Update 2: The BBC has now confirmed Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor! Congratulations to the BBC on keeping this quiet. The decision was made over Christmas. Smith takes over in 2010, most likely in a debut on Easter. Matt Smith at 26 is the youngest actor to ever play the Doctor.

Update 1: Rich Johnston of the gossip column “Lying in the Gutters” claims he has been told the 11th Doctor is actor Matt Smith. A relative unknown, Smith starred in the BBC series “Party Animals” to some critical acclaim. The show focused on the young people working to support Parlaiment. Of Johnston is correct, this will be the youngest Doctor yet. Current Doctor David Tennant was 34 when he took on the role but the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, was the youngest at 30. Matt Smith is only 25. We’ll have confirmation within the hour.

The BBC has announced that it will reveal which actor they have hired to take on the role of the Doctor on “Doctor Who” once David Tennant steps down at the end of 2009.

photo credit: abooth202

The announcement will be made on Doctor Who Confidential, which will air on BBC One at 5:35pm on January 3rd (Saturday). That means that the announcement will hit the newswires shortly after noon East Coast time here in the States. We’ll update this post as soon as the announcement is made.

photo credit: Great Beyond

According to the BBC, the new actor will give “his or her initial reaction” to becoming the 11th Doctor on the special. Piers Wenger, head of drama at BBC Wales, which produces Doctor Who, said: “We believe the actor is going to bring something very special to the role and will make it absolutely their own.”

photo credit: ahisgett

Stephen Moffat, who will take over as showrunner for the program in 2010, for its fifth season, will have a hand in selecting the actor. Some of the most popular predictions, according to betting sites, include Paterson Joseph, James Nesbitt, David Walliams, Chiwetell Eijofor, and Sean Pertwee. Feel free to reply with your predictions or hopes. We’ll know in less than 24 hours!

photo credit: hayley.bailey

Maybe you should watch this. And watch out for the robots and their shock sticks.

photo credit: Victor de la Fuente

The tail devouring serpent lead us all the way down a path that started in with a blast heard around the universe and ended with the rebirth of a story.  Sadly that’s where it will end.

We ended last time with everything seemingly on the up and up with the exception of Reena who still nurtured a kernel of chaos.  Well, unfortunately 01 Boxer doesn’t keep his word and allows the link to open.  Charlie, fresh off a night of adventure with Blues, goes to stop him.  What happens next is roughly 40 minutes of acid tripping.  Conversations are had in between universes, all the players speak in riddles, people disappear and it generally felt like someone explaining their dream to you after they’ve had a case of beer and you’ve removed your brain, covered it in sugar and fire ants and put it back in your head.  Here’s the gist.  01 figures it’s better to take the chance to keep the Link up.  Charlie, Karl, Blues and Reena try to stop him but Charlie ends up shifting between universes and being stuck in a sort of netherverse where 01 continually tortures him with unanswerable questions, one liners and his boots to the face.  All the while we keep hearing, “This, we did not expect.”  Charlie keeps feeling off, saying it’s not real.

The good guys deduce that the only way to save Beta and Gamma is to send Charlie into the Link and have him shift and pull all three verses together.  So he does, but now he’s trapped – forever.  But the universes now know of each other and it’s likely Alpha will flood people into Beta and Gamma.  Reena gets to go home, Karl goes with her.  Blues stays in Beta.  Wrapping things up completely, we see Sew Sew and Jasmine enjoying Alpha’s new prosperity announcement via a wide area broadcast and a scene with a drunk Julius Galt seeing visions of Essa Rompkin.

There were other parts of the story including an odd trial scene with Charlie, 01 and Essa where Charlie was tied to some rocks and blindfolded while 01 waved a gun around.  Also, the box that Reena had last week was apparently instructions or a signal for her to do something to the Link but we don’t know what.  I think she’s a bomb of some kind or would have acted as a reflector and pulled the Link back in on itself.  It doesn’t matter, Karl talks her down and they let Charlie do his thing.

