What are you watching right now?

[Cavaliere (moderator emeritus)]

Criminal Minds: "Amplification"

[The Baron]

"I'm detecting a pattern, Captain."

[Jeff of Earth-J]

PLANET OF THE APES - "Escape From Tomorrow"

This is the first episode of the short-lived TV series. I watched it because I just read the novelization of one of the episodes, but the first wasn't adapted. The show apparently had no budget to speak of because astronauts crash with no special effects whatsoever except a wind machine blowing dirt in the faces of the bystanders. No mention is made of what their mission was in the first place (other than they experienced some sort of difficulty near Alpha Centauri and hit the "automatic recall" switch) although, later in the episode, Zaius mentions two other ast-ro-nauts who arrived ten years earlier. I suspect this was a throwaway line for those who tuned in to the TV without ever having seen the movie. Those viewers may infer that it is a sequel when it is, in fact, a prequel. No mention of the earlier astronauts is ever made again. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

PLANET OF THE APES - "The Cure"

I hadn't planned on watching this one but, on the way home from work, I was telling Tracy about the novelization I had read and she thought it sounded interesting in light of certain recent events. Basically, an outbreak of Malaria is threatening both humans and apes alike. The humans have a cure, but the gorillas are against it. I was going to point out which character I see as which figure in reality, but it's pretty obvious. George Effinger hued pretty close to the teleplay in his adaptation, except he made Amy (and adult played by Sandra Locke, a love interest for Virdon) a 14-year-old girl who reminded him of his daughter. 

[The Baron]

Yesterday I re-watched Season Two of One Punch Man. Fun stuff.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

We had intended to re-watch season one of Resident Alien before the start of season two, but we've been having some trouble accessing SyFy.

Instead, last night we began watching season three of the new Lost in Space on Netflix. 

[Richard Willis]

Season 2 is scheduled to begin on January 26, so you still have time. They just had a call-back to season one, not a new episode.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

We had intended to re-watch season one of Resident Alien before the start of season two, but we've been having some trouble accessing SyFy.

Instead, last night we began watching season three of the new Lost in Space on Netflix. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

KUNG FU (THE PILOT): I hadn't planned to re-watch this one, but after having just finished reading the novelization, I couldn't resist. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"Last night we began watching season three of the new Lost in Space on Netflix."

Finished last night.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

SEAQUEST DSV: Last night I had occasion to watch something on VHS I recorded nearly 30 years ago. (More on that in a day or two.) Also on the tape was an episode of seaQuest that aired between two shows I had set to record, so I went ahead and watched it. I used to watch seaQuest and I used to like it, but the episode I watched last night was cheesier than I remember it the show itself being. The episode I recorded was from the first season, which was quite different from the second. The cast and thrust of the show was completely overhauled and retooled for the second season, and I didn't necessarily approve of all the changes that were made. [Understatement Alert.] Wikipedia tells me there was a third season, seaQuest 2032, which I don't even remember. 

There was a commercial for the upcoming episode on the first program I taped that night, and I didn't remember it at all. As I watched the episode itself, it kind of came back to me, but I didn't remember it as being as derivative as I see it now. Basically, it was made to look like an old western in which the law comes to a corrupt mining town, except this "mining town" is underwater. It looks like an Irwin Allen show to me now. I guess there's a reason it was dubbed "Voyage to the Bottom of the Ratings" by its critics. 

(It was set in 2018, BTW.)

EDIT: I did see season three. (I remembered it as being season two.) 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

BONANZA - SEASON 14: I have finally completed my long-time goal of watching every episode of Bonanza. Typically, I slowed down once the end was in sight, but Tracy and I together have watched every episode from seasons 1-7, and I have watched every episode from seasons 8-14 solo. Someone commented above that Bonanza wasn't as good after Adam left, but I didn't find that to be the case at all. There were plenty of good episodes in the remaining seven (six and a half, really) seasons. True to tell, there were also plenty of episodes in the first seven seasons that weren't all that good (the "comic" episodes, mostly). The best of the episodes are those that show the Cartwrights working together as a family, but many of the episodes spotlight one brother or another. (There were quite a few "Adam-less" episodes in the first seven seasons.)

