I mentioned when I last did a little cheerleading for the new season of Eureka that I’m a sucker for the hand holding. Since then Eureka has gone from strength to strength, but the latest episode, ‘The Ex-Files’ (4.09), showed a confidence that’s lacking in most shows currently on the air.

Annoying disclaimer again: I’m friends with Amy Berg who wrote this particular gem of an episode, but if you have a quick dig I’m confident that you’ll find a plethora of more analytical reviews than this post that reach the same conclusion. She knocked this one out of the park and then some. If you’re out this evening looking for the International Space Station you may be lucky enough to see Amy’s script bounce off the side of the tin can.

I’m writing this in London and I’m pretty sure the new season hasn’t aired here yet so don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but this episode had the tricky task of bringing back a couple of older Eureka characters into the storyline without alienating any new viewers who may have only just joined the fun this season. I count myself in that category as this is the most Eureka I’ve ever watched.

Now not only were these characters introduced in a manner that didn’t make me feel I had to sit through three box sets to catch up, their presence naturally pushed the season arc along beautifully, while at the same time forced some real honest-to-Zod character development in a set up that I’ve never seen before. To have two characters reach that moment while being cheered on by their actual past gets me in the same place that all good writing gets me. It’s heart wrenching in the same way (but with opposite intent) that the loss of Wash in Serenity was or the final (almost) Buffy voice over in season five’s ‘The Gift’ always is no matter how many times you hear it. I’m also pretty sure that the four actors involved have never had such wonderful lines given to them – the transition from humour to real sentiment was seamless – and I’ve been back and watched that scene a few times now.

It’s the kind of thing that is so audacious, yet pulled off so elegantly that you kind of need Kevin Costner talking you through it frame by frame, “Back, and to the left… back, and to the left… back, and to the left.”

The killer part for me as a fan of the hands that hold is that this was just as much about letting go.

Just perfect television.

Then again you may just wanna catch it for the killer BSG reference…

So what has kept you away from here for so long? I hear you ask. Work mostly, I reply.

Let’s be a little more specific (without ever actually going into specifics):

The TV stuff

I just finished a new pilot script. It needs one last pass of minor tweaking, but judging from the feedback so far it’s pretty much in the bag. Writing the Slingers pilot was a lot of fun, but just between us I didn’t really have a clue as to what I was doing when I started. Luckily I had a lot of good advice from people in the industry, some writers I’ve admired for ages (that I’m still giddy about now being friends with) and a lot of support.

That was almost two years ago now so I’d hate to think I hadn’t got a little bit better. That first script, ‘The Long Goodbye’, was the calling card that opened a lot of doors, but I find it hard to read now despite it having some great feedback from folks who have been doing this for a living a lot longer than I have.

So the new one now sits with the good guys over at Sleepydog and I move on to the next script. Which aptly enough is a brand new Slingers episode.

I wish I could say more about where we’re at with Slingers. I find the progress bar as frustratingly slow as everyone else, but it is filling up. I also get the impression that it’ll speed up considerably, but we’re not quite at that tipping point yet. Can I put a time frame on it? Not at all. And that’s partly why I’ve been keeping busy on all the other stuff. If Slingers was the only thing I was working on I’d have stabbed someone in the face by now. Thankfully with Sleepydog alone there are two other concepts that are at a very healthy development stage that I’m directly involved with. Plus working with Toby means we also get to throw a lot of cool ideas around outside of the TV stuff.

The Radio Thing

I just started working seriously on a radio pitch with an old friend yesterday. We’re calling that Wave for now. Very much at the ‘flesh meet bones’ stage but I guess its as high concept as anything else I’ve worked on recently. Lots of fun if we get to produce half of what we have in mind. Tackling radio is a whole new ball game and that’s partly what drew me to it. Plus the opportunity to work with Steve is like returning to something we started as kids.

