Review: Dallas

This is a review of the new revival of Dallas, particularly as compared to the original show. I'm probably one of the few people of my generation to have seen every episode of Dallas. Seventeen seasons, three hundred and eighty episodes.

Obviously I find the show to have some appeal.

I'm not obsessive about it, by any means. Dallas is not the best thing ever. The plot developments are sometimes contrived, and sometimes it's just outright cheesy. But the old show did a pretty good job of holding my attention with its well-developed and well-acted characters. With moments like "Who Shot JR?" and the amazingly ballsy dream season, Dallas deserves its place in television history.

The occasional moment of eighties anachronism is pretty enjoyable, as well. The Ewings have car-phones as a sign of their incredible richness. One industrialist brags that when his computer chips are complete, each one will hold over ten thousand pieces of information. And, for a darker turn, Sue Ellen drinks like a fish her entire pregnancy and nobody says a word about the health of her baby.

This was clearly a show of its time.

The reason Dallas worked was because the characters had clear motivations, and the conflicts developed from their relationships. The Ewings are all family, they all love each other, but they all have different ideas about how to proceed. Same for the Barnes family, though of course it was much smaller. Almost every strange plot twist was either a response to real-world concerns (actors dying or leaving) or a means to give the characters something new to respond to.

The new Dallas ignores all that. When Pam left Bobby, he was months or years before he was ready to move on. But Christopher has gone through two serious relationships that ended badly in the last, what, less than a year of show-time? Plus finding out his mother died, which nobody has reacted to. Yet Christopher is ready to jump right in with yet another new girl. It would be okay if they were presenting it as the action of a hurt person who's reacting to terrible events in his life, but they're not. Heather is just someone for Christopher to bang for drummed-up conflict.

What does Christopher want, exactly? Family? Business success? I have no idea. How about John Ross? Emma? Pamela? Eleana? As far as I can tell, they all want money and revenge. There's nothing holding these people together, no bonds of family that force them into conflict. It would have been much simpler for John Ross to simply leave Southfork. I have no reason to think he cares about it as a place or a piece of his legacy, or about the people living there. JR cared. Why does John Ross?

Now, some characters aren't like that. Bobby and Sue Ellen, they're better, but that's because they were defined characters when the show started. JR was pretty well-done before he died, as well. Cliff, though, is a totally one-note character, which is a disservice to him. Cliff was often deeper than they're portraying him now.

And some of the plot points are just toally unbelievable.

• Christopher supposedly grew up with Drew and Eleana Ramos. But if that's so, how does nobody know who Joaquin is? He was raised as their sibling!
• At the end of the most recent episode, Drew has apparently set fire to Southfork, despite heightened security.
• The entire family has left alcoholic Sue Ellen home alone in a house full of unlocked liquor. After having done the same thing, repeatedly, in the eighties.
• Many people want revenge on the entire Ewing family for something JR did. As if they aren't all individuals who have taken their own actions over time. Most of the bad blood was against JR (or Jock, if you go back far enough), and they're both dead. I could see Bobby or Sue Ellen having enemies of old, and John Ross is clearly a schemer in his own right. But nobody seems to be blaming them for their own actions. It's all about what JR did to Papa Ramos, which is a straight-up copy of what Jock supposedly did to Digger Barnes.
• And these plotters feel a need to repeat their plans and motivations to each other every episode, just so we viewers aren't left behind... "How is it going?" "Wonderful! Soon we will have our revenge against the Ewing family for stealing our father's property and driving him to his death!" "Oh, right, I'd forgotten why we were doing all this..."
• Drew is instantly totally over his guilt at killing two unborn babies, and now back on a revenge kick.
• All these people involved in shady dealings seem totally unaware that everything they do could be recorded at any time.

I'm afraid I'm almost done with Dallas. It's been fun seeing a few old friends, but I'm not making any new ones. That's what it was going to take to make this revival work.

Roles in Lost

Lost has come and gone. It was a phenomenon, it became a staple, and now it's a memory. It was arguably one of the most influential shows of the first decade of this century. (The aughts?) The characterization was entirely believable. Every one of them was broken, but every one of them could be liked.

Note: spoilers!