And his thing succeeded.  Holes open up between the universes, but where’s Charlie?  Well, last we see of him, he and 01 are somewhere with smashed ice, holding it together to create water.  Charlie says he can’t do it without 01.  But the, after flashbacks to the first part of the episode, we see he’s in a hospital bed with a tube coming out of him carrying blood.  A similar tube is going into a person in the next bed.  That person is 01 Boxer.  We pan back to see a room full of similar beds and in a control room a man looks at another man and says, “This, we did not expect.”

(for a list of lingering threads from Charlie Jade, you can check out the Wikipedia entry.)

So that’s all for Charlie Jade and we end on a question mark that, to me, negates the entire show.  It’s not as artfully done as the end of Newhart where he wakes up with his wife Suzanne Pleshette saying it was all a bad dream, but it’s close.  The biggest problem is that we’ll never know.  Lately it doesn’t feel like sci-fi unless there’s a big conspiracy behind it all.  All of the universe hoping, all of the love lost and gain, all the hurt and death and torment is for naught if they are but creations inside the minds of Charlie and 01 (if that’s even their names.)  And was it a dream?  Maybe they’ve been rescued from the netherverse.  Maybe they are the gate keepers of this collection of verses but something went wrong.  When you have things living on a quantum level and dealing with the human mind, the level of complexity is staggering and any combination of events is possible.

What wasn’t expected is how much I started to like this show.  I didn’t get half of it, but not because it was a type of humor or writing I didn’t get, I just know it was a type of show that was up to interpretation.  What I got out of it was the pleasure of watching a smart show that may have been too smart for its own good, a show that at times nearly stylized itself out of any meaning.  That said, this show was made by a group of studios ranging across the globe and I’m starting to see a bit of what could be its influence on newer shows.  The repetitive cutting of the same lines, the quick edits showing the passage of time, the angle of the camera behind an object blurring the surroundings are all things I see now on Life on Mars.  So was Charlie Jade some how influential?  It’s hard to say.  The show still has a following and the creators are even doing commentary for the sci-fi airings.

The creators, hats off to them, put together a gem of a show.  I’m sad to not see it on my DVR any more but you can’t always dictate which shows get extended and which don’t.  Knight Rider is still going, so is Heroes but a decently written show like Jade can’t even finish its story.  I won’t turn this into another rabid fan monologue and start mailing crackers or anything crazy, I just hope more shows like this come along and we start getting rid of ridiculous and poorly written shows.

This episode, however, wasn’t the best and was a bit of a drug trip.  However I still enjoyed it, so I’ll give it four shiny blue stones.

It’d be naive to think this show has a chance at another season.  The original season one ran nearly five years ago and while the second season was written, it was never picked up.  So what we’re going to be left with are a handful of mysteries.  Charlie Jade really weaved threads from many plots lines into this run and they started it immediately, to the point that after one season there are more unanswered questions than most shows.  While this episode didn’t really answer anything, it did change everything.

Charlie has been in Alpha for a few days (or maybe weeks) and the folks in Beta don’t know what’s happened.  With the hunter after him, Karl, Reena and Blues fear the worst.  But as we know he’s alive an kicking in Alpha where he and Sew Sew forge an uneasy alliance (Sew Sew slept with his wife after all) to bring down Essa Rompkin.  She is recovering from Brion’s death and wants 01′s head on a platter, to which Sew Sew nods and smiles and pretends to do her bidding.  However, he and Charlie and a wrongly incarcerated 01 plan to find the lab tech who was involved in killing execs to transfer blood to Brion.  That technician is their link to bringing Essa down, putting 01 in her place, and shutting the Link to Gamma/Beta down for good.

