Being Human is Made of Win

Contrary to the title of this post, we're - even as of this moment - unsure why we love this show so much. It could be because we have watched the entirety of season 1 and what has aired of season 2 within the past twenty-four hours, but we really can't put our finger on what it is about this show that we love.

Well, yes we can:

That. That right there would keep us watching this show even if it turned into a Heroes-scale trainwreck.

But even without factoring in Aidan Turner's amazing good looks, we adore this show. Here's the lowdown: a vampire (sort of by choice) and a werewolf (by accident) just happen to move into a house haunted by a ghost (by murder). The show focuses on their lives and their attempt at ... well, at being human.

Mitchell, the vampire, has decided he's had enough of killing people for blood, so now all the other vamps refer to him as being "on the wagon." He's had a bit of a bloodthirsty past (understandably), and so he spends a lot of time trying to atone for all the murder. We like that Mitchell tries so hard to be good and to do the right thing now, rather than brooding about having made the wrong choice then. Also, he's really good-looking (see above).

George, the werewolf, is played by Russell Tovey, who is our favorite. In addition to our involvement in sci-fi geekery, we also dabble in historical knowledge attainment. Russell Tovey first caught our attention in a little film known as The History Boys, as our favorite character, Rudge. We admire Tovey's ability to bring depth to characters that could easily be one-dimensional - Rudge is a "dumb jock" who's really not so dumb; George is a shy, unassuming janitor trying to come to terms with that whole werewolf bit. It would be so easy for him to sink into the shadows due to his insecurities, but Russell Tovey brings out every inch of George's personality and shoves it in our faces.

We arrive, finally, at Annie, the ghost, played by Lenora Crichlow. Annie has two habits that really irritate us: one, she spends a lot of time pining for the fiance she lost when she died ... well, for a few episodes, and then she wises up. Two, if a man so much as winks at her, she gets all giggly, and then that man thinks she's flirting and she ends up getting assaulted. And when we say giggly, we mean, BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL, WOMAN, SHUT UP OR I WILL THROW SOMETHING AT MY TV. That giggly. However, we also admire Annie. She cares so much about Mitchell and George that, when her unfinished business finally resolves itself and the mythical door into the next world appears, she turns it down because Mitchell is hurt and she wants to make sure he survives. When she's not giggling, she can be kind of badass.

We suppose, then, that we love this show for the same reason we love Torchwood: the character development. The cast of Being Human agrees with us.  Sci-fi geeks that we are, y'all know we love a good supernatural showdown; however, we think it has more meaning when we know enough about the characters to want to support them.

The second season of Being Human airs in the U.S. on BBC America Saturdays at 9pm/8 Central.

Photo from here.

The Greatest Television Couple of All Time ... of ALL TIME!

  ... Okay, maybe we're exaggerating a bit. But we love Amy Pond. We love Rory Williams. It's pretty safe to say that when you put them together, it's MAGIC. Gah. They are our favorite. And yes, everything is our favorite, but still. We love them.

The newly-regenerated (and still a little zonked) Doctor meets Amy when she is seven years old and in the midst of a prayer for someone to come fix the crack in her wall. Shock of all shocks, it turns out to be a crack in space and time. The Doctor leaves "just for a few minutes - he'll be right back, he promises," and it turns out he's gone for twelve years. They - with assistance from Amy's boyfriend, Rory - save the world from the Atraxi, etc. etc, he leaves "just for a mo'" and comes back two years later, on the night before Amy's wedding, which she neglects to mention to him.

Stuff happens, Amy tries to seduce the Doctor, Doctor says, no, you love Rory, howzabout we bring him time-traveling with us?

Thus begins a spectacular partnership (can it be a partnership if there's 3 people involved? We're going to say yes) involving the Doctor, Amy, and Rory and their misadventures with fish from space, a weird dream of the Doctor's, those creepy lizard creatures who live at the center of the earth, and a bunch of other stuff that we will refrain from relating because it involves spoilers. Let's go back to Amy and Rory.


Why We Love Amy:
Besides admiring her badassery, we find Amy refreshing because - attempted makeout sesh notwithstanting - she's not in love with the Doctor. We know, we know: Donna Noble was also not in love with the Doctor. We found that refreshing, too, but it would have been weird for Donna to be in love with the Doctor. Given that the Doctor sort of saved Amy's life when she was like seven, we know how easy it would have been for the writers of this show to create some weird daddy-issues love story involving the two of them. We are so glad they didn't. She makes a conscious decision that she loves Rory more than she loves the Doctor, and we respect her for that.

