KRAD's Inaccurate Guide to Life

Episode 28 of Dead Kitchen Radio: The Keith R.A. DeCandido Podcast is now live! I read "Undine the Boardwalk," another Cassie Zukav story set in Key West and involving Norse mythology (among other things), which was written for the upcoming Bad-Ass Faeries: It's Elemental anthology. (It will also be appearing in Ragnarok & Roll: Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet this spring.)

The episode is available on iTunes, either via The Chronic Rift Network subscription feed or its own feed. You can also get it from The Chronic Rift web site by clicking on the above paragraph, or by going to Mevio's DKR page. Feedback can be left via e-mail to keith at decandido dot net, on DKR's Facebook page, on the forums on The Chronic Rift site, on this here blog, or by phone at 888-866-9010.

So we watched the premiere of Monday Mornings on TNT. It's Yet Another Hospital Drama, because there hasn't been a new one of those in at least a week, with the gimmick that the surgical staff at this hospital that hasn't been named that takes place in a city I don't recognize the skyline of, gets together on Monday mornings to go over cases that have gone horribly wrong. These meetings are lead by the head of surgery, who is played by Alfred Molina in a bad toupée (which explains why he's in some coming attractions scenes completely bald) and with his Obnoxio-Meter set to 11. It's actually rather a good gimmick, and one that offsets the show from all the other eighty gajillion hospital shows. (It's certainly better than TNT's last attempt at one, the relentlessly mediocre HawthoRNe.)

I actually rather like the show, mostly because Alfred Molina is delightfully snotty, and he's not even the most delightfully snotty person on the show: that honor goes to Keong Sim as Dr. Sung Park, who is spectacularly snotty, and is my absolute favorite person on the show. Plus, Ving Rhames is automatically awesome in everything he does, and he's delightful as the show's conscience.

Sadly, I suspect that what's going to happen is that the show's going to develop a following that is based on Jamie Bamber, who is playing the Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful character, the guy who's Tortured and Earnest and Damaged, and an entire cult following will grow up around Dr. Tyler Wilson by people who will say that he's Tortured and Earnest and Damaged and isn't he a wonderful character? And it will all be a bullshit smokescreen so they won't come across as shallow for liking the character because he's played by Jamie Bamber, Hot Guy. If the exact same character written the exact same way was played by Kevin James or Wayne Knight, these same fans would not give a rat's ass about him.

This isn't entirely fandom's fault, of course, because they always cast the Tortured and Earnest and Damaged male characters with guys who look like Jamie Bamber, who's, like, the last person who has anything to be tortured about...........

Still, I like the show enough to keep watching.

Worf wins a bat'leth tournament -- or does he????? He eats chocolate cake -- or is it yellow???? Data has golden eyes -- or are they blue???? Plus Dr. Ogawa, Lieutenant Wesley Crusher, Crazy Beard Riker, and a crispy-fried La Forge corpse. The TNG Rewatch makes some "Parallels."

An excerpt:

But the piece de resistance, the moment that cemented this as one of TNG’s top episodes, was the Enterprise that fired on the shuttle. Nineteen years later, I still remember how haunted I was by that one scene. The disheveled, deranged Riker plaintively screaming, “We won’t go back!” stuck in my head for weeks after I first saw the episode. It’s one of Jonathan Frakes’s best moments—not just as Crazy Beard Riker, but also as Captain Riker, as he very (and uncharacteristically) subtly plays Riker’s anguish, seeing himself in that state, knowing that it could just as easily have been him. (This right after his pained “It’s good to see you again” to Picard over the viewer.)