The actually win the day and the results are as follows.  01 is freed and Brion’s computer will (probate bot, no foolin) declares his son as the rightful ruler of the Vexcor kingdom.  The tech and his lover are killed but the chip in one of them has a recorded confession saying they killed people at Essa’s request.  Essa is removed from the board and sent to jail.  Sew Sew is smug about it.  Jasmine and Charlie talk and he leaves saying he’s going “home.”  Jasmine calls Sew Sew, tells him to come home.  Charlie ends up at Blues’s place in Beta.  All seems well until the last scene with Reena.  Blues had found the bodies Reena exploded a few episodes ago (Malachi and company) and Reena asks if there were any odd objects.  There were, she tries to figure out what one of them does and in the end it opens up and projects a green and fuzzy set of looped images that I couldn’t make out, but Reena must have recognized it because she quotes Oppenheimer, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

So, going into our final episode, here’s where we stand.  01 Boxer is running Vexcor, Charlie left Jasmine and AlphaVerse forever and will be staying in Beta with Blues.  Essa is in jail, Brion is dead, the board still wants the Link set up, 01 doesn’t.  Jasmine and Sew Sew will likely end up together.  Reena, free of her programming, must still understand some deeper and malevolent purpose.

And here are some mysteries we’re left with.  Who was Malachi and what was his group?  Why were they intent on programming Reena to kill Julius Galt?  What is Reena’s mission?  Will the Link be set up and will the other universes be destroyed or will 01 stop it?  Does Charlie even care about the Link any more or does he think helping dethrone Essa is enough?  Speaking of other Verses, we saw an “unknown verse” while Charlie was jumping around, what are the other Verses?  What happens to 01′s kids in GammaVerse?  Will Karl still go after Vexcor now that 01′s in charge?

I can’t imagine one episode will answer all these questions, but as far as this episode goes, it was about as good as the show gets.  And because so much happened, I’m giving it four and a half shiny blue stones.

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With all the universe hopping we’ve been doing lately, we’ve forgotten that Charlie was a private investigator.  The story got so big so fast that we took for granted that he was first a street urchin, then company special ops security, then into business for himself finding missing persons.  That’s what “Bedtime Story” reminds us.  It uses a dream sequence where Charlie talks to Blues Paddock about a case he worked a long time ago.  The details of the case aren’t as important as the discussion he and Blues have while he tells her the story.

The quick and dirty of it is a typical film noir detective story.  A well dressed and well to-do woman with a cigarette and a bit of hip swishing comes in to solicit the services of one Mr. Jade to find her missing brilliant scientist husband.  It’s a classic set up, almost a parody.  The truth comes out that Charlie is being set up so the woman can cover her stealing her husband’s invention and then killing him for it.  But as Charlie tells Blues, this is just one of dozens of stories he could have told.  They’re all the same.

We do unearth some imporant points such as the fact that Charlie lives by a generator that blocks out the Ectoskin.  The Ectoskin is what keeps a constant tab on all of Alpha’s inhabitance.  We also get to see the first time Charlie and Sew Sew meet.  (At least I think it’s the first time, they didn’t refer to each other by name nor exchange pleasantries.)  But the rest of the dream recap was a tool to show us that Charlie is a different man now, that Beta has changed him.  Before he wouldn’t have cared so much about murders and mysteries – he was a man who lived by how much he could get paid and how soon.  Now he questions, he worries, he has compasion.

Blues is also just a vehicle in “Bedtime Story.”  It’s not really her, it’s Charlie’s dream of her.  Yet she comes up with lines and reaches conclusions before he does.  I’ve never had drams like this, I wish I did.  At times they’re both narrating the past events and it was slightly annoying because I wasn’t sure if they were talking about something current or something he was recaping.  And technically this wasn’t a recap episode, but it wasn’t backstory either.  If Charlie Jade could have a “monster of the week” episode, this would be it.  Given that Charlie’s past is one of solving mysteries, if the show was still in production it’s a tack they could have run:  Each week Charlie searches for a missing person, each missing person builds a bigger picture as to the mechanations of Vex-Cor.

What we know is Charlie is worried about Blues and about the other universes.  He doesn’t know what to do and it’s keeping him up at night.  It’s obvious he can’t just sit there and do nothing but what is it he has to do; what is it he can do?

