* The best Lost reviews/recaps I’ve found are by Ryland Walker Knight at The House Next Door and House veteran Todd VanDerWerff at the LA Times’ Show Tracker.

* I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I helped set it up: Chris Mautner interviews Brendan McCarthy about Spider-Man: Fever and sundry other things.

* Wow, Tim Goldsworthy appears to have severed his working relationship with James Murphy and the DFA. Or vice versa. And this may have been going on for some time. They were the dance act of the decade for me.

* A cool t-shirt for vegetarians and vegans by Tom Neely.

SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT. SPOILER ALERT.

* Initial, mostly silly thoughts here.

* I’m told that Maggie Grace initially had a film commitment, but that the show was ultimately able to work something out with all the actors they wanted to return for the final season. That’s really terrific news. Longtime readers know how much I hate the kind of situation where they have to create Frankie Pentangelli because Richard S. Castellano wanted too much money to return as Pete Clemenza.

* Thus it’s safer than ever to assume that Mr. Eko will be back. And I’m guessing my theory that he’ll link up with Jin and the Paik organization in some way will pan out too.

* Regarding Juliet’s double-dip death, I assume the thinking was that they couldn’t just bring her back as a dead body, that would be weird. They needed to give Elizabeth Mitchell something to do rather than just use a dummy or whatever.

* But mainly, this sets up Sawyer as the season’s most intriguing character. I’m hoping he becomes a really scary guy, that we get some full on Sawyer berserker attacks. They actually did one off-screen last night, after all.

* It’s never made sense to me that the time-travelers’ clothes transport with them. If it’s something about how anything in contact with you goes too, fine, but a) what about their shoes, those would only be touching their socks, most likely, and b) where do you draw the line? How much of the atmosphere comes with them, or the ground, or whatever? Oh well, I think we can give the show a pass for not being sticklers for pseudoscientific accuracy that would necessitate constant nudity. You can leave that to my fanfic, the title of which Nick Hornby stole for his latest book.

* Just yesterday I was telling someone I was looking forward to the inevitable Biggest Smoke Monster Attack Ever this season. I didn’t expect it to come in the very first hour! Pleasantly surprised. Also, I guess Fake Locke = Monster = Man in Black is settled law now, though I imagine people will still be searching for zebras after seeing this particular set of hoofprints.

* It was entertaining to see Hurley given some agency, above and beyond “Hi, I’m the audience identification character that the creators identify as such at every opportunity.” It didn’t feel fanservicey, either–it wasn’t the creators saying “Hey fans, now YOU get to be the hero!” I also enjoyed the way he just rolled with Jacob telling him he’d died an hour ago. You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to find a way to weird Hurley out at this point.

* I was surprised how entertained I was by the alternate timeline material. Here’s a case where the only thing weird about these sequences is the fact of their existence–there really aren’t any other genre staples to speak of, at least not yet. In that sense it’s very much a return to the tone of the Season One flashbacks, back before the science fiction, fantasy, and series-mythology elements seeped into pretty much everything. The way they sustained interest, besides the basic “hey look, it’s that guy!” stuff, was through attention to detail: the marshal getting up to retrieve the briefcase that had knocked him out from the overhead bin; playing with whether or not Locke would be in a wheelchair; some nice Rose/Bernard business; Locke still being a weirdo; Locke and Boone connecting; and so on. Little nods in the direction of things that were important way back when, bringing things full circle.

* They threw in some head-scratchers, too, of course. With Desmond on the plane and Shannon and Jack’s dad’s body not on it, we’re left to wonder how divergent the timelines really are. We don’t know if there’s added significance to Jack’s recognizing Desmond beyond their earlier meeting in that stadium, or to Charlie’s statement that he was “supposed to die” beyond junkie melodrama. We don’t know if Desmond really disappeared, or just went back to his original seat. And in a show that pays this much attention to detail, I even wonder why Sawyer and Charlie’s haircuts were so different.

