Everything I know about television (I learned from fandom)

[kangeiko]

Snaffled from everyone on my flist. Man, how much do I love this meme? It's so meta - a meme talking about memes - and oooh, it makes the pomo girl me curl her toes in happiness.

Shows that I have seen enough of not to be entirely ignorant about(i.e. about two eps and upwards): all the Star Treks, the new Battlestar Galactica, the new Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, Futurama, Blackadder, Quantum Leap, Buffy, Xena, Hercules, ER, CSI: Vegas, The West Wing, Studio 60, Angel, Buffy, Firefly, House, Veronica Mars, Sex & the City, Carnivale, Deadwood, Lois & Clark, Alias, LOST, Stargate SG-1, er.... nope, I think that covers it.

Ask me about any other show, and I will tell you everything I have learned about it from teh Internets! And, yes, there are some biggies on there that are missing...

Comments

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I, Claudius. Life on Mars. Blake's 7. Old Dr. Who. *g*

[kangeiko]

... all of which I mostly picked up from your lj and andraste's lj. *g*

I, Claudius:
That's the Robert Graves thing, yeah? There's this Roman emperor who's a really nice chap, only he's surrounded by political beasts ready to rip him to shreds. There's also someone called Livia on it, and you seem to like her so I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say that she's a really strong, powerful, manipulative woman, who is probably like Lauras Roslin and Bristow in many respects. Also, according to the imdb site, Brian Blessed was in it. Who knew?

Life on Mars:
This detective has a colleague attacked, and then falls asleep (or something) in his car, and when he wakes up it's 1973 and he's a police officer and wearing really bad 70s clothes. So, he has the obligatory 'culture shock' of everyone smoking, and racism and sexism, and then he figures out that the murders in the 70s are connected to the murder he was solving in 2006, and he has to solve it to wake back up in his body in 2006. Only I'm guessing he doesn't. Am I close?

Blake's 7:
AKA the one where they all die. There's Blake, and also Kerr Avon (whose name I know only because someone used it as an homage in a B5 fic, incidentally), and Vila, and some others. I think the '7' refers to a group of ships? Also, there is Servalan, who has odd make-up and I'm guessing is similar to Livia and the two Lauras. Yes/no?

Old Who:
Well, the first Doctor is this really old guy, who's formal and looks like he came from the nineteenth century or something. There's also paul mcgann at some point, and a bloke with a really long stripey scarf, and a blonde guy with a floppy hat who looks like he's a golfer, and Sylvester McCoy. And they're all the Doctors, I think. There's also a bad guy called The Master, and Cybermen, and Daleks who can't go up stairs, and K9, and Ace, and Romana, who are companions and apparently kick arse even more so than Rose. And there's one point where they all get together on planet - all of the doctors - which I suspect is the one episode I saw glimpses of during a hung-over morning a few years ago...

And the TARDIS is still the TARDIS. Of course.

Wasn't there also another timelord? like, a female one that the doctor occasionally gets paired with? was she evil? oh, and the doctor's race got wiped out by the daleks, using TIME. Which is apparently a weapon. or something.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

I, Claudius: he. Yes, it's the Robert Graves thing, but Claudius doesn't get to be Emperor until the last three episodes of the show, at which point he has survived most of the poltiical beasts by playing the fool they don't think worth killing.*g* Livia is his grandmother who was married to Augustus and yes, is a really strong powerful manipulative woman. Brian Blessed played Augustus, doesn't have a beard and shouts only ones (the sentence "how many of you slept with my daughter"). He also proves what he can do if properly challenged with a splendid death scene, in which he is entirely silent and the camera never leaves his face for five minutes, during which you hear Livia talk from off camera, and yet you know the exact moment Augustus dies, the light leaving Blessed's eyes, they become fixed, so does the face, it's amazing.

Life on Mars: Fair description of the pilot.

Blake's 7: LOL. The seven actually were never seven (crew members) unless you count the ahip's computers, but Terry Nation liked the number, so the title stayed. (Terry Nation, btw, being the chap who invented the Daleks; he invented B7 and wrote most of the first season, but equally as important to the show was his script editor and the later headwriter for the rest, Chris Boucher, another Old Who alumni.) JMS stole paid homage to one of the many subplots, the one with Anna Sheridan to be specific - Anna Grant in B7, so if you're an old B7 fan, as soon as you hear Sheridan's late wife is called Anna, you know she'll be back and working for the opposition. B7 in a dystopia where the Federation (same symbol as on Star Trek, only turned ninety degrees to the right) is a dictatorship, and Blake (former political activist, brainwashed into good citizen) gets framed as a pedophile by them in the pilot after he overcomes the original brainwashing, as they figure this is a better way to render him without support than making him a martyr. He gets a bit obsessive about being a terrorist freedom fighter after that one. Avon is the obligatory morally ambiguous character with snappy one liners and a slashy relationship with Blake.

Servalan is the coolest Evil Overlady ever. Much more than a fashion fiend than the two Lauras, though. Has great UST with Avon once Blake leaves the show. (This being the only show I know where the title character isn't around for the last two seasons except for the season finales.)

Old Who: There were plenty of other timelords, which is why several Old Who fans were rather disgruntled at Russel T. Davis for killing them all off in the Time War (which happened in the interim between the old show and the new because Davis made it so.) The Master is another timelord, for example, Romana (the one the Doctor gets occasionally paired with) is a timelady, and then there is the Rani (female villain); there are the most notable timelords other than the Doctor.

Paul McGann was the eigth Doctor who only appears in the American tv movie which is the red headed stepchild of the saga. Not beause of McGann, he's great in the part, but because of the rest of the film. To be totally prejudiced, Americans can't do Dr. Who. They gave him a teenage sidekick and made him half human because they figured American viewers couldn't relate to a completely alien main character. *headdesk* (The Daleks screaming "half human - blasphemy!" in Parting of the Ways is a in-joke about this.*g*)