One thing I enjoyed about the show was its symmetry. There were three male leads, and every one of them changed roles by the end of the show. (Amusingly, every one of them also has a first name starting with J. There are other names out there for male leads, writers...) Look at how they all start.

Jack: he started out as the guy who wants nothing more than to get off this island. He's the leader by default. He cares for those who are his, and will crush anyone who gets in the way of that. I'm not sure if he helps people because he cares in the same way other people do, because it's an emotional burden. I suspect he sees it as one more task, and he's the guy who can get it done. That doesn't mean he's a sociopath! But it does mean he's goal-focused enough that any absolute standard of morality goes completely out the window. He's a good man who's completely willing to torture or kill to accomplish his goals

(Arguably, Jack is one of a larger category of characters: the guy who will do bad things without hesitation, even though he's nominally the hero of the story. Sherlock, for a lighter example. Or possibly Dexter, or Wesley from Angel. Walt on Breaking Bad fits this mold, as well. One difference between Jack and Walt is that Walt's circle of give-a-damn is only six people wide. But that's another post.)

John Locke: John is the irrationally faithful one. He needs no evidence, he needs only to believe, and he only believes because he needs to. This makes him just as dangerous as Jack, because he's willing to risk others' lives, even kill people, if his irrational beliefs tell him it's right. He's the religious fanatic.

Sawyer: Sawyer is the trickster. His actions are dictated by the fact that he cares. He cares about his parents, he cares that someone killed them, and he cares that he killed that someone in return. He genuinely doesn't think he deserves anything good. Strange as it seems at first, Sawyer is defined by his need to be good.

Now look at how they all end.

Sawyer: He's overcome his past, and become the leader. And now, he's desperate to get off the island at all costs. Sawyer is now Jack, though not quite so sociopathic.

Locke: His faith has failed him, and he's died. But the guy who now looks like Locke? He's the trickster, the manipulator, the deceiver. Locke is now Sawyer. (Though also driven by his need to get off the island at all costs, and most definitely a sociopath!)

Jack: He's now the religious fanatic, the irrationally faithful. He no longer wants to leave. He's the one that led them back, because of his belief that it was necessary. Jack is now Locke.

And Hurley? He's still the same guy he always was.

TV streaming boxes

I enjoy my television setup. I ripped all my DVDs to a pair of USB hard disks, one WD Elements for TV shows, another Seagate Backup Plus for movies. Both are connected to a low-power server, which has a gigabit wired connection to jacks throughout the house. Each TV in the house has a streaming box attached, including two older WD TV Live, one newer WD TV Live, and one Apple TV.

The Apple TV requires an iTunes server, which only supports limited file types. The WD TV boxes are far more flexible and easy to set up; they read files of almost any type, directly off a Windows file share. I especially recommend the newer model, which has a vastly improved user interface.

Neither seems to support any sort of randomized playlist or video shuffle, so it's impossible to set up a sort of "channel-surfing" background noise channel. If anyone knows of a player which supports such a thing, let me know!

So here's the weird part. Whatever show I'm watching will intermittently freeze. The show will stop for between thirty seconds and three minutes. After that time, the video will skip ahead by that length of time, forcing me to rewind.

Imagine, watching the latest episode of Suits. You get to the juicy part (which, let's face it, is the entire episode), and then the show freezes. And worse, when it recovers, you get a lovely fast-forward spoiler of the next three minutes.

Unacceptable!

What's weird is that it's not the network. While the video is frozen, I can VNC into the server, no problem. But the server can't read the USB hard disk! If I try to open it, explorer freezes until the video resumes.This implies that the problem is between the server and the drive.

I've had multiple WD Elements drives behave this way. The Seagate drive, however,doesn't seem to have any such problems; watching movies, I'm fine. I'm seriously considering abandoning the WD Elemenets drives except as backups.

I also had an interesting issue with the server. All three Live boxes, at the same time, stopped seeing the server shares. Any PC could access the shares, and the network cabling all remained functional. The problem turned out to be my newly-reformatted Windows 7 desktop PC. It had assumed the duty of telling everyone where all the network shares were. The server was running XP. Windows 7 doesn't speak the same language as Windows XP in this regard, so suddenly all the streaming boxes couldn't see anything. Turned my desktop off long enough for the XP server to re-establish control, and all was well. One frustrating hour, I tell you!