* When Sayid came to and started talking, I tried to determine whether or not he sounded different–mostly meaning if he started speaking in Michael Emerson’s cadence. After all, Richard had said way back when they used the Temple to save young Ben after he was shot by Sayid that if they did this, Ben would never be the same. Sayid’s got the same wound, was treated in the same way–what’s different about him now? Is he now a vessel for Locke or Jacob?

* I’m not 100% convinced we’ll never see Actual Locke or Actual Sayid again. It seems to me like the show would want to make it clear whether these characters died a “good death” or not. I don’t see it as the kind of show that lets a good guy die believing he’s going to Hell.

* I sure am hoping we’re moving toward a “save the world from the Smoke Monster Man in Black” plotline. I fully support the Man in Black getting off the Island having the narrative significance of Sauron getting the Ring back.

(Thanks to Matthew Perpetua, Ben Morse, Kiel Phegley, and TJ Dietsch for the conversation.)

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

* And the Deadwood Cast Relocation Program continues! Please welcome Sol Star, ladies and gentlemen. John Hawkes, please say hello to Kim Dickens, Paula Malcomson, William Sanderson, Robin Wiegert, and Titus Welliver when you get the chance. Meanwhile, break open the fuckin’ canned peaches, because I’m starting the Countdown To Ian McShane right here and right now.

* On a related note, I’m not all that worried about the hapless Oceanic employee who had to inform Jack that his father’s body was missing, because that guy’s accustomed to getting spooked:

* I’m pretty impressed by a television show that can maintain that “whaat..thee…hell?” feeling for a full two hours. So…divergent timelines, and the overlap is the whispering sound?

* Just very very nice to see Claire and Charlie and Boone and Rose and Bernard again. Even fanservicey old Frogurt and Arzt made me chuckle. I take it that negotiations with Maggie Grace broke down, however.

* Pulling for Mr. Eko’s L.A. drug connection to be the recipient of Mr. Paik’s watch.

* “I’m sorry you had to see me this way.” Smokey, takin’ us for a ride on the LOLicopter!

* Nice little shadow-and-light homage to Apocalypse Now and Col. Kurtz. I think I’ll enjoy crazy evil Locke-esque person.

* The second they slowed down to give us a glory shot of the Temple, I knew we’d get a “so, I guess this is the Temple” line from Hurley and would then cut to commercial. Sure enough!

* Rough of them to double-dip on the death of Juliet. I think we sort of have to wait and see where Sawyer goes from here to judge the effectiveness of that move. If he turns into a full-fledged monster, that’d be something.

* Cindy! Cindy! Cindy! Cindy! C-C-C-Cindy and the kids!

* I suppose the big question is whether Jack recognizes Desmond because their meeting at the stadium where they both were practicing running still happened, or because the Jack of this timeline is somehow able to remember what went on with the Jack of the other timeline.

* Haircuts are not consistent throughout the timestream, as it turns out.

* On Sunday night I went to a very cool, very swanky, very funny fundraiser held by the stars and writers of Saturday Night Live to benefit the forthcoming stage/multimedia adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s all-time-great graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Here’s the report I did on the event for Comic Book Resources. Your takeaway should be that you should read The Diary of a Teenage Girl and go see Hannibal Burress and John Mulaney do stand-up if you get the chance.

* John Porcellino is blogging. Long Live the King. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Hot damn, a new Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets digest. Those books are the perfect blend of form and function. Scott Pilgrim fans, you have your instructions!

* My comics compadre Matt Wiegle did a 24-hour comic. Liz Bailie, MK Reed, Sally Bloodbath, and pie factor in.

* Gaze upon the face of your destroyer.