Also, we are totes jealous of her Scottish accent, beautiful porcelain skin, and fantastic hair. That's what we were going for during those two years we dyed our hair red, but clearly there's nothing like the real thing. Basically, Karen Gillan is gorgeous.

Why We Love Rory:
Rory rolls with the punches. Wayyyyy back when the Doctor and Rose first got together, Mickey wussed out and was like, "No, he's dangerous, you're going to die, time travel is scary, DON'T GO!" While we understood that he was trying to keep Rose safe, and that he genuinely cared about her welfare, we were unimpressed. More than that, we felt sorry for him. We've already discussed how annoying it was to feel sorry for Martha Jones, and Mickey was no different. We wanted to give him a hug, but we also kind of wanted him to go away.

Anyways. The Doctor takes Amy and Rory to 17th-century Venice for some pre-wedding romantic time, and they run into vampire-fish from space. Rory's all like, "Okay, I guess it's time to fight some vampire-fish from space, whatevs." And, okay, there's a little bit of confusion and waffling, but that's it. For the rest of the time he spends traveling with them, Rory is totally cool.

... Admittedly, we also are pretty impressed with the scope of his love for Amy. Dude spends 2,000 years watching over her (okay, partial spoiler - our bad) to make sure she doesn't die. That's pretty sweet.

Image from The Ultimate Doctor Who Site.

Not to be Confused With That One About the Blue People

Things The Internet Has Established:

1. Avatar: The Last Airbender is awesome.
2. The movie version, known as The Last Airbender on account of the aforementioned blue peepz, is less awesome. By a lot.
3. Hollywood and M. Night Shyamalan are racist for casting white people as Aang, Katara, and Sokka.

Our role here at SRSBZNZ is not to argue with the Internet about whether the cartoon or the movie is better (personally, we prefer the cartoon), or to provide you with diatribes on why the casting of this movie is or isn't racist (Hollywood in general, probably. This movie ... we're not entirely convinced). No. We are here to snark it up and to write about things that make us happy.

Enter the most badass television uncle ever, General Iroh.

Iroh, uncle to the not-so-evil Prince Zuko, accompanies his nephew on his journey to capture the avatar and regain his honor. In the series, Iroh enjoys tea, pai sho, and saying wise things that need to be deciphered. In the movie, we're sad to say, Iroh is Mr. Serious Business (not to be confused with SRSBZNZ, which is really much less serious). The Fire Nation views him as a failure for an unsuccessful siege at Ba Sing Se, the capital of the Earth Kingdom. 

We always feel bad for Uncle Iroh when Prince Zuko goes on one of his, "Must regain honor and make Daddy love me!" tangents and says that his uncle is a worthless loser who doesn't understand what's important. Like, OMG, Zuko, you are one seriously angsty teenager. But Uncle Iroh is wise and understands that Zuko will grow out of it. We're not even going to lie, we mostly feel bad for Uncle Iroh because sometimes we yell at our mom even though she's right. Basically, we're projecting. 

One of our favorite moments in the show, obviously, is when Zuko finally grows a pair and goes to tell his dad, Fire Lord Ozai, that he's deserting the Fire Nation and going to help the Avatar. Zuko proceeds to inform Fire Lord Ozai that he will go to Uncle Iroh and beg for forgiveness, because Uncle Iroh has been a better father than Ozai ever was.

Ozai: (I Think I'm Better Than Everyone Else Voice) "Your uncle? Well, perhaps he can pass down to you the ways of TEA and FAILURE." 

Allow us to share with you our reaction: BAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA

Few more hilarious angry lines have been uttered in our personal history of television watching. First of all, tea is made of win. Secondly, your butt is about to get TOTALLY SCHOOLED by the Avatar. Joke's on you, Fire Lord Ozai.

Our second favorite Dumbass Fire Nation Moment comes when Princess Azula, sister of Zuko, is betrayed by one of her friends, who happens to be Zuko's girlfriend. The betrayal occurs when Mai saves Zuko's life while Azula is trying to kill him. (Reason #23094872 you know this is a show intended for young adults. So much relationship drama! Yeesh.)

Mai: "You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you."

