there will be a fish

My sister left this morning for two weeks in Paris, the lucky duck. I miss her already. Without her around, who do I go running to tell when I recognize some obscure actor in a TV episode? Who will get my jokes about Aristotle, or laugh at my blatantly terrible puns? Anyway. I'm kinda mopey as a result.

Thus, I've been watching lots and lots and lots of Prison Break. Did I mention that Katie and I got totally sucked into PB? Yes, I know, hi, welcome to six years ago, but my god is Michael Scofield pretty. And crazy smart, and crazy loyal, and crazy sneaky, and also? Just plain crazy. I love him. :) The show itself is like crack -- not great television, but damn good TV; pretty deft balance of arc writing with episodic structure, and my goodness do they cram a lot of action into a single episode! I will find myself convinced that something happened like, three episodes back, when it was just twenty minutes earlier in the same episode. Whew. It's hitting all kinds of narrative kinks for me -- innocent man falsely accused, resourceful (woobie, balls-to-the-wall) mastermind main character, awesome lady doctor, tragic childhood backstories, intricate clockwork-like planning, daring rescues, harrowing escapes...and that's just the first season. Now I'm in the second, and it's ALSO got fugitive-on-the-run, and an obsessive intellectually-equal, morally-grey antagonist to boot. I'm having a blast.

If I had to complain, though, I would say that I wish they had cut down on some of the storylines -- I don't give a damn about Bellick, for example, and T-Bag needs to get squished like the cockroach he is, already, and I am kinda bored by C-Note's "plot", even though I like the character. The show can also get depressing -- I was thinking about it, and it weirdly rather fits the classical definition of a tragedy (lots of characters suffering reversals of fortune due to tragic flaws, people dropping dead left and right, etc). Only, the effect is somewhat odd when stretched out into a serialized drama rather than contained in a single shorter entity like a movie, and it can get a bit exhausting. (LOL, I bet that's the first time anyone's bothered to analyze Prison Break through the lens of Aristotle's Poetics. What a ridiculous person I am...) The show pulls it off pretty well by also sneakily being an enormously entertaining adventure story, though. Which is an odd combo, if you think about it -- how often do you see a tragic action-adventure? Interesting. Makes fic-reading kinda frustrating, though -- as far as I can tell, no one has ever written a single piece of future-fic in the fandom, because apparently none of the characters have a future. Sigh.

Anyway, jumping back to Mahone, how much do I love William Fitchner? His role on PB prompted me to look up his IMDB profile -- I'd already remembered his roles in Contact (&heart;) and Armageddon off the top of my head, but I kinda geeked out when I remembered that he played Judge Christopher Mulready in the S5 West Wing episode "The Supremes," which is one of my very favorite feel-good eps from the series. I mean, it's a total pipe-dream in terms of realism, but god, I love it. I love it so much, in fact, that simply the reminder of it forced me to re-watch it just now. I love Glenn Close as Evelyn Baker Lang, and when Josh has his "I love her mind, I love her shoes!" moment, and when Donna realizes Josh is putting her mother's cats on the Supreme Court, and Mulready messing with Toby about the constitutionality of DOMA, and when Mulready and Lang are delightedly arguing away with each other in the Roosevelt Room, and Josh and CJ getting blasted on 21-year Glenlivet with Senator Pierce. I'm not sure how I managed to forget that William Fitchner was Mulready, because that scene where he's meeting with Bartlet in the Oval Office ("but who writes the extraordinary dissent?") never fails to give me a little shiver of goosebumps. Part of it is the show's always-excellent writing, but damn, Fitchner nails the delivery. He does quietly intense intelligence very well indeed.