interesting. Boyd’s motivations have never been explained (and he dodges Ballard’s question on the subject). Ballard’s moral compass has obviously shifted somewhat; my best guess is that he’s working for the Dollhouse so he can have a role in protecting the Dolls from Alpha, figuring that if he can’t bring down the Dollhouse he might as well protect its victims as best he can. But it’s far from certain that that’s what he’s really up to. Hell, as far as we know that’s what Boyd is up to as well.

Alpha is this episode’s strong point. The actor, Alan Tudyk, was brilliant, the only downside to his performance being the way it exposed Eliza Dushku’s performance as mediocre (par for the course there). He made Alpha a genuinely frightening villain. He stole the most graphically disturbing scene I’ve ever seen on a TV channel that isn’t HBO: him slashing Whiskey and then gouging out his handler’s eyes. He convincingly conveyed a person with tons of personalities struggling for control and ending up a wildly, dangerously unstable psycho. I haven’t seen an insane villain played so well since “The Dark Knight”.

Obviously, there’s an awful lot more of this story to be told. Unfortunately, it looks doubtful that any of it ever will be. So in the end, am I satisfied with what’s been told so far?

My relationship with “Dollhouse” has been strange. There were only a few episodes that actually held my attention closely. Yet I kept watching because despite everything I was curious to see what was going to happen next. Watching “Dollhouse” didn’t give me as much pure enjoyment as, say, “Chuck”, but I did want to find out more about its world every week. So in that sense, yes, it was a good show. At least it didn’t completely lose my interest like, for example, “Lie to Me”, which I stopped watching after the second episode.

“Dollhouse” was built upon a very deep premise and had the potential to be a show truly out of the ordinary. It was out of the ordinary, to be sure, but it did not astound. It really did come quite close at times to being excellent, particularly during those moments when my head hurt trying to think through the tangle of deception that the audience was allowed glimpses of, and those moments where they took the lid off the more disturbing parts of the world. The show’s premise is inherently disturbing, and to the show’s credit it never held that back. Much like the beach landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan”, that’s the only way it could have been done right.

So what killed “Dollhouse”? I can identify several reasons. Let’s look back at my midseason review and look at the four points at the top. In my mind, the first three of them have either cleared up or the show works in spite of them (with the possible exception of the sympathetic-character one; I’ll get to that later). The fourth is still a problem, and it’s gotten to be a bigger problem as the show goes on. Eliza Dushku just does not have the kind of versatility and talent the role requires. Though most of the other Doll actors are relative unknowns, they all manage the shifting-persona thing better than Dushku does. The non-Doll actors do fairly well for the most part. Tahmoh Penikett as Ballard occasionally starts acting a little too much like Keanu Reeves at critical moments. It conflicts with the establishment of the character’s obsession with bringing down the Dollhouse, to the detriment of his own life. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz are probably the show’s acting-quality strong points. It may be because they play largely one-dimensional characters (evil and obnoxious, respectively) but they each do so quite well.

The reason I brought up the sympathetic-character beef again was that in the later part of the season, we mostly lost him. Around mid-season, I latched onto Ballard as a guy you could root for and sympathize with, because he showed up a lot and did good things. Then he mostly disappeared from the show, appearing in occasional scenes to stick out his manly jaw as he angsted about how his girlfriend’s a Doll. Then he went into the Dollhouse, and without too much fuss started helping them eliminate their biggest threat. Well, so much for the good-guy thing, then.

I can’t say I’m heartbroken that “Dollhouse” is probably toast, but I do have to admit I watched it with some interest and would almost certainly watch it again if the planets aligned and it were renewed. But I’m not holding my breath.

Scrubs episode 817

This is just a quick post before tonight’s finale. And I swear I’m working on a “Chuck” post; it’s just really long. And sometime in the next week there’s going to be an immensely long post covering all the Scrubs that has ever been.

While this episode’s Janitor subplot didn’t involve the Janitor actually doing anything, it did give us one of the more fantastic Janitor moments of all time: when he answers “Yes?” to Jordan in that insane tone of voice with a Sun Chip in his eye. Of course there was also his rant to the kid at the beginning. “Would you be willing to change the location of your eyes…to here?” I just don’t understand how one person is capable of making this kind of stuff up on the spot. At least Neil Flynn has a bright future in improv comedy after Scrubs is over.