This is entertaining in and of itself, but wait! It gets better.

Azula: (Angry Child Voice) "No, YOU miscalculated! You should have feared ME more!"

Insert tantrum here. No, really. There is totally a tantrum after this exchange.

In addition to these hilarious moments of Fire Nation Dialogue Fail, the television series actually has a lot of genuinely funny moments. Having seen the movie first, it was difficult for us to transition into Saturday Morning Cartoon mode and enjoy the funny moments without being all like, "BUT THE AVATAR HAS TO SAVE THE WORLD WHY ARE THEY TRYING TO MAKE ME GIGGLE." Eventually, we got used to it, and ended up loving all the slapstick sidenotes in the cartoon. We have to say, however, that we totally support M. Night Shyamalan's decision to make the movie more serious. It is still a horrific adaptation of an awesome show, but all those slapstick cartoon moments would not translate well to live action. And you know we're always going to prefer the version that can be funny on purpose, and not just because it has no idea how awful it is. What we're trying to say is, waste your free time on the TV show instead of the movie. It's worth it just for Uncle Iroh.

Image from http://www.freewebs.com/zutarachick/iroh02.jpg.

Carrying a Torch ... For Torchwood (Yes, We Just Went There).

Well, kids, it looks like Heroes is over for the season. Is that a good or bad thing? We can't decide. What we do know is that we need a show to fill that time. We're not yet sure what NBC will come up with, it being the Olympics and all, and can we just take a moment to say how much we LOVE THE OLYMPICS?!?!? Love. Them. And, really, they're kind of like science fiction - have you seen those skiers flying through the air? Crazy talk.

We digress. What we're trying to say is that we need a new sci-fi show, stat. While we work on finding something to recap every week, let us tell you about what is possibly our favorite sci-fi show ever.

If you're new to the sci-fi genre, we will let you in on a little secret: Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun for several reasons:

1. It's low-budget, and therefore, highly entertaining
2. It's British, which makes it better than anything American, just kidding, we don't want to turn into Gwyneth Paltrow here
3. The Doctor is generally (in new episodes, at least) played by an attractive gentleman.

We know you're sold, but before you run out the door to your local Blockbuster - or look the show up on Netflix, where you can find quite a few episodes available to watch instantly - we want to tell you about a show we think we might like even more than Doctor Who.

Probably a lot of people are going to call us blasphemers for having just said that, especially if they know what show we're about to discuss. But we shall persist in our love of this show, because it is awesome. During the second season of the most recent Doctor Who incarnation, the BBC capitalized on a couple of the show's more interesting secondary characters and created a spinoff. That spinoff is called Torchwood.

We once said on our (personal) Twitter account that we thought it was silly for people to watch Torchwood without watching Doctor Who first. We stand by that statement. Doctor Who is awesome. But one of the defining characteristics of The Doctor is that he steadfastly refuses to tell anyone anything about his past. We get to know quite a lot about his present, and about his relationships with the ladies who travel with him (of course they're always ladies ... no television show is complete without some palpable sexual tension), but hardly anything about his own personality or what his life was like before his planet was destroyed in the Time War. We think that's super lame.

What we love about Torchwood is the character development. The show revolves around Gwen Cooper (who is a descendant of the Gwen Cooper who was in the TOTALLY AWESOME Doctor Who episode about Charles Dickens, and is, of course, played by the same woman), a police officer in Cardiff. She discovers Torchwood accidentally, and although they try to erase her memory of it, she's too smart for them bwahahaha etc. Torchwood is led by Captain Jack Harkness, who is also in several episodes of Doctor Who and who cannot die. The other Torchwood officers include Doctor Owen Harper, who dies twice; Toshiko Sato, who carries a major torch for Owen but only dies once; and Ianto Jones, who is sleeping with Captain Jack and who has remained alive thus far. What, we never said Torchwood wasn't also full of cheesy things.

Whereas Doctor Who is primarily about crazy alien stuff and how smart-but-not-remotely-readable the Doctor is, Torchwood puts the aliens aside and focuses on the characters.

Let's pause to think about what we just said.

Pause over. In summation: We love us some Doctor Who, but we really appreciate the writers' decision to allow viewers to get to know the people of Torchwood. Also, we kind of have a thing for Ianto.

Only on Heroes

Over the weekend we caught up on our Heroes - in preparation for the finale tonight - and we noticed some interesting singularities about the show. In order to wrap our minds around the CRAZY, we compiled a list. It's called "Only on Heroes."

