stellaluna

The third season of Eureka debuts Tuesday, July 29th, on the Sci Fi Channel. Sci Fi will be running a marathon of the first eleven episodes of the second season tomorrow, with episodes 12 and 13 being rebroadcast immediately prior to the third-season debut on Tuesday night.

gin200168, who got me into the show in the first place, has posted an Illustrated Eureka Character Primer with a nicely detailed breakdown of all the show's main characters, intended as a guide for people who are curious about the show, but who may feel reluctant to jump into S3 without the benefit of having seen the first two seasons.

The guide, which obviously contains some spoilers (although she avoids going into detail or revealing anything too major) is an excellent resource for folks who find themselves in that boat, or for those who may have seen the show but find themselves in need of a refresher course.

Really, I'm just trying to pimp the show so that more people watch. This is a charming, occasionally goofy, well-written and thoughtful show with a great premise and with fabulously-developed characters. It has, to paraphrase myself from my post the other day, many delights in common with shows like The Middleman and Pushing Daisies, both of which it shares a number of tonal and narrative kinships with.

Although, in thinking about this since that original post, I'm inclined to say that Pushing Daisies is, ultimately, fundamentally darker at its core than either Eureka or The Middleman, despite the bright colors of the production design and the similar quirkiness of the writing. To vastly oversimplify, Pushing Daisies is about the inevitability of death in all its forms, while Eureka and The Middleman are each, in their own ways, celebrations of life -- moreover, Pushing Daisies doesn't just deal with death, it celebrates it and embraces it as a lover.

Which is something I may need to explore further after I get the S1 DVDs and have a chance to rewatch the show.

There have been several things that have made me happy lately, some of which I really, really need to make posts on at some point:

• Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor novels



• Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely, and good YA fiction in general



• The Dark Knight. I'm not going to see it until scarletts_awry gets here in a few weeks, and then we are going to see it TOGETHER YAYZ, but I'm delighted at all the good things I've heard, and I am so excited about it.
As I think I've mentioned before, the Bale/Nolan Batman is my Batman, and seeing that finally realized on the big screen, as I originally did with Batman Begins a few years ago, makes me more happy than I can easily put into words.


• the set and costume design on Mad Men (I've been watching the marathon today), which are gorgeous



• The Middleman, which is continuing to delight me. Okay, one comment about the most recent episode, "The Flying Fish Zombification."

( episode spoilers )

Okay, I clearly need a Middleman icon. And one for Eureka and one for Batman. And, while I'm at it, one for Buffy, too.

gin200168 asked me to ramble about

( Abernathy )

( Eureka )

( Little Tokyo )

So. Um. It would appear that I suddenly have a shiny new fandom.

gin200168 has been pimping Eureka to me and telling me over and over again how much I would like it, and although I wasn't exactly disagreeing, I wasn't really giving it much thought, either. But she brought her DVDs with her, and last night she showed me the pilot. Tonight we watched episodes two and three.

And...suddenly I am hooked. Okay, not exactly "suddenly." I was already liking it a lot after just the pilot, and my affection for the show only grew as I continued to watch. I like the characters a lot, and am quite taken by the premise and setting. The show is just...the best word I can come up with is charming. I am charmed by it. It charms me.

I like Jack Carter a lot, but so far I think Henry is my favorite character. He's just so...oh. So decent. He's a good man. (And complex, too, which I like. In fact, all the characters are pleasingly complex, even after just three episodes.)

Did I need another fandom? No, I did not. But it seems that I have one anyway.

Is anyone else out there on the flist into this show? Speak up if you are!

(Um, so gin200168 is already all smug about this, and she's going to be even more so once she reads this post. Which, normally I would not indulge or encourage her in this, but fuck it. It's a DAMN GOOD SHOW. Plus I'm feeling all gleeful with that initial burst of new-shiny-fandom starry-eyed love.)

In other news, we went to the Getty today, and it was awesome, as always. Saw a fabulous photography exhibit of work by a German photographer named August Sander, who did most of his work during and around the Weimar Republic era. Gorgeous stuff, and often unexpectedly moving, in part because of the character and history that gets revealed in the photographs, and in part because we know what's coming for these people; the shadow of Hitler and the War and everything else is already on them, even if they don't know it yet, and it's impossible not to try to read that in the faces of secretaries and farmers and government functionaries, of the members of a theater company and a Jewish composer and of two young girls on a country road.

Tomorrow is the Sunday morning farmer's market and shopping in Little Tokyo, and a Target run. And possibly a mall run, depending.

Today's other good thing is that I am now confident that there is no way scarletts_awry is going to win, not now that she's woken the lizard brain.

I'm just saying.