* Lost‘s final season begins tonight, and so…

* Lost Links #1: Noel Murray’s pondering of the show at the Onion A.V. Club contained a paragraph that spoke to some of my feelings about the show:

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the mythology is the heart of the show either–at least not for me. I dig the mythology more than the Sawyer/Kate/Jack/Juliet love quadrangle (and I do have questions I want answered), but I primarily love Lost for its thematic concerns and ambitious genre-play. I’ve already talked about how much I get out of the predetermination/freedom business, but I also like that Lost has always been a celebration of storytelling, from the arcane to the archetypal. It’s a genre-hopping story that pays direct homage to nearly every text that’s ever influenced its creators. It’s one long story, made up of a bunch of little stories. It’s a story about how backstories encroach and affect the main narrative, whether it be via time-travel or flashbacks (which are a kind of time travel). And, finally, it’s a story about the repetition of stories, and about which elements can be altered and which can’t.

In the past I’ve said something not identical, but similar: I watch the show not as an exercise in puzzle-solving, but as an exercise in genre that does everything genre can do, very very well: sex and violence, mystery and horror, awe and adventure, heroism and villainy, the literature of ideas, genre elements used as a sort of crucible for character development. Rather than the thematic or philosophical concerns that intrigue Murray, though, I prefer the individual character stories insofar as they deal with what people do when confronted with failure.

* Lost Links #2: In this colloquy between three TV critics–the Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, and Time’s James Poniewozik–this passage stood out:

Poniewozik: Unfortunately, there’s this [problem] that’s inherent to sci-fi shows that “Battlestar Galactica” ran into.

In a regular, character-based drama, maybe people have high expectations for the finale, maybe they expect that closure from it, or [maybe they expect it to] wrap up in a certain way for the characters. Even when it’s a finale that people really don’t like — the “Seinfeld” finale, the “Sopranos” finale for a lot of people — I don’t know that many people who said, “I hate this ‘Seinfeld’ finale so much that it ruined the show for me.”

But there’s a thing about sci-fi that they expect the finale is not just supposed to be a narrative ending. It’s supposed to be an Answer, which to me is kind of ridiculous. The finale is supposed to say what it all meant, what everything was about. And you know, I’m not saying that it’s unimportant. I watch these shows for the same reason, but if the show is really good, that’s secondary.

Ryan: Well, I really felt like there was a left-brain, right-brain split in a way, when it came to the reaction to “Battlestar.” I’m obviously being overly reductive, but it seemed like there were two sort of realms of fan responses or reactions. There were the people that wanted the whole mythology to add up correctly and make sense, and there were the people who wanted the character stuff to kind of wrap up.  I was mostly in the latter camp. And so for me, I felt like there were a couple of wobbly things in the finale, but I was willing to live with them because the “Battlestar” finale really delivered, for me, on a character level.

Whereas, in the post-finale comments I was seeing, people wanted the math to add up. You know, like, the show is a math equation and the show needed to get the right answer. And in my mind, it was never going to do that — I necessarily didn’t expect that or think it was going to be possible for it all to add up neatly. I felt like, this is a show that has taken many risks. A few of them have not paid off, but I’d rather watch a show that does something crazy that has an 89 percent chance of working out down the road, story-wise, than a show that plots things out in a way that is purely logical and kind of clinical.

I don’t have much to add to that. (Via LOSTblog.)

* Lost Links #3: Here’s a cute idea from Topless Robot’s Kevin Guhl: ranking the season premieres and season finales by their openings and cliffhangers respectively. I think the openings list is more or less right on, though I would have given top honors to the pilot episode, because that harrowing opening sequence is what sold the world on the following six seasons. The cliffhanger section is sort of weird, though–he doesn’t seem to actually like any of them.

Much to my surprise, I find myself very excited by this year’s Oscar nominees.

I was pretty skeptical of the decision to expand the Best Picture category from five films to a whopping ten, since it seemed such an naked studio cash grab rather than a legit reconsideration of how this process works. But I didn’t realize that it would open the category up to films and genres outside the beaten path of your usual Oscar fare. A hardcore science-fiction movie like District 9, for Best Picture? That’s very exciting to me. (Avatar doesn’t count, because it made so much money it was BOUND to get nominated. Nothing succeeds like success!) It doesn’t really matter, even, that District 9 is a flawed work–as time has gone by, that fun but not terribly interesting action climax has overshadowed all the meatier stuff earlier on for me–because, c’mon, look at what normally gets nominated. If you’re going to have a contest between great works, flawed works, and sometimes out-and-out bad works, you might as well expand the pool from which you’re drawing.

