Weekend review

Saturday I got up bright and early to go pick up my parents and drive 2.5 hours to Cumberland, Maryland. There we met Ellen of Armitage Shelties to receive the gorgeous 6 year old "Cami" who is retiring from breeding and showing into a life of luxury at my parent's house. She is a sweet girl who is fitting in perfectly and acting as if she's always lived with us. Pictures to come. Even though I had my camera in my pocket, I somehow didn't manage to take any! Since I had hardly slept Friday night, when I got home I went to bed.

Sometime this weekend, I watched the second episode of the new "Knight Rider". Wow was it awful. I remember that even as a child I thought the original was cheesy at times. But I think this is worse. Poor acting, poor blue-screen work. It appears they spent money on the CGI, it wasn't too bad. And I like the idea of Kitt transforming; but from a Mustang into a quad-cab pickup truck? Um...hmmm. I won't be upset if this gets deleted from the DVR schedule.

We also watched the sorta-anticipated "Sanctuary" starring Amanda Tapping from Stargate SG-1. It was awful. We'll definitely be deleting it from the schedule. It is filmed almost entirely on green-screen so almost all of the sets are CGI. And sometimes it shows, very badly...scale is off, movement and lighting are off. The show is very very dim/dark, so that makes it easier on the CGI, but its still bad.

Amanda has this bizarre accent...sorta Brittish maybe, mixed with Canadian perhaps. Amanda plays brunette Dr. Helen Magnus, a (gasp!) scientist (her character on SG-1 was a scientist too). Her character is 157 years old, and her blond daughter is the femme fatale co-star (and is thus the kick-ass soldier character that Amanda played as "Samantha Carter" on SG-1). I guess the dual role of scientist and soldier was too much for Sanctuary so they split her up into two characters. Dr. Magnus wears frumpy clothes (to cover Amanda's post-pregnancy weight, which she seemed to lose but has regained) and a witch-style hat, while blond daughter wears form-fit leather.

Brought onto the team during this premier was the Daniel Jackson sociologist character, named Will Zimmerman (had to look it up..his name is not memorable). Also introduced was the primary bad guy, "John Druitt". Apparently he is/was Jack the Ripper, and has lived this long b/c he had an injection of Dr Magnus' blood when they were engaged to be married back in the 1800s. He is the secret father of the blond daughter (Dr Magnus froze the embryo for decades before deciding to give birth), so we can look forward to lots of family angst about how to stop the evil daddy or somehow redeem him. The actor who plays John Druitt has also appeared on SG-1, and was a speaking character in "Chronicles of Riddick". In both of those, he had shoulder length wavy brown hair. Now, however, he's bald and even has no eyebrows.

We briefly meet Dr Magnus' staff: a caveman a la the Geico commercials, and her "quirky tech wiz Henry" who is written and acted exactly like Dr. Rodney McKay from Stargate Atlantis.

Making guest appearances were Dan Shea (Sgt Siler of SG-1), and others you'll recognize. In addition, the first monster or "abnormal" they work with in this show features a boy from Chernobyl who has a mutation which looks horribly similar to a goa'uld symbiote from SG-1, and it is a symbiote on the boy's body. Written by a SG-1 writer, the show is completely derivative: Ghost Hunters meets SG-1. Oh! Another really annoying thing is that when the Daniel-Jackson character is doing his forensic thing, the show employs the EXACT same visual trick as "Psych!" by highlighting the clues he sees with white, and doing the freeze-frame thing. Next week the ensemble will work with three witch sisters who have been resurrected from the grave or somesuch. We won't be watching.