Category: Hobbies & Interests

Other things that interest me besides the “big ticket items”

This Week’s Biking Non-Adventure

My current schedule is to bike to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So Tuesday I went out to the bike to pump up my tires. I rotated the rear wheel to get the nozzle in the right place and…

“Hmm… that’s strange.”

There was a staple stuck in the tire, one prong jammed neatly into the tire. I pulled it out, and saw that the tire was flat. Was it flat before I pulled the staple out? I dunno, but even so I wasn’t going to bike to work with a staple in my tire and get a flat halfway in.

My thought process then went something like this:

  1. I could change the tube myself, but I’m not very good at it. It’d probably take me about 20 minutes to change it.
  2. Then I’d be getting into work pretty late (even by my lights), so I’d better drive.
  3. If I drive, should I then change the tube myself tonight, or shall I be lazy and take the wheel to the shop and get it fixed?
  4. I’m going to be lazy. Then I can have them check the tire to see if it’s still otherwise sound, too.
  5. Of course, if I never change flats myself, then I’m never going to get any better at it.
  6. Then again, I don’t really want to get so many flats that I get that much practice…

(I find changing the tube to be difficult mainly when trying to start getting the tire off, or finish putting it on; the tension is pretty strong, and I just don’t have the right technique or something, because I always stress my fingers at those points, and struggle with it until it finally pops out or pops back on. A pain in the ass, really.)

Two additional ironies: When I had my bike in to change a different flat a few weeks ago (due to the tire rupturing around the nozzle because I’d twisted the screw that holds the nozzle in place too far) he said my tires are pretty impenetrable. Apparently not completely impenetrable (maybe the staple just missed hitting the kevlar lining, or maybe biking on it drove it through). Second, we’d gone by the bike shop on Saturday to have the gears on Debbi’s bike adjusted; had I known about the staple then, I could have brought the wheel in at the same time.

Anyway, I took the wheel in after work on Tuesday and it was fixed in 15 minutes (so… maybe it would have taken me even longer to fix it myself?), and the wheel checked out. So I biked in again on Thursday and it help up like a champ. (And the wheel itself, which I had replaced last year with a beefier model because the spokes kept breaking, has done wonderfully this year, as well.)

bbum suggested that I get some slime-filled tubes for my bike. So I might try that. Although honestly I don’t get many flats these days, so it would just be an extra layer of insurance. But maybe.

Biking has otherwise been going well this year, aside from flat-tire mishaps and issues with getting ill or our late-season rains. I think I’ll easily eclipse my mileage from last year.

Basketball at its Worst?

John Gruber on game seven of the NBA Finals:

But what struck me the most watching this series, and especially game seven, is what an ugly, ugly game the NBA has devolved into. No beauty and very little strategy offensively from either side. No ball movement, and lots of standing around. Very hard to believe that these are the two best teams in the league. The Lakers shot just 33 percent from the field and yet clearly deserved to win the game. For decades, a game seven in the Finals between the Celtics and Lakers resulted in basketball at its very best. Now, it’s basketball at its worst. Brutal.

There’s no particular reason that a sport, when played optimally, should be beautiful or even interesting. Most sports evolved organically, and continue to evolve (albeit slowly) under pressures other than what makes a good or interesting game. Strategy and tactics in baseball (the sport I know best) are clearly far superior to those employed even 20 years ago, in terms of teams trying to win games, yet certainly there’s some basis in arguing that the reliance on walks and home runs has made the game less exciting. (Stolen bases, while exciting, are very minor components of winning; a walk is far more valuable.)

So I wonder: Has basketball strategy been optimized such that the game has become boring, or “brutal”? Were the Lakers and Celtics playing a general style of game which gave them the best chance of winning (notwithstanding specific errors committed in-game)? Or were they playing a fairly stupid game and both teams managed to get to the finals only because of their superior talent (or luck)?