We also touch breifly on the life of 01 Boxer.  We also learn his name means “switch, on or off.”  As a suit in a limo told him, “Your the next switch in the line.”  I’m not sure what we were shown with 01 this time out.  It picked up with him hovering like a sated vulture over his father’s dead body.  He has a vision of his father rising from the dead saying, “You’re ready.”  The last thing we see from 01 is him looking unhappy as a giant LCD sign is helicoptered around saying “Vexlink to Gamma ready in 55 hours.”  I can understand he’s upset about the link destorying Gamma along with the other Verses, but with Brion out I felt he was now in control of Vex-Cor or at least in enough control to fight Essa.  His lack of power now that Brion is dead is an unneriving unknown.

With two episodes left it’s still building to a head but slowly.  Another episode without Galt or the killer or now Karl.  Will Charlie go back and see his friend one last time even though he could be killed?  Will he go back for Blues?  Will 01 make a move and blow up the link like he’s done before?

Will the Verses survive?

Well done this time.  I liked the classic story type but I’m a little upset about the continued lack of movement this close to the end.

Three and a half shiny blue stones.

It sounds typical, but after sixteen previous episodes the story of Charlie Jade is begging to finally resemble a familiar mythos.  But it’s not just Charlie involved in this battle but also his friends and even his one time enemies.  Vex-Cor is close to having everything they need, but the glimmering tower is rotting from the inside out and Charlie, 01, Reena and Karl are going to be there to pull the I-beams down around their heads.

“Spin” starts where we left off with Charlie walking through a desert in Alphaville.  He ends up back in Cape City where he’s reunited with Papa Louis, Sew Sew and Jasmine.  None of the anticipated meetings go well; Sew Sew has to tell Charlie he’s with Vex-Cor, Jasmine’s upset because of how long he’s been gone and Papa Louis is taken by Vex-Cor when they find out she’s associated with Charlie.  She doens’t break under pressure and ends up scheduled for televised execution.

Speaking of execution, Brion Boxer heads to GammaVerse and kills Sasha Boxer leaving his Vex-Cor pendant behind on purpose.  01 in BetaVerse seems to sense something going on and heads to Gamma to see his dead wife.  (We also find out that 01 still has mother issues, think of a scene somewhere between Aunti Mame and the end of Neverending Story when Bastian shouts into the storm.)  Charlie tries to save Papa Louis but can’t do it fast enough, but does have time to tell her the truth about Vex-Cor and in a slightly predictable ending, her televised execution becomes a soapbox.  Instead of confessing her crimes against the state/company, she goes on an overlong tear about how Vex-Cor is lying about everything.  There are other worlds and Vex-Cor is stealing from them.   01 kills his father and Essa Rompkin uses Papa Louis’ monologue to spin Vex-Cor in a favorable light saying it could save their ailing world.

Charlie and Jasmine sleep together, Sew Sew never told him what had happened while he was gone.  Poor Sew Sew.

Not a fan of this episode.  The recap above was the entire show.  There were smaller bits here and there but that’s the gist of it and it went by pretty slowly.  My biggest problem was the televised execution and how long Papa Louis was able to just go on and on about all these other universes.  She talked for a good 2 minutes even before the music covered her voice in a TV monitor, unwashed masses, Charlie looking on montage, and then it was another 30 seconds while she wrapped up.  This is in a universe with flying spy bugs, floating crystal monitors the size of buildings and portable hologram projectors.  Are you telling me that when the doped up scapegoat goes off script there isn’t someone at the switch ready to cut to commercial?

I’m also not really happy about the reaction Charlie got when he got home.  Sew Sew and Jasmine were really broken up about him being gone but as soon as he gets back we’re back to the Obsession ad enui we see in the first episodes.  AlphaVerse must be truly in trouble, especially in the thespian arts, because there was no pathos in this episode at all save for Papa Louis.

We also dropped the 01/Reena thread like a bad habit, no sign of Karl or the mystery huntress Shikari, and not a mention of Galt and the links between the Verses.  It was a self contained and almost self egrandizing episode, very much full of pomp and circumstance.  Too many longing looks, too much left unsaid and not enough story movement.  The entirety of the plot in this episode could have been told in 10 minutes of screen time, the rest was art nonsense that at this late in the game should have been abandoned.  “Spin” is the example of why Jade wasn’t picked up because I can see reality TV hungry, explosion craving viewers completely zoning out.  Imagine Twin Peaks but minus the creepy.

