Better Off Forgotten

I was around 10 years old when The Invisible Man ran briefly on NBC. I saw them first-run and loved the show. And then it was cancelled and disappeared into the ether.

I remembered it all these years, hoping it would come back on the old Sci Fi channel or TVLand or something, the way obscure tv shows occasionally do. It hasn't. Then I recently saw that it came out on DVD. I was floored. Was it as good as I remembered, or was going to be Temperature's Rising?

Netflix didn't have it (not on my by-mail option) so I went ahead and bought it. It's the full series, eleven episodes (ten plus the pilot movie) and — ugh. It wasn't Temperature's Rising, but was a lot less than what I had expected.

The story line is this: Dr. Dan Weston and his wife Dr. Kate Weston work for a DARPA-like think-tank, and their project is invisibility. Dr. Weston is brilliant but of course this is entertainment, so Weston decides to skip all those pesky intermediate steps and ethics and tries it on himself, and of course, even though it worked fine on rats and bunnies, for some reason it's permament on him.

Long story short (i.e. most of the pilot), the think tank makes a deal with the Westons: they gets to continue to use the lab to research a reversal for Dan's invisibility, and they pay off the time by doing freelance jobs by people who need special services. Weston's invisiblity is secret, so the work falls under an aegis called The Klae Resource (Klae being the name of the think-tank). So people hire the use of The Klae Resource without really knowing what it is.

It's a decent-enough premise for an action/adventure show. But—damn, it's not what I remembered. Now I'm old enough to see the obvious plot holes; the razor-think characters; villians who desparately need a long handle-bar moustache to twirl.

I feel betrayed by my memory and I'm angry at the show for not being better. I don't think that's unreasonable: so many of the episodes just look lazy, as if they'd put all their energy into the special effects (which are often clever) and had nothing left for the scripts.

Worst of all are the three main characters. They're cyphers: they have no backstory outside what we see on the show; they have no real flaws or features that make them interesting. Dr. Weston is almost entirely humorless and colorless (pun not intended but I'll take it); Walter Carlson, except for a single episode when he's actually given something to do, could have been performed perfectly well by a garden gnome. Only Melinda Fee gets to show any real range of emotion and given interesting things to do, and yet her character is as unknown and malleable as any.

Cyphers worked fine for Mission: Impossible where the characters (except for Peter Lupus) played parts every week. But M:I made up for it with intricate plots. The Invisible Man's plots are typically weak, bordering on lame. A couple are decent but most are tiresome retreads of the spy genre: contact the prisoner, break the defector out, steal the McGuffin.

It's not dumb like color Lost in Spaces were dumb, but it was amazing the thought, or lack thereof, that went into some of the stories. The one that really made my jaw drop: a US senator visits a psychic for seances to contact his dead wife. A government agency hires The Klae Resource to put an end to it because the senator is possibly being manipulated by the psychic to vote against a particular bill. So basically, the government is hiring The Klae Resource because a Senator is voting the wrong way.

Nobody sees any problem with this. Carlson and the Westons both want the bill passed.

After the first or second episode, it appears everyone and his dog knows about The Klae Resource even if they don't know what it is, and even that little secret leaks out at an alarming rate. If they show had gone on another year, The Klae Resource might have been parodied on Saturday Night Live.

It could have been better; it should have been better. It couldn't have been that difficult.

So I can't relieve my childhood love of this show. I'm too old to enjoy the stories, but I'm old enough now to appreciate Melinda Fee.

The Greaseless Mechanic

Along with the previous post about DIY home improvement shows, I have the same problem with car repair shows. Used to watch them, now—forget it.

Here's how a typical car repair show goes. Today we're going to restore this classic 1961 Ford Thunderbird. First we begin by ripping out single-reservoir, shoe brake system and replacing them entirely with a brand new dual-reservoir disc braking system*. Next we're going to rip out the original 6v wiring and replace it with 12 volt*. Then we're going to tear that ancient cap 'n points distributor ignition and replace it with a brand new, high energy, distributorless ignition*. Next we remove that crap stockblock V8 which cranked only about 110 horses on its best day, and we're going to bolt on new manifolds*, intake and exhaust, add racing cylinder heads* and a high throughput custom exhaust*. Then on the inside, we're going to remove the old AM radio and place it with a state of the art HD FM, Satellite/iPod/bluetooth GPS navigation system*. We're going to fit electric windows and locks* on all our doors, and a security system with Lo-Jack.*

About the only original thing left on this "restored" vehicle will be the windshield wipers.

And all of this will be done over the course of maybe 4 half-hour shows, each about 12 minutes long after you cut out commercials, teasers, recaps and assorted other shit. They'll do it without cutting themselves, making any mistakes, finding out that something doesn't fit, that the instructions are wrong, that a part is missing, or getting a streak of grease anywhere.

Meanwhile, I can't seem to replace a blown headlight on my car without knocking it out of time.

* donated by a sponsor

Home Wrecking

I have a weird love-hate with some of these DIY shows. I like learning how to do things; but I hate how most of the DIY shows have evolved into doing the same few things—and they're things I wouldn't do myself anyway.

On the DIY channel, which I used to enjoy, almost every show seems to take place in the kitchen or the bathroom, with a few for the garage. They mostly seem to do the same thing. Kitchen: yank out the countertop and put in a granite one. Put up that mosaic-tile backsplash. Remove the cupboards and put up different ones. In the bathroom: rip out the fixtures and put in new ones. And a tv. Always put in a tv. I always want to watch tv when I'm on the throne.

For the garage, it's always removing clutter and changing it into something else: maybe a workroom, maybe a workout room, maybe a game room. At the end it's always beautiful. But where did all that clutter go? You can't tell me that they removed 450 cubic feet of stuff out of the garage, installed three cabinets and a line of hooks to hang the garden tools, and somehow there's a place for everything and everythhing in its place. There has to be a shed in the back yard that's bursting in the seems now.

They never do the things I want to see. You know what I want in my bathroom? A urinal. Some day when I have a place of my own, I'm going to put one into the master bath. You laugh? Why? With a urinal, there's no reason to raise the seat (unless to clean it), and no middle of the night misses. You say it's another thing to clean? Yeah, but it's a lot easier to clean.

And screw the tv set. How about a real medicine cabinet? I'm not on any meds, and my crappy medicine cabinet is full anyway. You put in a few boxes of various size band-aids, some anti-sceptic, the sun block, the basic OTC meds (cough drops, pepto, antacids), razor blades, toothpaste—and it's full. And that's just me. A woman can fill a regular sized medicine chest with face creams alone.

The only show where you actually learn how to do something is on Ask This Old House. When I buy my house, I'm going to ask them to help me install a urinal.