I have close-to-zero interest in basketball (slightly more than I have in hockey or soccer), so I really have no idea. But in the abstract, it’s an interesting sports question.

Speaking of interesting sports questions, has anyone else noticed that people (other than Lakers and Celtics fans) seem more upset that the Lakers won than that the Celtics lost? I guess that’s what being the Yankees of the NBA gets you.

I Survived The Heat

WWDC went well last week. Everything I’ve been working on is still under nondisclosure 🙂 but it seemed to be well-received. I spent my usual shifts (plus a few hours) in the labs, which were low-key for me compared to usual (and my cow-orker who works in my same general area had the same feeling). My biggest success was figuring out that someone had somehow ended up with a corrupted install of his developer tools, and figuring out exactly what was broken (although not why). I did come into the office on Wednesday and did a quick turnaround of an issue my managers wanted me to look at.

I always sign up for the 9 am Friday morning lab shift, partly because it’s fun to get up with Deb and carpool up with her to get dropped off at Caltrain, and partly because it leaves me with the afternoon free to do stuff. I went to lunch with friends (some from work, some attendees) afterwards, and then took BART over to drop in on Borderlands Books.

I was grateful that the heat wave of the previous weekend broke before the conference started, since walking to and from Caltrain is no fun in 80+ degree heat. In the normal cooler weather, though, it’s quite nice. Plus I get to do some reading on the way there and back.

I was less grateful when a new heat wave moved in on Saturday, as it dampened my enthusiasm to do much stuff around the house. Though neither heat wave was as brutal as the ones we’ve had in the past. And we did get out to look for a new gas grill; I ended up buying a Weber Genesis E310 from OSH, which was having their periodic “we pay the sales tax” sale this weekend. Between the grill and various other things I picked up, I saved a bundle of money in sales tax. Now I just have to put the grill together…

Back to work this week, but it’s a pretty low key week as everyone recovers from WWDC. I biked in today, and had a flat tire when I came out of the gym after showering. I walked it over to the bike shop to get it repaired (I could have repaired it myself but decided I’d rather have a pro do it since they’re not far away), and learned that the nut which holds the nozzle in place can cause the tube to rupture if you tighten it too far, which I must have done. I also learned that the nut is not really needed, so I got rid of it. Success!

Lastly, we’re moving offices again on Friday (the second and final stage of our big office move, staged this way I think mainly because our building has gotten substantially remodeled along the way), so I’m packing today, and then taking the rest of the week off to catch up on some of that stuff at home. And then I’ll have another new environment to get used to!

New Nano

Is it silly to be excited to get a new toy like this? Especially since there have been weeks when I’ve spent more on comic books than I spent on this? (Okay, very few such weeks, but still.)

I mainly plan to use this to play podcasts in my car, replacing my venerable – but nearing the end – 80 Gb “classic” iPod.

New Biking Year

It took me almost two weeks after daylight savings time started, but I got back on the bike today and rode to and from work. It was about as hard as I expected, but not too bad. My legs were definitely wobbly during the morning, and around 3:30 my body decided it was naptime. Once I got home I was quite hungry, and afterwards I felt pretty well zonked. I’ll sleep well tonight!

Amusing little aside: On my ride in I often stop off at some friends’ house. Usually I just stop in front, have some water, and push on, though sometimes I see one of them and say hi. This morning I turned into their neighborhood behind a car that looked just like theirs – not too surprising since they have a common make, model and color. But it turned onto a different street. When I got to their house, their garage was open, and I noticed that their license plate was exactly the same as the other car’s to the fifth digit (of seven). What are the odds?

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks lined up, with lots to do at work and at least at much to get through at home. So updates may be sparse. March and early April always seem to be this way, for some reason.

Doctor Who: The End of Tennant

We recently caught up with the last episodes of Doctor Who starring David Tennant. Taken a whole, they were okay, better than the fourth season, but they still show lead writer Russell T. Davies’ tendency to be overly sentimental.