All in all three of my four favorite films of the year were nominated: A Serious Man, Inglourious Basterds, and The Hurt Locker. I also liked District 9 and Up in the Air. I’m pretty happy with the choices. (For the record, Best Films of 2009 as of this very moment: 1) A Serious Man 2) Inglourious Basterds 3) The Lovely Bones 4) The Hurt Locker 5) Crank 2: High Voltage–1 & 2 especially are subject to change)

I’m thrilled that Jeremy Renner got a Best Actor nod. Loved him since Dahmer, in which he was really something special. Shit, I’d have nominated him for 28 Weeks Later. (Man, that was a finely acted horror film.)

Also thrilled about Stanley Tucci and Christoph Waltz getting nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the villains they played. Tucci was maybe the best serial killer since Renner in Dahmer? And Waltz, I mean, duh.

I’m a bit perplexed that A Serious Man earned a Best Picture nomination AND a Best Original Screenplay nomination for the Coen Brothers, but they didn’t get nominated for Best Director. Was that due to rules against co-directors, or was it felt that they should have done a better job?

Also a bit perplexed that BOTH Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick were nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Up in the Air. They were good, and as far as I’m concerned Kendrick should be nominated for nearly singlehandedly making the Twilight movies entertaining (her and Michael Welch), but I thought Farmiga didn’t have much to do but be sexy. Nudity tends to be rewarded, so I’m wondering, was the Academy unaware she used a body double?

I tend to care about the Oscars only to the extent that I have a dog in the race. When The Return of the King swept I was over the moon; most years since then I haven’t even watched. That seems to me like a healthy level of engagement with this thing and with award programs generally. So it looks like I’ll be watching this year. I don’t do picks or predictions, but I will say that The Hurt Locker‘s chances seem very strong and I’m glad of that. There were a few films I preferred, but that’s a totally worthy movie, and obviously it would be a huge, long-overdue deal for a woman director and/or her film to win. It’s not a terrible idea to reward an entertaining, non-didactic, but still powerful Iraq War movie, either.

How the FUCK have I never heard THIS before?

* Recently at Robot 6: Frank Miller drew new Sin City covers, Bendis and John Romita Jr. on Avengers, Picasso-style superheroes, and the Shamus/Wizard cons spread to Cincinnati.

* Child-porn conviction in Australia for dirty drawings of The Simpsons, The Powerpuff Girls, and The Incredibles. That’s a bad bad precedent. A real, serious crime involving imaginary depictions of imaginary people.

* Craig Thompson answers questions in a short interview someone’s doing for a school project. Aww!

* Kevin Melrose has a pretty fascinating interview up with Rafael Grampa of Mesmo Delivery. Check out the influences he rattles off–this guy’s the real deal. Interesting stuff in there about the move from AdHouse to Dark Horse, design as storytelling, and more.

* Red Lantern Gary Groth better thank his lucky stars there’s no Black Lantern Carol Kalish.

* TWIN PEAKS SPOILER ALERT IF YOU CLICK THIS LINK: Believe it or not it took me more than a day to mentally picture Star Sapphire Audrey Horne. I will take credit, however, for pointing out that Twin Peaks already had a power ring.

* Sam Gaskin sings the praises of Aapo Rapi, one of the highlights of Kramers Ergot 7.

* This is going on two years old now, but Phoebe Gloeckner took a photo of Ann Perry, the British mystery author whom fans of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures might better know for other reasons.

