Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans - Bits from the Numinous Box

[akirlu]

I finally sat through another full episode of Criminal Minds and so far can't see why the fuss. I seem to be drawing arsonist eps, and the writing on this one("Ashes and Dust") had a fitful case of the stupid.

We first encounter a family sleeping innocently in their beds while the perp is pouring gasoline around the house and then setting it all ablaze. Cut to parents being awakened by their son -- it's a fire! C'mon we gotta go! The son then drags them out of their Not Yet Burning bedroom into a Flame Engulfed hallway choked with smoke and leaping fire. Everyone crawls along the floor of the Flame Engulfed hallway, through the Flame Engulfed dining room and living room, and winds up half-fried and attractively ash-smeared at the base of the front door, which (gasp) won't open. It's been jammed! Oh, noes! Oh, the doominess! All die in flames.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting through all of this wondering who the hell goes out of a completely Not Burning bedroom right into a Flame Engulfed inferno of a hallway to aim for an exterior door they might not even be able to reach through the heat and smoke of the Flame Engulfed intervening rooms when there is a perfectly serviceable window right there in the Not Burning room? Is there a long drop to the ground below the window? Is the window above a cliff? Is the house built on stilts above shrieking-shark-infested waters?

That's when we get an exterior shot to reveal the burning house is a low-slung single-story ranch house with big aluminum slider windows.

Screw those people, they were too stupid to live anyway.

Later we get some hand-wavish mumbo-jumbo about how the perp forced them to head for the front door by splashing gas all over the back door. Great. Still doesn't account for leaving a Not Burning room by way of the Flame Engulfed doorway instead of by way of the Not Even A Little Bit Burning bigass window.

Even later, the serial arsonist traps another family in their car in their garage, and while the father is playing with the remote to the garage door opener, which does nothing, there's this bunker-clad maniac pouring gas all over the hood of the car. Aieeee! He has a lighter! Aieee! Get out of the car, everyone! Get out! Get out! Oh, noes! None of the door locks work! Everyone is locked in! All die in exploding flames.

Okay, I'm happy to believe it's trivial to disable an electronic garage door opener. But 'splain me pliz how one manages to gimmick the power locks of a car so that they open to a key once, and only *then* lock in such a way that even the driver inside the car cannot unlock them? Yeah, no, not buying it. Also? Family is (naturally) seated in a Giant Horking SUV thing. Screw the door opener, screw the door locks, the engine's already running anyway, so drive through the asshole with the gas can, and through closed garage door, and worry about your trim pieces later.

Screw those people, they're too stupid to live, too.

Later, there is a rather clever, switchy ending for the bad guy, but by then I'm sufficiently annoyed with the stupid that eleventh hour cleverness is wasted on me.

On the other hand, I am in ecstasies to find that there is a new series of Foyle's War. Michael Kitchen, oh, baby.

And we are almost through the long dry patch between series of Mad Men. Jon Hamm, oh, baby, baby.

Comments

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

Hehehehe...tee...hee! This episode is one that I haven't seen. I am probably all for the better for having not seen it. *snicker* *snicker* *snork*

Foyle's War is good -I have found that most episodes dragging a character back from "retirement" are tepid, but this one made a fairly decent job of it. I am most fond Masterpiece Theater Mysteries as they generally have a good plot and decent writing.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Criminal Minds ran out of steam a while ago. This season has been largely idiocies, like the one you describe, or completely amoral psychotic behavior, like Dick Cheney. The post-writers strike episodes were better.