The theme of the season is both one of the Doctor’s impending regeneration (which we know about thanks to the mass media, but he obviously doesn’t), and the Doctor’s relationship to his companions generally, i.e., why he has and needs them, since he spends these adventures without any companions.

The first episode is a big tease: “The Next Doctor” (written by Davies) has the Doctor land in London in 1951 where he becomes embroiled in a plot by the cybermen, but more importantly he encounters a man (David Morrissey) who claims to be the Doctor, and even has a companion, Rosita (Velile Tshabalala), who resembles the Doctor’s past companion Martha Jones. It quickly becomes apparent that this Doctor isn’t who he claims, and the fun is in figuring out who he really is. The explanation doesn’t aim too high, which is fine, since it provides some insight into the Doctor himself as well as making the other character interesting in his own right. The cybermen story is much less satisfying, culminating in a truly ridiculous monstrosity menacing the city. So this one was a bit of a mixed bag.

The second episode, “Planet of the Dead” (written by Davies and Gareth Roberts) is the least interesting story of the season. The Doctor gets on a London bus on which a jewel thief, Lady Christina (Michelle Ryan) is also travelling, and they end up getting sucked through a hole in space to a desert planet, from which they need to learn how to escape, since going back through the hole kills anyone who tries it. They meet aliens who have recently crashed on the planet, and learn why the world is a wasteland, but none of that is really interesting: It’s just a lackluster monster story. The emotional core of the story is the Doctor’s relationship with Lady Christina, who find the Doctor and his life of travelling alluring, but the Doctor realizes that the amoral Christina would be a poor companion and rejects her. There’s a foreshadowing here of the Doctor’s impending demise, but that’s really the high point of the episode. This one was a misfire.

By contrast, “The Waters of Mars” (Davies and Phil Ford) is the best of the specials. The Doctor lands on Mars in 2059 during the days of the first manned mission, but he knows that every person on the base is doomed to be killed in a huge explosion, although Captain Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) inspired her granddaughter to help lead Earth outside the solar system. Things start to go wrong when several crewmembers are infected with some sort of virus, causing their bodies to be controlled by some sort of water-based alien. The Doctor tries desperately to depart, but he’s delayed just long enough to have a change of heart: As a time lord, he can change history, and he resolves to do so, to save whomever he can from the base.

This episode is in the tradition of many of the classic series’ “locked inside with a killer” stories, as the characters get gradually herded to a place where they have to make a stand or die, with the added tinge of melancholy since the Doctor knows their fates. It tie into the overall theme of the specials is to show how the Doctor can act unchecked if he doesn’t have a companion tying him to humanity. It’s a tense story with compelling acting and drama, although any long-time viewer of the series will be a little perplexed (as I was) that companions are so important to the Doctor, since he’s gone for periods without them in the past and his fundamental character hasn’t changed. I guess you can chalk it up to specifically the Tenth Doctor being a man whose hubris led him to making this frightening decision. In any event, this is probably he single best episode Davies has written.

Finally we have the two-part episode “The End of Time” (Davies), in which the Master returns (played again by John Simm, although this time as a sort of young punk rather than an insane aristocrat – quite an impressive turn, really). The Doctor arrives on Earth to prevent this, where he again meets Donna’s grandfather Wilfred (Bernard Cribbins) who has been having nightmares about the Doctor and the end of the world. The Master is captured by a billionaire who wants him to activate a piece of alien technology, which he does, except that he turns the tables by using it to take over the Earth himself. But all of this may end up being incidental, as we learn that the President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton) has been using the Master as a means for Gallifrey to escape the time lock it was plunged into at the end of the Time War. The Doctor has to stop all of them to save humanity and the rest of the universe besides, but at the price of his tenth incarnation.