The Comic Book Thing

This is a ‘package’ deal and it’s very raw and a tad more experimental. Slowly lining up the right people for that just now. Most things I work on are time dependent one way or another. This is the thing I slip into when the other stuff is moving along without me. Long term I guess, plus it involves a number of stories (some quite old, some brand new).

The Brit Movie Thing

Just outlined this properly over the weekend and it’s entirely dependent on the person I want to work with. If they pass then it’ll go into a folder to be cannibalised at some point in the future. If they like it I guess we’ll grab a coffee and discuss if it’s really doable. Fun idea though.

The LA Stuff

First and foremost out there is my first feature script, CONTAINER. I’m taking that out to my management, Principato-Young, and they’ve now set up a new round of meetings for me. Last time I met with people involved with some of my favourite movies and I’m slowly putting my inner fan boy away and getting to grips with the weird fact that not only do they still return my calls they also wanna work with me. Madness.

Earlier this year I got to work briefly with Disney and that went well enough that I just got a new project through to give some feedback on. I’ve managed to not fuck this stuff up to the point that I keep getting asked back to the table. One of my other feature ideas is being pitched right back at them next.

Be nice if some of this works, but the odds aren’t bad now that I know what individual studios are hungry for and I’ve been writing pages accordingly. I guess in total I have around five feature ideas that have had enough interest for me to start expanding on them. It’s a good thing I don’t sleep much because the hours fill up pretty quickly these days. Plus it’s a very real possibility that nothing will come of any of the feature stuff I’m currently working on, but that’s all part of the fun too. And even though I’m a miserable cunt most of the time, there isn’t a single thing right now that I’m working on that isn’t enjoyable.

When will any of the above find its way into an actual thing that you can watch and give me grief over? No idea.

I know people in Hollywood who make a very comfortable living form never having anything actually made. I don’t want to go down that particular road myself so I’ll keep banging away at the keys until something slips through or I decide to try to my luck in Hong Kong writing heroic bloodshed.

Looking back over this it seems ridiculously that this isn’t even close to everything that I have up on my whiteboard right now. Some stuff I work on once a year (Carbon Black) and others are slowly morphing into something entirely new (West is now looking more like a novel, but I’m still not as mad as Warren to try and add that to my work load too). The key is to keep coming up with ideas. A lot of them never make it from my desk to the whiteboard and I only have room for two projects at a time on the other walls in my office. I have piles of index cards, rubber banded and stacked that may one day get broken down further. And I have a Drop Box folder that I drop new ideas in to every single day so that I can throw them around on my iPhone or iPad while traveling.

As things progress I hope I’ll be able to talk about each of them in a little more detail here. Or you can just do the preferred thing of buying me a drink and I’ll spill everything.

But enough about my crap. There’s a lot of other people’s stuff I need to talk about now that I’m back on the blog…

This hasn’t really kept me from here as the whole process has been staggeringly slow, but I want to mention it here after reading this post from Christian. My own relationship with my mother was hopelessly broken and since she died a few months ago I’ve been forced back into a world I’ve been trying to escape from since I was a kid. So far the few meetings I’ve had with ‘family’ have been brief and not altogether unpleasant.

Bizarre but not unpleasant. No one’s punched me yet.

I’m still in the process of settling the estate. It’s a chore that is about to get a little more complicated thanks to the ‘eccentricities’ of some of my kin. Last Friday I spent the day traveling a couple of hundred miles to take a box of documents from one location to another location not a stone’s throw away. Loops, I jump through them. There’s a few home-truths to take on the chin along the way and that’s fine. I’m leaving as much of this as possible in the hands of my lawyer, but I think it’s fair to say that Friday was a bit of a head fuck. But I also came away with stuff like the photo heading the previous post.

That’s my old school pal, Martin Travis, with the blonde hair. That particular photo ended up in the local newspaper. No idea why.

And then there are the monkeys:

That’s me in miniature carrying a monkey. And my dad, many years previously, seems to have taken one out on a date. Again, no idea why.