Only on Heroes would someone say, "People think dreaming the future is a gift, but it's not."

Only on Heroes would it be that easy for Hiro, Ando, and Mohinder to escape from a mental hospital when the alarm has been going off for like ten minutes already.

Only on Heroes would a dream cure Hiro Nakamura's brain tumor. 

Only on Heroes would Sylar STILL NOT BE DEAD YET.

Only on Heroes would everybody in "the family" still believe that Samuel is the good guy.

This show is so predictable.

Kickin' it Back to the Late 90s

Some of our friends recently became fans of "DEEDEE! GET OUT OF MY LABORRRATORY!" on Facebook, and although we're pretty choosy about our fan pages, we did feel compelled to check this one out. We didn't realize it at the time, but Dexter's Laboratory was a pretty great science fiction show when we were youngsters. We love mad scientists because they come up with the most outrageous schemes, typically with hilarious results that make us both pity and ridicule the schemers. We also love prodigious children, because, well, they're just so cute. What better idea than combining them both: a prodigious, mad-scientist child ... who only wants some ice cream. Without further ado, we present: Dexter's Battle With the Ice Cream Man.

Caprica What?!

... No, really. We spent about half of this two-hour premiere asking ourselves what was going on. Pilots are always like that, though, so fear not, clever readers! We'll be watching this week, too. (Okay, so we're a little late on the review. Blame it on the fact that we have a life. Also, we don't get paid for this. Show us the money and we'll talk about timely reviews.)

Okay, so first of all, props to whomever hired Ann Number One from Arrested Development to play main character Zoe Graystone. Props taken from whomever named her "Graystone," because we will always think, "By the power of Greyskull!" whenever we see her or her parents.

Now, you might be wondering about the premise of this show. Zoe, she of the Power of Greyskull, is all computer genius-y and involved in some kind of weird avatar world where everybody is TOTALLY FREAKIN' CRAZY and people are, like, shooting each other and sacrificing virgins, and engaging in all sorts of despicable behavior. But Zoe and her friends are trying to undermine that avatar world (we think?) because they believe in some sort of monotheistic - and, apparently, to everyone else on Caprica, crazy - religion. But then Zoe goes and gets herself blown up.

You may think the show ends there, but no! Because the two hours are not up yet, we discover that Zoe's avatar survived. Because she is a computer genius and created an avatar that couldn't die, we don't know, whatever. The point of all this is to get to the part about her dad. Her dad finds out about this surviving avatar, and because he's all computer genius-y, tries to make it into a Real Boy, like Pinocchio, except it's actually a girl. Duh. What, did you think this show was about wooden puppets?

Anyways, Zoe's dad makes friends with this guy from our mom's favorite show, Da Vinci's Inquest, which is some kind of Canadian answer to Law and Order, except with more of a serial plotline. So this dude, who is from a planet called Tauron, where apparently everyone eats dirt (no they don't), has just lost his wife and daughter. Zoe's dad is all like, I WILL BRING YOUR DAUGHTER BACK TO LIFE IN THE AVATAR WORLD! and then he does, but the daughter is like, um, no thank you, this is weird, because my REAL self is dead. So we're not really sure how this Tauron dude is going to continue to fit in the plot, but he got so much screen time during the pilot that we know he's important.

Finally, because we're sure you're ready for this recap to just end already - we know we are - the icing on the cake: Zoe's dad has created this robot that looks just like Megatron, only smaller, and he tries to transfer Zoe's avatar into it, but it doesn't work ... except it DOES!!!!!! The episode ends with Zoe's voice speaking out of the tiny - well, tiny by comparison, anyway - Megatron, asking her friend for help.

Um, hi. We love any pilot episode that ends with a girl-robot asking someone for help. Because it's ridiculous. And since you don't know us too well, internetz, we love ridiculous.

Our one complaint about this show is that their favorite swear word is apparently "frak." In case you're not an avid 30 Rock watcher like us, that's their favorite fake swear word. When someone calls someone else a "frakkin' dirt eater," we cannot hold it together. It sounds ridiculous - but not the good kind of ridiculous, the kind where you're like, really? You couldn't come up with a better swear word? Really. What the frak were you thinking?!

 

Images from Oh Mars, Share of Voice,  and Geek Sugar