Driven to Watch at Least a Few More Episodes

Ah, the power of a single actor. It was the prospect of watching Nathan Fillion more than anything else that lured me to TiVo the first three episodes of Drive. And while I think it strange that in an entire hotel function room full of people, not one person is sane enough/not comprised enough to go to the cops, the premise isn't boring me and the characters aren't annoying me. Though it's got a problem in series continuity, I guess. Not sure I'd want this one iteration of the race dragged out for more than twenty episodes, and I don't know how they can spin the reveals at the end to be able to "reset" things so we'd want to watch another race with new characters for the next season. But for right now, I'm enjoying the show. And it's fun watching Nathan Fillion play basically the reverse of Captain Mal Reynolds (this time he's a reformed bad guy having to reach back into his past to do the right thing instead of a reformed good guy running from his past to do his own thing, which was often the right thing but just as often an illegal thing).

As for Painkiller Jane, though, I'm a little less optimistic. Here, the premise is fascinating, and they nabbed one helluva leading lady. But the execution of the premise is fairly flat and at times not quite believable. Granted, this is only one episode in. I'll watch at least two more episodes (barring something unforgiveable to the extreme in tonight's episode) and then figure out if we want to use up DVR space on the show.

I'm the same boat with Stargate Atlantis. This show can't make up its mind what it's about. I thought it was supposed to be all about the ancients, yet we've seen precious little of the exploration of Atlantis itself and precious little of the ancient aspects of it (beyond the "cool setting" aspects). In fact, it was an episode of SG-1 that focused completely on the ancient side of an Atlantis piece of technology. WTF? And the big cliffhanger that the ancients were back was given all of two lines in the season's return, and it's noted that basically the ancients were all destroyed by the replicators, who in turn were all destroyed by McKay, for all intents and purposes. Add to this that wraith either haven't done much or have been ignored or have been written off when things were getting interesting, and I don't know what I'm supposed to be watching this show for. Other than to see Shepperd "kirk" out, and that really doesn't interest me. Here's hoping that bringing Carter in from SG-1 after that show ends will make Atlantis about something again.