I really really really liked The Lovely Bones, a movie about murder and grief funneled into a big huge emotional slow-motion close-up panoramic fantasia swirling-camera special-effects Brian Eno CGI tear-streaked period-piece whirligig. It made me cry. The serial killer material was unusually well-handled and realistic, in that greasy nauseating biting-on-tinfoil way that those men are. It used a bunch of actors I personally have an affinity for, like Mark Wahlberg and Michael Imperioli, as buttresses for a CGI-as-metaphor spectacle, something you’d seen hints of here and there in King Kong and The Lord of the Rings, but here Peter Jackson goes full-on Heavenly Creatures with it. It had a fine Brian Eno score, including a couple of cues from his weird-pop days (I heard “Baby’s On Fire” coming about three minutes before it really started). There were A-class suspense sequences and a musical montage set to the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.” If you wanted to read it as a horror movie that just spends an unusual amount of time with people who aren’t threatened by the monster anymore, you could do that, and I actually suggest that you do. Right down to the tricky climax, it made meaning from the stuff of moviemaking. If it were nine years ago or so, I could see myself getting stuck in a k-hole with this movie, staying up past everyone else in my house and watching it and living with it night after night. I found it strange and very sad.

Yesterday I discovered that even one of this blog’s most frequent readers and commenters didn’t realize that I have links to pretty much every comic, book, and film review I’ve written in the sidebar to the left. But I do! In the absence of tags, that’s probably the best way for you to find an old review or just browse to see what I’ve said about this or that. There are also links to a handful of “best of ADDTF”-type posts, interviews I’ve done, interviews I’ve given, all the comics I’ve written that are currently online, and so forth.

I tend to update the non-blogroll portions of the sidebar around the end of each month, so right now it’s pretty current. Happy surfing!

* Maureen Ryan wraps up her long conversation with Lost‘s Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse in a two-part post: The first half’s the article she wrote up out of the interview, and the second half is part three of the interview itself. Lots of talk about the race of people on the Internet to be the first one to stop applauding, to see their skepticism validated, to go into things hoping not to be entertained, etc.

* As you can see below, I went Lantern Crazy today. There’s more at Robot 6. And if you read just one Internet thing today, make it Tom Spurgeon’s Muppet Lanterns.

* I haven’t seen Man Bites Dog in…13 years? I haven’t thought about it in about half that long, I’d imagine. But Scott Tobias has me wanting to revisit it in a post-torture-porn world.

* Vaya con Dios, Heidi Mac.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates is so good, I forgot he was a blogger today for an hour.

Red = John Locke

Orange = Charles Widmore

Yellow = Benjamin Linus

Green = James “Sawyer” Ford

Blue = Jack Shepherd

Indigo = Kate Austen

Violet = Desmond Hume & Penelope Widmore

Black Lantern Avatar = Christian Shepherd

Black Lantern Guardian = The Man in Black

Red = Liz Sherman

Orange = Baba Yaga

Yellow = whoever the King of Fear turns out to be, obviously

Green = Hellboy

Blue = Lobster Johnson

Indigo = Abe Sapien

Violet = Johann Kraus

Black Lantern Avatar = The Black Flame

Black Lantern Guardian = The Ogdru Jahad

* Today at Marvel.com I interviewed Chip Kidd about his cover design for the Strange Tales hardcover. Man, what a pleasure that guy is to talk to. He talks about his comic cover design philosophy, Marvel vs. DC, how he finds projects…enjoyable stuff.

* Diamond is changing its policy regarding minimum orders so that they’ll still fulfill orders for an item that falls short, only canceling related future issues. So you can still get your foot in the door. It’s still more of a hatchet than a scalpel, in the parlance of our times, but it’s a step in the right direction.

* Chris Ware is going to C2E2. ROAD TRIP

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Afrodisiac. He’s right–this book could have simply coasted, but Rugg and Maruca chose otherwise.

* My main takeaway from Marvel’s official Heroic Age/Avengers announcement is that it appears Gorilla Man from the Agents of Atlas is joining the Avengers. More, but alas not more about Gorilla Man, at USA Today and CBR.