At its best, CM was a thoughtful game of cat-and-mouse with lives on the line. It hasn't dropped completely off my watchlist, but I generally only catch it if there's nothing on opposite the show and I'm not doing anything else.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I seem to be drawing arsonist eps

Every time I tried out ST:TNG when it was on the air, it seemed that I got an episode with the tiresome Q. (My opinion: one Squire of Gothos had been enough.) Fans of the show had a hard time convincing me they weren't all like that.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I have not seen this, but I can explain to you how the power locks of a car can lock in such a way that even the driver inside the car cannot unlock them. Rather, I cannot explain this, because I am ignorant of the irritating combination of electronic and mechanical failure that made it happen to me, but I can testify that when it did, I had to open the car window and unlock the car with the key from the outside in order to open the door, an action which took me an embarrassing amount of time to think of. I'm with you, though. Got a car, the engine's on, a homicidal maniac is after you: run over him and keep going.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's the bit where it's implied by narrative circumstance that the reason the doors do not open is because the the homicidal maniac has done something to the car so that the door locks will yeild to normal blandishments on the family's way in to the car, but then will lock themselves and say locked thereafter, that has me skeptical. That seems a particularly fiddly and fail-prone bit of gimmicking. But what do I know about these fancy 21st Century vehicles, anyway? Our doorlocks are pneumatic.

But yeah, use vehicle to extract yourself from homicidal situations. Accellerate Out of Problems, quoth Mr. Powers. But then, I may be uncommonly bloodthirsty. I was dumbfounded years back at the news of a young woman who was asphyxiated by her rapist's penis. The response to such treatment is clear. Bite it off, spit it out, and continue breathing normally. If he has a gun, better to be shot in the head than asphyxiated anyway, and at the very least, you stand a chance of taking him with you when you go.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Foyle's war is usually both well written and well acted, and usually has the side benefit of doing a lot of really interesting WW II history bits in the B and C plots. (Indeed one of the things I admire about the show is that there pretty well always are B and C plots and they are seamlessly woven into the A plot.)

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I'm vaguely reminded of a Doctor Who episode from this season in which the Doctor just forgets that his sonic screwdriver has a "shatter glass" setting.

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. I don't see the appeal. I've watched it a few times, and thought it lacked spirit and guts. Needless to say, I didn't see this one, so I am only working from your description, but the idea of being in a burning garage and fooling around with the garage remote is plain stupid. You've got a three-thousand to four-thousand pound weapon. Turn that baby on, and either go out the back of the garage through the wall (which is really fairly easy to do so I have seen), or put it in reverse and go through the damned door. Wow, that car gets damaged.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I usually only watch Masterpiece Mystery, not the olde englishe ones. So the tall blond guy is Michael Kitchen?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I have *no* idea who you're thinking of, since a)Foyle's War *is* one of the Masterpiece Mystery series, b)there is no tall blond guy in the series and c)Michael Kitchen is neither tall nor blond. There's a recent-ish picture of him here (with Penelope Wilton), and his IMDB page is ... hmm, well IMDB seems to be down right now, but there's a link to it here at the Wikipedia entry on Kitchen. If you ever saw Enchanted April, he played the musical owner of the villa in Italy.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's the guy who plays Foyle! I was thinking of the series before this one (they're showing four, I think, mystery short series this summer). Inspector Lewis -- used to be Inspector Morse, but the actor who played the title character died and they've promoted his assistant and given him a young tall educated blond male assistant.

(I had to use IMDB to look up Inspector Lewis because public television only likes to look forward, and IMDB appear to have been paid lots of money to put in a Pan's Labyrinth background on the main page.)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I liked the show at first, but stuff like this (I wrote some of these very same complaints about this very episode) eventually pushed my away.

Some of the ardent fans apparently think that the character development outweighs these quibbles. I stopped reading one person's LJ because she did not want to hear any complaints about the idiocy of some of the plot elements, so immersed was she in the characters.

[intelligentrix.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that tendency, too. I was disappointed and peeved at the episode set in New Orleans (they got just about everything possible to get wrong, wrong) and the ardent fans didn't want to hear about it. *sigh* FWIW, I think the character development is interesting, but you have to sort of put blinders on to the utter stupidity of some of the stories.

[albionwood.livejournal.com]

That ep lost me, too, as soon as they crawled out into the Flame Engulfed Hallway. WTF?

This show suffers, as do virtually all TV series, from erratic writing. Some eps are just great, and in some you wonder if the writers had seen any of the previous eps. And they had a very disturbing tendency to substitute frantic handwaving and jargon-spewing for logical plotting and development.

OTOH, the ones with Keith Carradine were great.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Ah. I must have gotten timing mixed up.