After Pernell Roberts left the series, Adam Cartwright left the Ponderosa never to return. But the final blow came when Dan Blocker died between seasons 13 and 14. In story, Hoss's death was barely acknowledged. Fans knew that the character had died, but didn't know how. By that time, the cast was rounded out with hands Candy and Griff, plus an adopted son, Jamie. Finding a replacement for Dan Blocker on Bonanza was like trying to replace John Belushi in The Blues Brothers: no matter how many actors are recruited to take his place, all of them together are unable to fill his shoes.

BONANZA, MY LOVE: As I was watching the series, the only episodes I did not delete were the "flashback" ones dealing with Ben's three wives, and the first episode. Once I finished watching the last episode of S14, I went back and watched "Elizabeth, My Love," "Inger, My Love," "Journey Remembered," "Marie. My Love" and the first episode. I wish I would have saved the episodes with Hoss's uncle and Little Joe's half-brother as well, plus maybe "Top Hand." 

BACK TO BONANZA:

[A retrospective titled Back to Bonanza aired as a lead-in to Bonanza: The Return on November 28, 1993. I taped both on that night with an episode of seaQuest DSV (see above) in between.]

Back in the '90s, there were a couple of TV movie sequels which I taped. I found those tapes a while back and have been saving them to re-watch after I finished watching the series. As I recalled, there were two movies: Bonanza: The Next Generation and Bonanza: The Return, but I was mistaken. There were actually three TV movies. The ones I found were labeled "Bonanza: The Return" and "Bonanza TV Movie II." I had completely forgotten about the third one, Bonanza: Under Attack (which I had labeled "TV Movie II"), much less that I had recorded it. 

Again, as I recall (obviously not entirely reliable), Bonanza: The Return was a remake of Bonanza: The Next Generation and rendered the first one out of continuity (which is probably why I labeled Bonanza: Under Attack as "TV Movie II"). The first TV movie aired in 1988, the second in 1993 and the third in 1995. I've been piecing this together with the help of Wikipedia and Steven Lance's Written Out of Television. I haven't yet found confirmation that the second rendered the first non-canon, but I know I recorded Bonanza: The Next Generation; I just have to find it. 

[ClarkKent_DC]

Somehow, I was up at 1:30 in the morning and came across a scene that pulled me in ... the setting was a high-end restaurant, and there was a young couple who appeared to be on a first date, and another young woman sitting at a nearby table, hiding behind a menu, signaling to the woman at the other table the answers to the questions that came up in conversation. In other words, a silly Cyrano de Bergerac-type scenario.

I watched it to the end, and found it was part of a TV series called She Was Pretty. The premise is that years ago, when they were tweens, the young man on the date and the young woman at the other table were middle-schoolers. Back then, the boy was schlumpy, with Coke-bottle eyeglasses, and she was the queen bee of the school, from a wealthy family. One rainy day, the boy has a panic attack, and the girl kindly calms him down, by playing The Carpenters' version of "(They Long to Be) Close to You" on her MP3 player, placing one of her earphones in his ear.

Since then, they've gone their separate ways, but before he moves away, he gives her a piece of a jigsaw puzzle as a pledge that they would reunite in the future. Now twentysomethings, he has reached out to her, but their fortunes have changed. In particular, she's lost hers: Her family has gone bankrupt and she's eking out a living, while he's become slim, trim, handsome and a rising magazine editor. For her part, she hasn't stopped being pretty, per se; it's more that she's become frumpy, with a messy hairstyle, dowdy clothes and clunky shoes. At the moment I came into the story, the guy has reached out to her, but she's too embarrassed to face him so she enlists her glamorous friend to stand in for her. 

In subsequent episodes, our heroine gets a new job, but it's at the same publishing company the guy works for. And, in the kind of coincidence that can only happen in a situation comedy, she gets assigned to his publication, The Most magazine, where she is both happy and panicked to be near him, even though he doesn't recognize her. In fact, at one point, they are trapped in an elevator and she has a panic attack ... and he calms her down the same way she did for him all those years ago, playing "(They Long to Be) Close to You" without ever realizing she's the girl who did that for him. 

If this sounds like a telenovela, I suppose it is, except it's Korean. And even though I don't speak Korean (helpfully, they provide subtitles), I want to see where this goes.

[Richard Willis]

She Was Pretty sounds like one the U.S. might remake, like they did the original Korean version of The Good Doctor.