This story is annoying for two reasons: First, it’s yet another of Davies’ over-the-top season-enders, which honestly gets very boring after a while. You can’t keep ratcheting up the suspense and excitement level all the time, it’s not “Doctor Who Saves the Universe Again and Again”. Second, even after he’s been fatally wounded, there’s a lengthy denouement where he travels around to visit or see the many friends he’s had in his tenth life, a sort of melancholy mirror to the events of “Journey’s End” at the end of the fourth season, but which really feels entirely unnecessary. A little nostalgia here and there is okay, but geez, this was too much. The scene with Captain Jack was amusing for the decor of all the aliens in the bar, and the encounter with Rose was amusing, but I think this sequence should have been scaled back considerably.

Some bits are quite good: Wilfred is an endearing character, and the fate of Donna is still rather tragic. John Simm is excellent as the Master, especially in the first half, Timothy Dalton is always a delight to see, and the final confrontation between all parties is quite good (although it perhaps goes on a bit too long, and the solution the Doctor chooses seems so simple as to undercut the length even further; Davies is not really the strongest plotter). But overall I found “The End of Time” a bit disappointing, especially after “The Waters of Mars” (whose themes were largely dropped in this story, which is also too bad; I’d been intrigued by the possibility of the Doctor heading down a path of hubristic self-destruction, which isn’t how it played out).

I’ve said several times before that I didn’t think David Tennant was as good a Doctor as Christopher Eccleston. This is selling Tennant short to some degree: I think he was let down by the writing as much as anything. Although I do feel he played the character in a way too similar to some past Doctors, whereas Eccleston’s Doctor didn’t really resemble any of his predecessors (which was, uh, fantastic). But Tennant’s earnestness and comic tinges have been entertaining.

For next season, I’m most excited that Steven Moffat will replace Davies as executive producer and head writer, as Moffat has written several of the very best episodes of the series, and I’m looking forward to the quality of the writing going up next season. Here’s hoping that’s how it works out.

(You can read my reviews of other nouveau Doctor Who seasons here.)

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert is one of those people I thought would be around forever, because after all I’ve been watching him since I was a kid, when he and Gene Siskel were hosting Sneak Previews in the late 1970s. It was a little shocking when Siskel died in 1999, but also reassuring (I thought) that Ebert kept their film review show going afterwards. Other than graying hair, Ebert didn’t seem to change very much over the years. I can’t say I was ever a “true fan”, since I didn’t follow his columns (even on the Web), nor watch his show every week (though I’d sometimes watch one if I came across it). Nothing against him, but I’m not truly a film buff, and in fact I’ve spent more time in the last decade watching films made before I was born than films made after I was born. Still, like any other enduring public figure who’s been there for most of your life, you get used to the lack of change.

I came across Ebert’s blog a year or two ago and had read about him having had throat cancer. His picture on his blog showed him with his hands palms-together in front of his face, covering much of his lower face. But other than looking thinner, he basically looked like the same guy.

The picture, it seems, is several years old, as I learned by reading this amazing profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire, which includes a head shot of Ebert as he looks today: He no longer has a lower jaw bone, and cannot eat or talk. And, obviously, he looks quite different. If you cover the bottom of his head, then he looks basically the same as he always has. But the difference of the totality is striking.

I’m not sure why the photo is so fascinating to me. I usually shy away from pictures like this (for example, the seemingly-omnipresent ads in the paper to donate to help children with cleft palates always cause me to turn the page immediately), but not this one. With the equally bewitching article, I think it makes me think that this sort of thing – although rare – could happen to anyone. Ebert seems to deal with it as well as anyone could hope for, at least from the view from the outside: Last month he wrote an entry about not being able to eat, where he seems to be philosophical about it. I’m sure it’s been terrifying for him at times – but you can’t be terrified constantly.

This month Ebert wrote a follow-up to the Esquire article, and it’s also a fascinating read (and has additional pictures). He seems a little surprised that he’s exposed his home life as much as he has, as if he knew intellectually what inviting the writer into his home to write the profile meant, but until he saw it he hadn’t realized it emotionally.