* Bout of Geekery #1: The fact that neither CBR nor USAT actually listed the characters depicted in the promo art indicates to me that maybe this line-up isn’t really the line-up. Regardless, it’s Thor, Iron Man, Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Spider-Man, Hawkeye, the Thing, Beast, Black Widow, and Gorilla Man. It’s interesting to me that after all the to-do about getting the Big Three Avengers back together, this team gets Bucky Cap rather than Steve Rogers. Also interesting: a bit of a sausagefest, no? Also also interesting: It’d be cool if the Thing, Beast, and Gorilla Man were there as official representatives for their respective teams, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and the Agents of Atlas. That seems like a geekily logical way to build teams like the Avengers and the Justice League. Heck, by that light you could see Black Widow as an agent of SHIELD, and even Spidey as a liaison from the New York City street-level dudes. Also, I could be wrong, but I don’t see a lot of potential for intra-team conflict in that line-up. That’s a bunch of get-along guys, for the most part.

* Hahaha that Saw guy is really pissed They’re making him do another Saw movie instead of Paranormal Activity 2. Like, talking shit about the movie he’ll be directing for the next few months and everything. Awesome.

* This is indeed a fine piece on Lady Gaga by the great Rich Juzwiak. Locating her as the fulfilled prophecy of electroclash was a nice touch, as was examining the role of mystery and mythmaking among young listeners, something I wasn’t sure was even possible anymore in the Internet age. If anything I think Juzwiak’s a little hard on her regarding her philosophical pontifications–I mean, Bowie was all over the fucking place in his provocateur days any time he ventured much further than talking about rock music, and no one holds that against him, or no one should. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Bout of Geekery #2–Extreme Edition: Ben Morse selects his Marvel Lanterns. Here are mine:

Red = Wolverine

Orange = Doctor Doom

Yellow = Green Goblin

Green = Spider-Man

Blue = Captain America

Indigo = Professor X

Violet = Cyclops

Black Lantern Avatar = The Punisher

Black Lantern Guardian = Thanos

This wasn’t all that easy.

Ben picked the Hulk for Red, and obviously that’s a great choice, but a) I wanted Wolverine on here, and b) there’s already a Red Hulk so the visual impact wouldn’t be as strong. Berserker Wolverine’s just as logical a choice.

I thought about making Doctor Doom Yellow, since I think he needs to be the A-Number-1 supervillain for Marvel and should scare the shit out of the heroes any time he shows up, but his lust for power, knowledge, and the kudos Reed Richards got instead of him makes him a prime Orange candidate.

I picked the Green Goblin for Yellow to get him back to his scary crazy Halloween-costume roots (something I think that Brian Bendis/Michael Lark mask sequence in the Siege prologue issue did very well, by the way).

I imagine Spidey as the Green Lantern leaves some folks scratching their heads, but a) making the flagship Marvel character the flagship Lantern makes sense on a meta level; b) Spidey is all about overcoming great fear and adversity. The Corps could rest assured he’d use his power responsibly, duh. Plus I think you could get some neat power-ring-as-web-shooter visuals out of it.

Cap’s a no-brainer for Blue.

I wanna see Professor X get back to being the Martin Luther King of the Marvel Universe, instead of a slaveowner who covers up multiple murders routinely, so Indigo for him.

Cyclops seems like a character defined by his relationships, first with Phoenix and now with Emma Frost, so it’s Violet for him. If you insisted on having a woman in this role since we haven’t seen any male Star Sapphires yet, I think it’d be an interesting commentary on Emma to give it to her, implying that her feelings for Scott are really real and have really changed her. Plus, she’s pretty much already there, outfit-wise; you’d just have to change the color scheme.

It ain’t rocket science making the Punisher the Black Hand of the Marvel Universe–he’s cheated death twice, and the more-or-less in-continuity Garth Ennis origin story Born literally had him make a deal with Death for eternal life in exchange for being able to routinely murder people, so he’s already halfway there if not more. And Thanos as Nekron = obvs.