The photo atop this post is my grandfather’s baptism certificate from 1910. I have one strong memory of the man and everyone who knew him is long gone, so it’s interesting to find these little artifacts from his life. I recently found his soldier’s service book from the Second World War which I’ll get up here at some point too. But if you jump ahead from 1910 to 1926 you find he was already entering the workforce:

It’s a beautiful document. I handed about twenty other intricately handwritten documents from the same period over to my lawyer so when I get those back I’ll get them up on Flickr too. The language is great. I don’t have time to transcribe it here now, but again I’ll add it to another blog post when I find the time.

And then there are my father’s GCE certificates from 1942:

Not surprised at the results, but I never knew that I shared the same middle name as my father until now.

There may be other bits and pieces squirreled away in the house I inherited, but unlike Christian I don’t really value this stuff beyond blog-fodder. My first instruction to the lawyer was to just empty the place and sell it.

With a little luck I can now handle the whole thing remotely without setting foot there again.

Just look at me.

Regular blogging will be resumed today. You lucky fuckers.

This weekend I watched Glee for the first time.

All 22 episodes. Back to back.

Haven’t done that with a show in a while.

I now completely understand why everyone has been quoting Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester at me.  But for me the real breakout character is Brittany as played by Heather Morris.

She gets perhaps the least lines* per episode and none of those episodes in the first season hinge on her character, but every single line she does get out (“When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist“) absolutely floored me. It’s an utterly charming performance.

Glee is easily dismissed as an opportunity to tap into the High School Musical/Normals Have Talent audience but the writing, especially the dialogue, is first rate. It’s not quite in the same league as The Gilmore Girls (which I still rate higher than The West Wing) and it’s no Veronica Mars, but I was only half joking when I described it as Battle Royale with Journey songs instead of sickles.

Odd that the Joss Whedon episode was only luke-warm and it’s a shame that the Lady Gaga/KISS episode slipped a little on one of the central character’s big moments, but overall it was a stupendous run. I guess I’ll catch the second season in more conventional sized bites with interest. The way an audience chooses to consume media does effect the experience.  I think I would have enjoyed the final season of Lost a lot less if I’d allowed it to be spoon fed to me rather than saving the entire season and then watching it in three hour chunks (more on this subject later).

I seem to be the last person on the planet to catch up on this, but if you’ve yet to visit William McKinley High School do give it a whirl. Like Ugly Betty it carves out a new niche for itself effortlessly.

Oh, and here’s the real thing for any Fugazi fans out there:

*and thanks to @robertbrook for this link.

Tidying up my office shelves and found a copy of the Monthly Film Bulletin from April 1982 which finished off its review of Sharky’s Machine thus:

“With the hitherto relaxed narrative pace switching gear to a climatic frenzy, the fact that Sharky’s final prey is virtually ejaculated bodily from the top of a tower block might be taken as a directorial joke on the genre’s oft-noted phallic preoccupations.”

One to rewatch then.

I haven’t seen the movie in years, but do have a copy here somewhere. I think the last Reynolds movie I revisited was Shamus so I’m overdue some Burt action. The MFB review seemed very British so I checked Variety* to see what they made of it:

Seems a tad harsh. Maybe a Sharky’s Machine / Blow Out double bill is in order…

*I have the Cover to Cover version of Rolling Stone magazine (1967-2007) and would recommend it to everyone.

Isn’t she beautiful?

That’s the asteroid Lutetia. Hermann Goldschmidt discovered her in 1852 from the balcony of his apartment in Paris and this month, some 158 years later, we got a much closer look. The photograph is one of several taken by the Rosetta probe. This is the one of Lutetia and Saturn that’s been getting all the attention:

This is the second asteroid that Rosetta has snuggled up to. The probe is due to to go into hibernation in just under a year’s time so that it can continue quietly on to its final destination, a comet named rather less romantically, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But in 2014 Rosetta wakes up again and deploys a lander named Philae (although I’m gonna call him Phil) whose job it is to touch down on the comet itself.

