Wednesday Morning Coming Down

Oh, god. Where am I? I just had a five day weekend and I feel like I spent much of it fighting a crocosaurus!

For the last couple years, I’ve been part of a dinner bunch where old friends and I host dinners for each other. Each month we trade off hosting duties. Whenever my rotation is up, the dinners err on the side of booze. My turn was last Saturday and, like a lunatic, I decided to up the ante and spend a month infusing vodka and brandy with cranberries and doing other terrible things. Then, in an attempt to murder all of my friends, I dragged as many people as I could into my tiny, overpriced apartment and fed them shots of death. Then I feasted on their corpses. Because I am, as you all know, a 273 year old vampire.

The result: a sleepless, overheated hangover that stretched on for three days. So, I sat on the couch and blankly watched episodes of Downton Abbey and thought about what the Brits are going to deliver in 2011, television wise. This post, then, becomes about embedding Youtube trailers and blathering on about sci-fi.

Doctor Who redeemed itself with the best Christmas special yet and threw us a sexy trailer for 2011. It’s got everything you could want — stupid jokes, a cowboy episode (we haven’t suffered through one of those since William Hartnell) and the ever-tiresome River Song. Yes, everybody, Alex Kingston is really hot… But only when she’s doing full frontal. The Alex Kingston of The Croupier is great, the Alex Kingston of Doctor Who is not.

But…whatever. I’m excited for the season, and just as excited to see how it completely fucks up over the course of just a handful of episodes.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyIBZFFnWng]

The Beeb ran this clever little “looking ahead” trailer a couple weeks ago, which finally dropped tantalizing clips from Outcasts — the long delayed, long suffering Jamie Bamber post-apocalypse vehicle. We all raised an eyebrow because what little was there was sandwiched between more Doctor Who clips. Why so secretive, BBC?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIKFxP2Fy84&]

Oooh… Spaceships! Sexy. And I didn’t see Jamie at all, did I? Which is a blessing in disguise, believe you me.

Now, that got all the sci-fi freaks in an uproar so, finally, we got the proper Outcasts trailer:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM_-eFLJkSE&]

Whew… And now we know why that show’s been long delayed and long suffering, eh? That looks like the worst elements of Earth 2 meet the worst elements of Battlefield Earth, have sex, then give birth to the worst subplots from Primeval and Being Human.

But, shut up. Everyone shut up. Because what’s this post really about? That’s right… Game of Thrones.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ5p18wIQEI&]

Ho-ho!

I stopped reading the books because George Martin has pulled a Robert Jordan. He’s decided that the only thing he can write is Song of Ice and Fire, so he’ll just simply string us along till he dies and then some asshole will come in and try to piece together his notes for the final arc of the series. What began as a very expertly done fantasy version of War of the Roses turned into what appears to be a drunken bet that Martin can outdo Terry Goodkind, and, eventually, the only expertise involved in the books was the use of the find-replace option in MSWord.

But we’re talking a few thousand pages later. The show can spend years just slowly crawling through the first book, so I’m not really worried. Swords, castles, intrigue, Sean Bean, and a girl with platinum hair who gets naked. Amen. There’s a case of Stella in the fridge. Grab a few, then come here and sit on daddy’s lap.