For reference, here are my ideal DC Lanterns–I’ve changed the line-up somewhat:

Red = Doomsday

Orange = Lex Luthor

Yellow = Batman

Green = Hal Jordan

Blue = Superman

Indigo = Steel

Violet = Wonder Woman

I’ve come around on making Wonder Woman Violet/Love, rather than my initial idea of Green/Will. Seems to me that part of what makes Wonder Woman dull these days is this a very joyless interpretation of what a tough superheroine warrior woman would be like. Tapping into her as some embodiment of love for humanity might lighten and liven her up a bit. If they lost the bare midriff from the costume, I wouldn’t mind it at all. Plus, this way the marquee power of the line-up is stronger than when I had Hal out altogether and Kyle Rayner in the Violet slot.

How’s this for a secret origin: The Cylons were an unsuccessful attempt to develop the Cinco Boy.

[hey RSS users–you gotta click the actual post to see a couple videos here]

People thought Battlestar Galactica was dark because its pilot episodes centered on genocide, with a dollop of 9/11 on top. That’s true. But they were still a swashbuckling space adventure with dogfights and killer robots and sexy robots and so on. The pilot for Caprica, on the other hand, is pretty much just a suicide bomber blowing up a subway and killing some teenage girls, and chain-smoking fathers in dark suits dealing with their grief. There’s some science-fictiony stuff in there too, to be sure–and in the DVD version that I watched, that stuff includes virtual-reality titties–but for the most part it’s about as thrilling as importing your old files to your new MacBook. Nope, you come for the parents burying their children or you don’t come at all.

That’s a lot to ask of your audience, and a very big risk for a pilot episode on the network that brought us Ice Spiders to take. For all the talk of BSG as SciFi/Syfy’s flagship show, it never did flagship ratings, Peabody Award or no. I can’t imagine that in a culture as angry and ground down as we are right now, an actionless morality play about the lengths to which people are driven by grief is going to put up gangbusters numbers. Frankly I’d be surprised if it got renewed.

That would be a pity, because I really enjoyed this episode. For one thing, it just looks so classy. “Classy” usually means “blue-tinted” these days, but not here. I mean, sometimes I guess, but when I realized there was going to be a major plotline about the mob connections of our lawyer lead character Joseph Adams (nee Adama) and it was going to be shot in the rich golds and blacks of Gordon Willis and The Godfather, the blues and grays struck me more as Godfather Part II than perfunctory prestige picture. Throughout, the stately, ruminative pace of late Battlestar was maintained–an editing rhythm that puts you in the company of big, unpleasant moments and questions and lets you sit with them. I know to some that’s a minus–cf. Jim Henley and his “Caprica: Planet of the Assholes” lament–but if I want happytimes I can watch The Golden Girls. (Except any episode with a touching Blanche moment. God, those are a punch to the gut. Or the one where Sofia’s son Phil dies and she has to deal with her grief, to bring it all back home.) I don’t mind assholes. I am an asshole myself.

Fine cast of assholes, too. I was particularly taken with Esai Morales as Joseph Adama. He came across like a classy, hardworking guy with some part of himself burnt out by a life of tragedy and unfortunate choices, and I bought his climactic conversion as an effort to try to relight that spark because living as he had brought no hope to him. Eric Stoltz had a tougher row to hoe as technological and corporate wizard Daniel Graystone–he had to deliver some mad-scientist speeches to Joseph when both were at a particularly low emotional ebb, which would be a challenge for anyone to pull off. The way he sold it was by hinting that his drive to technologically reproduce his slain daughter was a manifestation of grief-driven mania, but then utilizing all the tools of salesmanship and argument to expertise that made him Caprica’s Bill Gates in the first place. When he guilts Adama into helping him steal the technology he needs, his “leave now and you’ll always wonder what could have been” speech didn’t feel like a cliche, it felt like something a results-oriented businessman would say to seal a deal.