I may seem overly harsh on this episode and I am being nitpicky, but I expect a bigger ramp up to the end.  Last week’s episode was nearly perfect, as perfect as this show can get.  This was a let down.

I’m glad Jody and Darlene didn’t get killed last time, but that’s not going to stop me from giving “Spin” two and a half shiney blue stones.

Turns out there’s good reason and “The Shortening of the Way” is it.  I hadn’t seen an episode in a couple weeks thanks in large part to all the new shows, the Presidential debate drinking games and my sudden urge to hurt myself playing basketball, but that’s not what this review is about.  This is about what an utter gem of a show Charlie Jade is and we can sadly chalk it up to another unappreciated show that will only live on in producer commentaries, DVDs and fanfic.

So what happened this time around that garnered such love?  Action.  Last episode we were introduced to a new character, a nemesis for Charlie, a killer, a genetically enhanced assassin named Shikari.  If your’e a fan of Survivor you’ll know her as Vanessa Marawa, the first South African winner of that primordial reality show.  I can tell from what her character is doing that it’s her whole purpose not only to kill Charlie, but to pick up the pace of the show.  Charlie now is not only trying to get home and trying to stop Vex-Cor, he’s trying to save his own life.  He almost doesn’t succeed in the later but shockingly he does make it home.

What?  But we have four episodes to go!  I realize that, but I didn’t write the show.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

This outting sees the return of just about every character seen thus far including Darlene and Jody from the first episodes.  Turns out, in fact, that Charlie gets pointers from Jody.  She sees The Invisible People, the same thing Charlie sees in his headache inducing visions, but she’s able to control it and her analogy is charming.  It’s like a sneeze, if you think about it, you lose it.  If you hold your breath, you get a headache, and you end up having to breath anyway.  With this newly acquired sage advice, Charlie is able to freely move to any Verse he wants – including an Unknown Verse all dapled in purple and rife with commune like inhabitants.  Jody douses Charlie in Water and he’s able to physically travel to these places, including his home.  Our last vision is of him walking through an AlphaVerse desert.

This episode also saw 01′s return and go figure he’s dressed as a samurai geisha.  Reena finds him through Karl Lubinsky and 01 is able to find, unlock and free Reena of Malichi’s programming, but not before we see a flashback of Reena blowing Malichi to smithereens.  Blues Paddock shows up shortly to ask where Lubinsky got his classified Vex-Cor file and leaves her home number for Charlie to call her.  Another Vex-Cor exec is sent to Rompkin for HIS ESSENCE, HIS LIFE ESSEEEENCE!  Fresh Gelfling!  Sorry.  Anyway, he’s the last of the Execs to have gone through the link, so he tells Sew Sew (who’s now a Vex-Cor stooge) and it’s now his quest to find out what’s going on – much to Jasmine’s dismay.  And yes her story is becoming useless.  She’s a hooker made good, gone bad, made good again.  And now that Charlie’s back in Alpha, what’s going to happen?

I think the biggest reveal was that Reena and 01 know each other from Gamma.  Story wise that could mean a lot of things for the two characters.

This episode moved well, had few funny jump cuts, not many flashbacks and just enough 01 humor to cut through the droning soundtrack and nearly monochromatic schemes.  It’s one of the best episodes yet but it leaves a weird taste in your mouth wondering what’s going to happen now that Charlie’s back in Alpha, now that the Colonists have found a nuked out blasted Earth.

And because we get to see Jody again, I’m giving this episode four and a half shiny blue stones.

Not trying to keep track of every event in the show for later recount allowed me to finally watch the show in one sitting without pauses and I have to say it’s a very strong show over all and this episode was fantastic – odd considering Michael Filipowich wasn’t in this episode.  Even Reena was enjoyable as she exacted some revenge on Malachi, her programmed killer brain seems to be either taking over or allowing her Reena mind to adapt making her both dangerous and frankly pretty decent to watch.