There was another fart joke: “Dr. Mantoots”. I don’t know why the writers’ brains have regressed to seventh-grade level, but I am certainly not one to complain. There were more JD/Turk gay jokes. Although that storyline took a turn for the serious at the end, they kept it immature by having JD’s pants around his ankles the entire time.

Gooch and her extremely oddly-proportioned head were back. So was Denise, who was great as usual. “I just wanted to do something I know I could do right, like bangin’ a dude.” No random guest stars from the past this episode, but the finale should be loaded with them, from what I hear.

This episode’s primary dramatic concerns reflect the theme of season 8 as a whole. The characters’ lives as they know them are coming to an end. Certainly the future holds tons of possibilities for all of them, but they are a story for another time, another place. “Scrubs” has followed these people from the beginning of the beginning of their careers to the end of the beginning. The rest will be interesting, but “Scrubs” has told its part, and we’re watching the characters make the transition into the next part. There could have been more of this theme in the rest of the season, but I guess they didn’t want to beat it into the ground. You can bet the finale will beat it into the ground, though. But that’s OK. It’s the series finale; that’s what it’s supposed to do.

42 total minutes of Scrubs remain. I hope they’re good ones. So far this last season has done the rest of the show justice, but it all comes down to tonight.

On California High-Speed Rail

I’m skeptical about this proposal for a high-speed rail system in California. The proposal’s cheerleaders point to the success of high-speed rail systems in other countries, most notably Japan, France and Germany. I think there are fundamental differences between the two areas that will mean a HSR system in California won’t be as successful.

The reason ultimately stems from the fact that the distributions of population in these areas are fundamentally different. Let me elaborate.

• First, it’s pretty clear that high speed trains need to travel long distances between stops in order to be effective, otherwise they never get a chance to attain high speeds, thus defeating the whole purpose. So stations need to be pretty far apart.
• Given that stations need to be far apart, it’s likely that, in order for a given person to get to a station, they’ll need to use some other form of transport, such as other public transport, or a car.
• In California, especially in the corridor where the HSR system is proposed, the population tends to be concentrated in a few dense urban centers, with some gaps filled by vast uniform areas of suburbs, and other gaps filled with unbuildable nothingness. For example, the path between San Francisco and San Jose is a big strip of relatively high-density suburb, and the path between Santa Ana (part of the Los Angeles conurbation) and San Diego is very sparsely inhabited. So how will HSR riders get to the train station? The public transport in suburban areas of California tends to be so sparse as to practically be nonexistent, leaving driving to the station as the most attractive option. Then this leaves the traffic congestion problem.
• In Japan, HSR stations are located in the ludicrously dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of merely extremely dense “suburb”. So there are huge numbers of people who would have to travel fairly far to get to an HSR station. It works out because Japan has such fantastic auxiliary public transport. Most people live within a short distance (or at most a short bus ride) of a (conventional, low-speed) train station, and the quality of Japan’s train system is unparalleled in all the world.
• In France and Germany, HSR stations are located in the dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of very sparsely populated countryside. Suburbs as they exist in the US mostly don’t appear in Europe. Any non-urban area that is dense enough to have a significant population and doesn’t have a HSR station is generally well enough served by the nearest city’s public transport that getting to the HSR station via public transport is viable.

Imagine me, for instance. I’m going to be living in Palo Alto pretty soon. Suppose this Californian HSR system exists, and I want to go to Irvine. How am I going to do that? First of all, here’s the map. Apparently there’s a Redwood City/Palo Alto station, so I could hopefully get there by bus (crap though the VTA bus system is). So that’s good. But then the problem arises at the other end of the trip: the only reason I’m going to Irvine is to visit somebody who lives in one of those heinous, abominable suburban subdivisions where the nearest public transport stop is in a different zip code. (This is potentially a real scenario, since I do know someone there, and he lives in a subdivision whose name is, no joke, “Meadowood”. When I think about it I throw up in my mouth a little.) He lives so far out into the suburban sprawl that there’s no hope of getting there other than by car. If this were pretty much any of the world’s other major HSR systems, I could take public transport end-to-end.