Then there’s Allesandra Torresani, as both teenage-radical trustafarian jerk/budding computer genius Zoe Graystone and the virtual-reality duplicate of herself she develops. It’s funny reading everyone automatically lash out at teenage actors, like no one ever enjoyed The Goonies or Rebel Without a Cause; me, I liked her raspy sullenness and regional-production-of-Zooey-Deschanel looks. She seemed like the kind of smart-and-knows-it teen dickhead I was at my worst, and I thought she handled the heavy lifting of the show’s wooliest “what is it to be human?” sci-fi ponderings with aplomb. Keep in mind that when Battlestar started, Grace Park, Tricia Helfer, and James Callis were all somewhat difficult to stomach. Things worked out pretty well with them.

On a purely nerd level, I got a kick out of the glimpses of Colonial society we got here. Strife between the Colonies, racism, cultural and religious differentiation, and the roots of the rancid brand of monotheism that infected the Cylons in BSG. Also, “Cybernetic Life-form Node.” Not bad! Plus, the great Bear McCreary is back for the music. That guy’s an MVP, and a huge part of what made both shows feel classy in the first place.

There’s reason to be worried, of course. Wikipedia tells me that there are a lot of cooks in Caprica‘s kitchen. The concept was developed as a separate movie pitch by Remi Aubuchon, who was then thrown together with BSG‘s Ronald D. Moore and David Eick by Universal. Moore and Aubuchon, who’s since departed the show, co-wrote the pilot for Friday Night Lights‘ Jeffrey Reiner to direct. There have already been three showrunners: Moore, BSG/Buffy‘s Jane Espenson (who has an aggressively mixed track record in this world), and Desperate Housewives‘ Kevin Murphy. BSG‘s worst fault was schizophrenia, even with a pretty consistent hand at the helm; who knows what result all this will have. Meanwhile the show could get bogged down by its fairly cheesy depiction of what a VR counterculture would look like (has science fiction ever done that convincingly? It’s all Rent extras and underground Matrix rave orgies), or by making Polly Walker’s secret, scheming terrorist cell leader a supervillainess, or by a whole plethora of potential pitfalls. But I have faith in Moore and Eick, faith they earned and rewarded in BSG. By gods, I’m on board.

* Frank Miller, my all-time favorite cartoonist, is on Twitter!

* Very long, very thorough, very interesting, minimally controversial interview with Grant Morrison over at IGN on Batman & Robin and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne. Dan Philips always does a fine job with these.

* The Iron Man 2 soundtrack is all AC/DC. I support any maneuver that results in “Shoot to Thrill” being released as a single.

* LOL, They’re making the Saw VI guy who another group of Them hired to do Paranormal Activity 2 do Saw VII 3D instead!

* Psych himself up

* Consume the biosphere of a small planet to recharge his cosmic energy

* Prank call Keith Moon

* Play the drums in his head

* Play the drums in a soundproof room elsewhere in the arena

* Play the drums for another band at a nearby venue after knocking their drummer out

* Drink

* Mate

* Grow and shave off one cycle of his mighty beard

* Gather a party of stout Bossonian bowmen and raid the Pictish wilderness ruled by Zogar Sag beyond the Black River

* Play pinochle

* Concoct and spread the “mudshark incident” rumor as an experiment in memetic engineering

* Listen intently and imagine where the drum parts WOULD go

* Translate the lyrics into Quenya

* Use his four sticks to sit in for Clyde Stubblefield AND Jabo Starks over the phone during a JBs recording session

* Sit quietly and wait his turn

* Bed down the significant others of each and every member of Vanilla Fudge

* Pray

* Chip in a few chanted verses from Aleister Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis to keep Jimmy Page’s black magick curse against David Bowie going

* Do a quick set of squat thrusts

* Entertain the roadies with a few Monty Python bits

* Continue his years-long investigation into the “Paul Is Dead” rumor–the very thing would end up getting him killed when he got too close to the truth

* Shift his molecular vibration over to an alternate universe where the band was already up to the drum part of “Stairway,” perform it there, and then come back just in time