To paraphrase the great Joe Rogan, from last Saturday’s UFC 104, I don’t watch much TV, maybe the Discovery Channel here and there to see a documentary or two. I bring this up because I’ve been told to write about some TV show called “V,” and the beauty is that I have no idea what it’s about! My first thought was, “V For Vendetta? Oh, no? Oh, well, then yeah, not a clue.” Apparently it’s a re-make of an old sci-fi show. Thankfully, though, ABC, the network where this show will air here in the U.S., has just posted the first seven minutes online. Let’s watch it, together!
Note: I’m not sure if this video works outside of the U.S. Sorry if it doesn’t, but there’s no other source right now. So if you’re an international reader, feel free to skip all of this.
Opening scene, it’s the blonde woman, the former “Other,” from Lost, who, to be totally honest, was the only reason I watched Lost as long as I did, and I’m not keen on blondes at all.
Moving on, a priest looks ominously at a street lamp. He talks to a man in a wheelchair, saying nothing of any importance.
A man is trying to buy an engagement ring. “Can’t go wrong with a knee,” says the shopkeep, in response to a question if going down on one knee is corny or not when asking a woman to marry you.
We’re about a third of the way through, and the one thing that’s painfully obvious, given the spooky music and quick camera cuts, is that something bad is going to happen. Plus, everything is shaking for some reason. Shaking = bad.
The Lost woman is back. Her no-good son in at a doctor’s office in SoHo (following a party he wasn’t supposed to attend), which either means this is taking place in New York City, and thus totally unreliable to Middle America, or in London, which would be reasonably exotic and interesting. Fingers crossed!
The shaking has returned! Books fall off the shelf (to illustrate how severe the shaking is), and the priest saves that same man in a wheelchair from a giant, falling crucifix inside the church.
… and then a fighter jet crashes into the streets of, sigh, New York. The CGI here is abysmal. Goldeneye for the N64 had better fire effects. Oh, and Goldeneye was also fun. This? So far…
The pilot of the fighter jet, who’s presumably dead, floats down to the street via his parachute. Then the guy who was buying an engagement ring looks up and sees… something! They’re building suspense, that’s what they’re doing!
And we’re back to the kid who’s talking to his Lost mother. She tells him to stay where he is, but then his phone, an iPhone, cuts out. It needs to be said that the kid’s iPhone cutting out may be totally unrelated to the oncoming commotion because, as we all know, AT&T is a hunk of junk in New York City. So far, this is the most realistic scene in the show.
Now we get scenes of people looking up into the sky. Clearly something is up there, but what?
We get a better glimpse of what’s going on: a vessel of some sort is floating in the sky.
There it is! It’s a vessel of some sort, all right, and it’s shaped like a sting ray.
The cops are telling everyone to remain calm while the Lost woman’s no-good son arrives on a motorcycle, presumably to reinforce his tough guy image. He can’t be seen driving a Ford Fiesta, now can he? He tries to go against the flow of people to go home, but a soldier tells him to keep walking with the crowd, away from home. Oh, my.
Then we see some news footage of people talking nonsense, including some nerd kid who corrects his friend’s reference to the movie Independence Day. The one kid says, “Dude, this is Independence Day,” but then the other kid says something like, “Well, that movie was a ripoff of any number of other alien invasion movies.” I get it.
The engagement guy meets up with his girl, and they embrace. Guess they won’t be getting engaged today. Now that guy has to psyche himself up all over again, presumably after all of this craziness ends. That’s if they both survive, of course.
The Lost woman is looking for her son on the streets, but a solider tells her to hit the bricks. She crosses the police line anyway. If this were real life she would have been detained right then and there—you mean to tell me that no officer saw her cross the police line?—but not in the clever world of TV, where anything is possible.
Of course Lost woman finds her son. Why challenge the audience? What could be more terrifying than losing your child? Bring some emotion into this dreck.
The vessel is opening! We see lights, and people are looking up!
And there’s a woman looking down from the vessel. She looks like Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2.
End of video.
Boring. I’m sorry, but you see one invasion angle and you’ve seen ‘em all. Granted, Alyx Vance may portend something not quite usual, but I can’t get behind another invasion angle. It’s played out. Not even the Lost woman will get me to watch it.
Feel free to disagree, but I shan’t be watching this show (outside of this here preview).
I came home, booted up the machine and used my Time Machine backup to restore it. Things worked just fine for about 12 hours. Just after 12 noon on Monday, like the witching hour, my bad luck started again: the computer froze, though it didn’t show any blue screen. I couldn’t do anything. Since there are no batteries to remove, all you can do is reboot the machine and pray that it works. Well, it didn’t. So back to the Apple store, though this time a colleague went to the Apple store because I couldn’t back out of some prior commitments.
I don’t know how you could forget, considering we’ve been posting Droid updates just about every day, but according to our calculations, tomorrow is 
We just got a 
Come November 1, Amazon’s Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a “quadruple extra-large” AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).
