I liked the first season of Teen Titans well enough that I rushed into the second. That was probably a mistake. The first episode, “How Long Is Forever?”, pits the Titans against a time-traveling thief, resulting in a surprisingly elegiac and overall depressing entry about losing friends and the ravages of time. Cyborg is particularly damaged, tethered to the tower due to his technology becoming obsolete. Beast Boy is fat, bald, and caged in a circus. Raven is utterly alone. […]

I was drawn to Teen Titans because the the characters are so well-done, whether it’s Starfire’s alien optimism, Raven’s quiet darkness, or Cyborg’s stubborn strength. Beast Boy’s the most teen to my eyes, with his goofy screwups serving as metaphor for gawky adolescence. In the first episode, Robin’s voice is not quite right for me, but by episode two, it has either altered or I’ve adjusted to it. The first episode, “Divide and Conquer”, is an interesting choice for an […]

I really like Eureka. It’s about a town full of geniuses, where someone rather like Tony Stark (Ed Quinn, playing “Nathan Stark”) runs a secret government research lab. His ex-wife is the top administrative official (Salli Richardson), and she’s attracted to the new sheriff in town (Colin Ferguson), a well-meaning but not-too-smart former US marshal. One of the best parts of the show is the way it plays opposite to prevailing TV stereotypes. The smartest guy in town (Joe Morton), […]

I ran across a cache of Doctor Who episodes from the first Peter Davison season. He’s always been my favorite, and it was a treat to think about watching his adventures from the beginning. Oh, I was so misguided. The first, Castrovalva, was terrible. I remembered them getting trapped in a town square that became wrapped around itself like an Escher image. That was still there, briefly, but I had to get through an awful lot of “oh, my regeneration […]