My life being as it is, I don’t generally watch much TV except during the summer, when I have some vacation time and a chance to kick back on occasion. So I’ve been tuning in here and there, hither and yon, of late, and having a rather fine time of it in the process. I grew up during a fad for crime/detective shows (remember The FBI, Mannix, Ironside, Barnaby Jones, Mannix, Adam-12, The Rockford Files?) so the current full-court press of such shows (CSI and its offshoots, Law and Order and its offshoots, The Closer, The Mentalist) are familiar enough fare. Plus ça change, plus la meme chose.
I’m bugged/bemused by the occasional offering, however.
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The courtroom drama Raising the Bar is apparently set in a parallel universe in which members of the legal profession do not live past the age of about 40. Even the judges are on the young side.
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A commercial for an artificial-tears product is subtly self-defeating. The young actress playing the "doctor" who recommends said eye drops is characterized by a pair of unsettlingly bright and unblinking eyes which look either fake (glass eyes?) or vaguely reptilian, as though she is actually a multi-tentacled thing from the planet Smigrothesn5 who has somehow slipped into an optometrist’s office and is just waiting for the right moment to enslave/eat the unsuspecting earthlings who wander into her office/lair.
She assures the patient that she uses the eye drops herself. I do not find this reassuring.
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Commercials during the evening network news tend to be mostly for prescription medicenes. It’s strange enough that they are bound by law these days to specify side effects and give warnings—the resultant speed-talk litany invariably winds up being the most interesting part of the presentation. But odder still, I can’t imagine ever acting on the advice of these commercials. Would I ever go see my doctor and say Hey Doc, howzabout you lettin’ me try some of that there Chrimodextrilavicet I saw t’other night on the TV? At which point my doc answers Scott, you dumbass dickhead, Chrimodextrilavicet is for Alzheimer’s. You don’t have Alzheimer’s, you’re just a dumbass dickhead.
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On any crime show worth mentioning, if a character who by all rights should have been a wordless extra is given a name, a function, and some lines of dialog, you can count on that character being either the malefactor or at least a very close associate. Somebody’s secretary enters his/her office and has an exchange with the boss together with the assorted CSI folks who are investigating the case. Perhaps the boss says something like: "Oh, Smithers there. He’s been with the firm for years, really from the beginning when Old Man Wilson founded it. He’s been completely loyal to every CEO." You may turn off the TV at that point should you wish; Smithers did it.
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I watched The Da Vinci Code again recently. Actually I think it’s a lot of fun; total nonsense, of course, slapped together from a lot of non-existent "facts", distortion, and wishful thinking, but enjoyable bubblegum for all that. However, this time around I couldn’t keep from noticing that one of the central issues in the story is a logical dead end. The idea that Sophie Neveu is the lineal descendant of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene would be ostensibly proven by being able to perform a DNA test on Mary’s body in her tomb. The movie ends with Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) having presumably located the missing tomb as residing under the Louvre.
So let’s just accept the entire cock-and-bull story at face value and pretend for a minute that it’s all real. They retire to the sub-Louvre catacomb, extract some bone tissue from the tomb, and perform a DNA test on the body. They find that Sophie is indeed a lineal descendent from Mary Magdalene (assuming, of course, that the body in the tomb is the Mary of Magdala of the New Testament.)
They still haven’t proven that she’s descended from Jesus of Nazareth—only that she is descended from Mary Magdalene. The male line could have been anyone.
And it’s perfectly possible that Mary Magdalene had kids, in fact, it’s very likely that she did. In other words, even if the story were 100% true (which it isn’t, not by a long shot), then the grail would pose no threat whatsoever to the Catholic Church’s hegemony.
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I’m sick and tired of pop-rock song endings to crime shows—the action having completed, you see the various protagonists of the story going silently about their concluding business, to some mewly song. I’ve gotten in the habit of changing channels whenever one of those comes up.
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I wish crime dramas would ix-nay on the oap-say opera-way it-shay. One in particular was that show (I’m forgetting the name) set in the New York FBI that handled missing persons cases. Everybody was sleeping with everybody else, a fact that they seemed to want to tell you about every five minutes, slipped in between grilling witnesses or running around looking concerned.