Jasmine and Sew Sew’s relationship is blossoming and it’s rather sweet to watch.  Both Jasmine and Charlie got busy with new people this time around and it was very cathartic.  Charlie bedded Blues Paddock (we like her) and this episode was very Blues-centric, though more than one character made internal narrations at various points.  Blues seemed to recap all that she and Charlie had gone through including the very end where it seemed she hadn’t seen him since he spilled his guts about his entire life since coming to Beta.  It was again cathartic for Charlie to – thanks to some quality editing and clip montages – open up to Blues about his entire sojourn into Beta’s Cape Town society.

This episode really gave the lighter of the cast to shine and it was surprisingly refreshing.  I didn’t think seeing Jasmine and Reena this much would be worth it but it was and this was to me the strongest episode yet.  It’s really being pushed that Vex-Cor is a criminal organization and that the Alpha version of the company is on track to ruin several dozen billion lives if they don’t stop and now we’re starting to see those rising up to oppose them.  More needs to be told and we’re only five away from being complete.  I can only hope they don’t leave it on too much of a cliff hanger.

That’s why I give this episode four and a half shiny blue stones.

At the Glass Door, 01 is pushing himself through an intense work out involving chair push ups and punching bags.  Princess asks what it’s like to be shot, 01 says it’s a rush then it sucks.  He goes to take a shower, at first he doesn’t let the water touch him, the slowly he passes his hands and face through and everything phases in and out, then he stops.  Karl tells Charlie the documents show Vex-Cor dumping toxic waste, it’s his proof.  Charlie wants to track down Norman Ord.  01 and Princess are filming something.  01 uses his Alpha software to transpose Essa’s face and voice onto Princess, which makes for an interesting scene when we see the Chair of Vex-Cor say she’s horny.  Also, it’s pronounced “Beeta.”

Charlie finds out Norman’s ID was erased but not very professionally.  Charlie calls Blues Paddock (yay!) and they flirt and banter.  She agrees to help him track down Norman Ord.  Cops are going to set up a sting, Charlie knows it, tries to get there early.  Quick look at Jasmine, she’s still in the cage with the dead guy.  A phone rings, she picks it up but it’s not the one ringing.  When she sees another phone on the floor, she bolts.  I don’t know whose phone was whose so this didn’t make much sense.

Blues and Will Archer are outside Norman’s house and he’s giving her crap about helping Charlie when they see Norman with a bag getting into his car like he’s running.  Also, no Charlie because he’s hidden away in Norman’s car.  Charlie surprises them about the wrist chips, seems to want to help them.  01 is in Julius Galt’s office where he starts playing with a knife and Galt’s head.  01 gives Galt a slate saying Essa’s upset and when Galt has a response to call him.  (There was a lot of clever movie lines and bits where Galt was seriously made uncomfortable by 01 that you’d have to watch to appreciate.)  Sew Sew and his men are on the the scene of Jasmine’s killed client.  Sew Sew picks up the device I thought was a phone and projects images on the ceiling.  One of them is a picture of Jasmine.  I still don’t know what’s going on there.

At Charlie’s place, Norman and his wife Maria fight for a bit over him screwing up and how they have no where to go, they can’t stay in Beta and they can’t go back to Alpha.  Norman talks about the bomb and the files and describes the woman who threatened him.  Charlie shows her a picture of Reena, he recognizes her.  Charlie says they’ll help if Norman tells him how to find this lady, and that they’ll need an operation first (to remove the chips.)  Charlie posts a lost dog notice (that’s how Reena said to find her.)  Karl and Charlie see the Ord’s off, they’ll be going to a friend of Karl’s in England who helped with apartheid refugees.  Karl buys Charlie a beer.

Head Ghost is back giving Charlie a hard time about his current plans.  He suddenly jumps up and points his gun at a man in a suit talking about lost dogs.  Charlie wants to know how he got in, the man never answers.  Charlie looks down at an Elliot Krogg memo and goes to hand it to the man, asking what he knows.  When he looks up, the man is gone and there’s a puddle and we flash back to when Charlie was tracking 01 and the trail dead ended at a pair of footprints in slowly soaking gravel.  Reena shows up in the park near the trash can where the lost dog sign in.  She doesn’t linger and we see Porter on the phone behind her.