Think about that. This isn’t lets just aim some metal and crash the fucker to see what happens – this will be the first controlled landing on an actual comet.

I get all kinds of excited about this stuff and I’m not even a full-on science nerd. It just taps into the kid part of me that just thinks everything we do in space is awesome*.

But for now we can have a good look at Lutetia. If we ever get our act together and make manned missions that far she’ll literally be the best touchstone between Mars and Jupiter…

Doesn’t it suddenly strike you as crazy that Kirk, Skywalker and all those other space types never seemed to carry a camera?

More info on the mission over at the Rosetta blog.

*The September NASA shuttle launch was rescheduled for November so I’ve revised my travel plans and hope to get out there then.

I have a backlog of TV stuff I want to talk about (Sons of Anarchy), but the fourth season opener for SyFy’s Eureka just pulled out into the fast lane and demands immediate attention.

Disclaimer. I’m friends with (and a huge fan of) Amy Berg who joined the show after Leverage and so I was expecting the show to kick my ass. I have a couple of Amy’s scripts on my desk that I refer to from time to time as she’s got this down cold. If you want someone to avenge the death of your idiot family at the hands of corrupt cop Gary Oldman then you talk to Leon. If you want the same kind of professionalism when it comes to breaking a story… you go to Berg.

It’s also worth noting that up until now I’ve not been a regular visitor to Eureka. I watched some of the first season, but figured I knew where it was heading and it dropped off my radar. I’ve dipped into each season and did catch the third season finale, but again it didn’t really pull me in. All change.

I’m guessing the safe route would have been to pile on more of the same, but ‘Founder’s Day’ manages to stick to the core conceit and pull off a smart as hell reboot that should keep the old fans happy, usher in a new audience and still leave room for a Terminator gag and Erica Cerra taking down a platoon of grunts. That they also brought James Callis from BSG into the mix is a) a crowd-pleaser and b) sets up a staggering amount of story possibilities. But here’s what I really liked about the episode.

It wasn’t about the gadgets, the remarkable situation the cast found themselves in or just throwing stuff at the audience. It was character lead all the way and there were some brilliant quiet moments in the script that immediately locked me in for the season.

I’m a sucker for people holding hands.

So yeah, I was expecting Berg to kick my ass – she’s actually been doing that for years before I met her – but this was a pummeling. It sometimes seems that the very process that gets a show onto television is constructed in such a way to suck some of the elemental fun out of the finished product. That I was grinning from start to finish shows that Eureka pulled off something special last night.

Oh, and if you really need another reason to get on board they’ve got a 28 Day’s Later inspired zombie episode on the way… with Wil freakin’ Wheaton.

I’m sure this is everywhere by now, but I was grinning and watched it more than once in the early hours of the morning:

No love for Simon though?

And yeah, I admit I have this on heavy rotation too:

ps You already know about this*, right?

*Edited to fix typo caused by excitement in chatting to one of my fave actors. Also please don’t count any guest stars before the show is hatched. Updates on that to follow.

When I was blogging from the train the other week I meant to mention this piece too:

Mainly to get a reaction from @Hinchcliffe.

It’s a flyer for a Jason Chalker show, but it was just the Snoopy as Red Baron thing that drew my attention. I’ve always drawn a straight line from Snoopy’s flights of fancy to the dizzy heights of Calvin & Hobbes. Back in my metal days when most of my friends had Maiden and Anthrax going on, my own leather jacket featured a full back acrylic painting of Calvin and Hobbes.

I did go through the horns ‘n’ demons phase, but as much as a good piece of album art touched me it was always the stronger narrative that won out and I’ve always believed there’s something more real in the tale of a small boy and his tiger than even most of the literature I studied.

Than again I think Watership Down is a vast improvement on Homer*.

*The original one – no eyes, no overbite.