So we’ve encountered a failure of the sort that happens with far lower probability in the European systems (needing to get somewhere beyond the reach of public transport). At the beginning of that hypothetical journey, suppose the Palo Alto station doesn’t exist and the nearest HSR station is San Jose. Then we have a failure of the sort that couldn’t happen in Japan: I’d have to take public transport to the San Jose station, and the public transport would suck. The most reasonable way would be the laughable Caltrain.

In sum: much of the population area served by the HSR system has either poor or nonexistent public transport coverage, leaving driving as either the preferable or only option for getting to an HSR station. If the HSR system is as heavily used as people expect it to be, this could actually end up increasing traffic congestion in the areas around HSR stations, as people drive to the station to board. If they were driving to their actual destination instead of taking the train, they’d be getting on the nearest highway, which would at least keep traffic more even.

The ultimate cause of California population centers’ poor or nonexistent public transport coverage is the fact that a good deal of it is suburban sprawl. I can’t think of any successful high-speed rail system in existence which operates in an area with similar population distribution. Even the US’s existing high-speed rail system, Acela, operates in the Northeast, along a route which is a series of dense urban centers. There is some sprawl with poor public transport coverage, to be sure, but not to the degree there is in California. Besides, it’s very debatable whether or not Acela is successful in the first place; the unfavorable population density and poor public transport might be why it’s not doing so well (and why intercity rail in general doesn’t work well in the US).

So it’s a problem to which there’s no good solution. California has suburban sprawl, and that’s neither going to go away nor get decent, viable public transport coverage anytime soon. Even if good public transport could magically be willed into existence in the suburbs, I highly doubt it would see much ridership, since car culture is basically one of the pillars of suburbia.

What the hell

ABC in talks to renew Scrubs

Guys, seriously. I love Scrubs, but its time has come. Just let it go out with a good last season, and then leave it alone.

Bones episode 423

Oh boy oh boy. An episode focused on Japanese people? Yay for me.

OK, let’s just start with a list of things. I have to whine about all of these, and it’s best to get it all over with now.

• The guy who played Ken Nakamura: he looks Japanese, but his accent is messed up and when he actually speaks Japanese, it sounds a bit off. Also, he introduced himself in Japanese to the restaurant guy as “Ken Nakamura” which is wrong; you introduce yourself family name first, like the restaurant guy did (“Takedo Bruce”). My guess is (a) bad writing and (b) the actor is a Nissei who isn’t a native Japanese speaker but knows a bit.
• The guy who played Bruce Takedo: looks and sounds genuinely Japanese.
• The, uh, person who played Haru Tanaka looks and sounds genuinely Japanese. Interesting point: “Haru” is a nickname for both masculine and feminine Japanese names, like “Pat” in English.
• The girl who played Nozomi Sato: if she’s Japanese, I’ll eat my hat. But come on, writers, come up with a more original name than “Sato”, please. (“Sachi” was a good choice of original name, though; I had to look it up to verify that it’s real. I’ve never heard of anyone named Sachi before.)
• The guy who played the sleazy pimp: he could have Japanese blood.
• Back to the question of Tanaka’s gender. (Also, seriously: “Tanaka”? I get the feeling that one of the writers took a Japanese class once and they just lifted the names of the fictitious characters in the class textbook.) Angela apparently looked him/her up on the Internet, and found most of the results in Japanese, “with no personal pronouns”. Now hold on just a darned minute. Where in the hell ass are you going to find gender in a Japanese personal pronoun? Huh? SOMEBODY CALL ME WHEN THEY FIND GENDER IN A JAPANESE PERSONAL PRONOUN

  *calm down*

  Whoooo. Good God. No, OK? Japanese personal pronouns are not gendered. Japanese doesn’t have grammatical gender even for people. It barely even has grammatical number. The only way you can infer anyone’s gender from a personal pronoun is from first-person ones: some are only used by men, some only by women. But if Tanaka is a member of some subculture that glorifies androgyny (I’ve never heard of this; there are way too many of these subcultures for me to keep track) he/she (see? the hell with grammatical gender) would not be using a gendered personal pronoun. And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns. So shut the hell up, partly Chinese woman.

