Looking for Serenity

There seems a dearth of stuff on telly at the moment ...

(With the serenity thing, I'll talk a little about me later)

As a scifi fan, it used to be that we'd be blessed with lots of competition for our attention when it came to new stuff on the telly. At one point, we had 3 concurrent series of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, Earth Final Conflict and a bunch of other notables. Now, the only current scifi I'm watching is Falling Skies (the others are on a break).

Don't get me wrong, Falling Skies is very high quality scifi. It keeps you guessing as to what's going on. It has outstanding pacing for each episode. It's consistent with itself and the rules it sets. But there used to be a lot more on. (There is - I'm ignoring Continuum now and gave Under the Dome a miss).

What we do have is an awful lot of good scifi in the cinema this year. Oblivion was a major highlight. Pacific Rim was great fun (if very silly). I'll be getting Star Trek Into Darkness quite soon after the blu-ray comes out. I missed out on Man Of Steel. Iron Man 3 was a fitting finish to that trilogy. And the latest was Elysium, which had a lot of good things to tell about it. (I may do a mini review / major tech analysis of Elysium sometime)

What else ? Looking forward to Riddick. I'm not convinced by the plotline but Vin Diesel's Riddick is a very watchable character. Mortal Instruments ... should be a good bit of fantasy. Rush will be awesome if it's as good as the Senna movie. The second Hunger Games movie will hopefully live up to the first. Thor should be amusing.

But at home, I'm in the strange position of running out of stuff to record. My series link list is currently :

Formula 1 Grand Prix - on BBC of course
Stargate Atlantis repeats - until end of this week
Body of Proof - this is still quite amusing
Falling Skies - catch this from the start if you can, it's worth it
Strictly Come Dancing - I may even watch the dailies this time round too
And Castle just disappeared off it because it's run ended.

I'll keep myself amused by finally catching up with the various series I have on dvd that I haven't had a chance to watch yet. This includes (don't laugh!) things like TinTin, Ulysses 31, Dresden Files, Space Above and Beyond, Dungeons and Dragons and a good few others besides.

For now though, it's finishing off a legend. I started watching the Firefly series just as the cricket season was starting ... So I had a big break in the middle. I've gone back to it tonight. It only ran for 14 episodes plus 1 film but it's quite possibly the best scifi that's been on telly.

And that's quite a high bar to compete with. Yep. I think this is better than Star Trek (which isn't actually that high quality), Babylon 5, Farscape ...

It's centred around a ship. A Firefly class transport (think small junk trading ship) called Serenity, which is crewed by a truly motley bunch. It's embedded with humour. It lives by scifi rules which always stay consistent. It makes it about the story, not the technology (which is where ST always fell down).

It's entertainment. And I'd thoroughly recommend watching it, even if you're not a scifi fan.

How about my own serenity ?

I think it's getting there. I'm much more comfortable with me as myself. My head's in a decent place. I think I'm getting more sleep ... My skin's not too impressed with me still but it's improved since I started taking the vitamin tablets again. I can have Jaffa Cakes again !

What I need to do is let the healing happen (not as easy as it sounds). It is happening now, I just keep interfering with it. Work actually helps, as it lets me concentrate on stuff which doesn't involve worrying my arms or legs. I have my fingers crossed that the improvement will continue this week.

We shall see !