Sew Sew finds Jasmine, asks why she’s been running.  Sew Sew tells her they called the killing a “heart attack” so there’s no record of what she did.  Then he takes her some place safe.  Charlie is sneaking around an abandoned building.  He’s watching Porter and his men tracking Reena.  Galt shows up at the Glass Door with the slate, saying it’s a fake, 01 wants to know why Galt bothered to come by.  Reena takes on Porter and his henchmen.  01 and Galt come to an agreement that Porter is becoming a problem and they toast.  Back to Reena who dispatches both Porter and his man.  And by dispatch I mean ninja style with broke necks and faces.  She runs, Charlie chases, convinces her not to run.  This is the first time they’ve talked since episode one and they acknowledge that.  Reena then describes her world to Charlie and has more lines in five minutes than she has the whole series thus far combined.  She still sounds ridiculously young and out of place, but it works the same way a classically trained dancer can be believable as a killer robot from the future.  She tells Charlie they were running a pipeline from her world to Alpha.  Charlie mentions Porter and Reena goes into a weird trance and attacks him then bolts.

In Alpha, Sew Sew takes Jasmine back to her old home.  It’s covered in police tape so it wouldn’t have been sold.  Sew Sew seems like a stand up guy, tells her there’s no crime and that he’ll get her some furniture.  He tells her Jobbo (her boss) was arrested.  He reassures her there won’t be any investigation, says he likes the apartment.  She starts kissing on him, he says she doesn’t owe him anything.  He makes a few chivalrous remarks and leaves.  (Small note:  Jasmine’s john, Jobbo, looks a lot like Sew Sew.  Enough that in the dark and green lighting of Alpha I know I’ve mistaken them during quick edits and high contrast flashbacks.  This is the first time I’ve seen Sew Sew’s character and I wish I’d seen more earlier.)

01 shows up at the abandoned building to find Porter’s body.  Makes a show of calling Porter’s cell phone and saying he can’t come to the phone because he’s dead.  I laughed.  Charlie tells Karl about Reena Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?  and how he’s seen it before in Vex-Cor security training but this was better, deadlier.  “The Girl From Ipanema” plays while Galt does a little dance (which was weird to watch) but he’s apparently happy about Porter’s death – Porter was one of the few pushing for The Link to be restored, he hated Beta and wanted to get back.

Last scene is of Reena back at her trailer.  She sees her bloodied hand and pauses.  Charlie goes back to the church confessional and asks for advice about a friend who’s lost but doesn’t know it.  The priest says he should help himself first before helping other people.  Charlie says, Pfft, whatever Padre and leaves while talking to his dredlocked little head ghost.  We go back to inside the church as the man in the suit who disappeared into a puddle earlier emerges from the the confessional.

Credits.

Meh.  I’d like to base my show watching experience, especially those in which I invest more than a few episodes, on whether or not something is revealed.  It doesn’t have to be what the Swan Station does or who the next Cylon will be or where the Master will show up next, but it at least has to be interesting enough so that I move with the story and WANT to move with the story.  You have to tantalize your viewers so they will come back.  This episode didn’t do that, it was a mushroom on a pizza or nipples on men – no real purpose and you probably wouldn’t miss them if they were gone.

Charlie and Reena’s “reunion” was anticlimactic and rushed.  Like people sick with lonliness, they nearly tripped over themselves in revealing information after being so closed off for so long.  Then she snapped and it was all over.  01 continues to be the most exciting character, but he’s giving Galt lap dances and quoting Bugs Bunny.  Him being so over the top really only accentuates how really drab the show was/is getting.  As Reena sad, “This place is so dirty.”  So Porter is dead, no one on this side wants The Link to be made and the main characters all now know of each other.  The only mystery is what is Reena’s programmed agenda and Lord help me they could have picked someone else to brainwash.

Meh.

I haven’t seen any in a while, so I’m only going to give this episode two and a half shiny blue stones.  They’ve got six episodes left to wow me so I don’t feel like I blew a whole summer championing a rerun.