• They can identify that the victim was a native Japanese speaker from a feature of the palate? Color me highly skeptical. I doubt that any language causes permanent changes to the physiology of the mouth. Even if they did, there’s no reason for Japanese to affect the hard palate. Japanese doesn’t have any purely palatal consonants other than /j/ (transliterated as “y” in English). In fact, the consonant inventory of Japanese is almost a subset of English’s consonant inventory; the exception is /ɕ/. It’s an alveolo-palatal consonant, but it’s not an obstruent, so I don’t see how it could affect the physiology of the palate at all.
• Ironically, I have no objections about what little actual Japanese dialogue there was. It’s correct. Obviously Emily Deschanel sucks at speaking Japanese, but that’s excusable.

So they’re looking to hire one of the interns permanently? I really hope it’s Vincent. Clark is hilarious, but not as much as Vincent. Wendell is just boring, although a perfectly likeable guy. I’m not sure how they’re going to resolve it. They all have desirable characteristics (to Brennan) but I can see them going with Wendell because Booth prefers him. And it was interesting that they brought in a random guest character to serve as a pseudo-intern for this episode, to avoid having to make a decision just yet.

Other than all the Japan-related stuff, not much to say. Last episode was a hard act to follow, but this one wasn’t too bad.

Scrubs episode 816

I really like Scott Foley, I have to admit. I haven’t been pleased with any of Elliot’s boyfriends since Sean. He’s just such a perfect mix of random quirks and oddities, especially as Elliot’s significant other. He and JD have always had good comic rapport as two mildly insane competitors for Elliot’s affections.

I suppose it makes sense that a show in its last season would bring back some favorite guest stars from the past, and Scott Foley is pretty much the best possible choice, other than, of course, Tom Cavanagh as Dan Dorian. I think I remember reading some rumors of a Tom Cavanagh appearance on the interwebs, but of course you shouldn’t believe things you read on the interwebs. I do have to take this moment to say: both of these guest stars, as excellent as they are, do not hold a candle to the best Scrubs guest star of all time: Brendan Fraser. Unfortunately, his character’s dead so a return isn’t really an option other than in flashbacks (or possibly “Sixth Sense”-style dead-man-walking à la “My Screw Up”). Foley and Cavanagh are more than good enough for me.

You know what? I really miss season 3 right now. In fact:

Just a small town girl
Living in a lonely world
She took a midnight train goin’ anywhere

Just a city boy
Born and raised in south Detroit
He took a midnight train goin’ anywhere

…

STREET LIGHT
PEOPLE
WO OH OHHHHHHHHH

I suppose I should explain myself. Here’s my explanation: Journey is the shit.

Seriously now, I thought this episode was great. Full of comic moments, one excellent guest star and one pretty good one (Elizabeth Banks, who for whatever reason has been appearing in a lot of dumb comedy movies these past few years), and an interesting plot twist at the end. Sean and JD still had their rapport, with their disputes over saying “good” and yogurt. Their conversations could have come straight out of season 3. The ongoing “wiener cuz” joke was pretty good too.

Despite the fact that it was entirely later-seasons-style, I laughed uproariously at Elliot and Kim’s conversation on the ramp. “Who’s In There?” “What’s In There?” “Mister Peep Tries On Hats”?? Where in the hell did they come up with things like that? “Mister Peep Tries On Hats”?? Seriously??

No JD/Turk gay jokes this week, unfortunately, but just a bit of JD thinking Sean is beautiful. I kind of wish they’d brought up the “full-lipped” joke from season 3 episode 20. And yes, I did know that without looking it up, although I did go back to confirm.

Leaving aside the implausibility of Turk being named chief of surgery at the hospital (he’s only been an attending for three years, for Christ’s sake; where did all the other surgeons older than him go?), I liked that subplot because it continued Cox’s evolution into a kinder, gentler person. It also gave Carla a bit of a role to play (remember how I said she doesn’t get much to do anymore? Yeah, this is about the extent of it).

Kelso also had some great moments treating himself and browbeating interns. (Although, where’s Denise? I think she and Kelso could make some great comedy.) And it was nice to have Kelso in the hospital (and very strange to see him as a patient) instead of just being Norm from “Cheers” in the coffee shop. For some reason, his walk through the ICU with the back of his gown open has taken on a “legendary Scrubs moment” status in my mind even though it really wasn’t. It was hilarious of course (including Mickhead taking a picture on his cellphone in the background — subtle background antics are a sign of Scrubs in its better days), but not legendary.

I think there’s like an hour total of Scrubs left. I’m honestly going to be sad when it’s over.