It’s the final paragraph in the blog post that gripped me the most:

I studiously avoid looking at myself in a mirror. It would not be productive. If we think we have physical imperfections, obsessing about them is only destructive.

I don’t think I could do that. I don’t know if I’d be able to deal with it as well as Ebert seems to be. Then again, maybe you deal with it because it’s better than the alternative.

Regarding “Against Camel Case”

Caleb Crain’s article “Against Camel Case” in the New York Times is part informative historical information, and part silly exhortation. And through it all he doesn’t address the most important issue, that being, shouldn’t it be spelled “CamelCase”?

Actually, what I think he misses is the more interesting issue, which is that while the advent of writing initially helped to “fix” language so that it evolved somewhat more slowly (well, English, anyway), the greater use of writing for a wider variety of communication has cause the written form of the language to evolve rapidly and in unpredictable ways: The ubiquity of acronyms (LOL, WTF, IMHO and their brethren), which evolved (sort of) into L33Tspeak and text message lingo (which seems closely related in spirit, if not in derivation), which has started creeping out of the Internet and into student papers and such.

Language evolves. These things happen. I’m as pedantic as the next guy (probably much more pedantic than the next guy) about using correct grammar and spelling (typos and my meandering run-on sentences notwithstanding), but arguing for uniformity seems hopeless at best, senseless at worst. Set against some of the linguistic developments of the Internet age, camel case seems relatively innocuous.

Crain’s historical notes on the subtraction and later restoration of spaces in Latin is fascinating (separation of words by spaces was dropped completely? Wow), but I think he’s missing the forest for the trees: It’s pretty drastic to drop what is the functional demarcation between units, but not nearly as much so to drop a demarcation within a unit. “Bank of America” doesn’t mean “this is the bank of the entire nation” (there are, after all, other banks), but rather “this is a bank whose unique name is ‘Bank of America'”. That’s probably not that BofA wants their name to mean, but in practice that’s what people use the name to mean. And I expect that BofA recognized this when they changed their name (if only temporarily) to “BankAmerica”. (They might also have wanted to avoid people accidentally abbreviating their name with a term that could be pronounced ‘boh-fah’, though I have always heard people pronounce it as ‘bee-of-ay’.) The whole term is a unit, and the spacing is almost irrelevant.

Camel case is currently used in terms intended to sound trendy or cool (or that’s how I interpret it, anyway). Obviously, YMMV as to whether it sounds that way, but the intent, I think, is to convey that little extra emphasis. (Whether or not camel case is appropriate for a given company or product is another matter.) But I hardly think the loss of a few spaces is worth much fuss. At best, it might be grounds for a slippery slope argument, and we all know how much those are worth. It seems more likely that camel case is just one of Crain’s pet peeves.

The evolution of language is a fascinating thing, and it’s going to happen whether we want it to or not, and probably in ways we can’t anticipate. It’s just one more way the information era is changing and challenging the nature of our lives and our world.

Sunday in the City

Friday night I surprised Debbi by taking her to dinner at Sundance The Steakhouse, which we’d last (and first) visited for my birthday this year. It was as good as it was the first time!

Saturday we took the cats to the vet, Debbi taking hers in for a 2 pm appointment, then me taking mine in half an hour later. She was in-and-out and ran into me as I was arriving. It took longer for my guys to get their check-ups. Newton seems to be doing well enough given that he’s taking thyroid medication. Jefferson, however, has some really crummy teeth and his gums are looking pretty bad, including a spot that’s bleeding. He’s lost 3 pounds in the last year, and it could be because he’s having hyperthyroidism himself, or it could be because eating has been difficult because of his mouth. And the vet said there’s a chance that he could have a tumor which is bleeding. So both cats are getting blood tests, and we’ll see where to go from there. My bet is that Jefferson “just” needs some dental surgery.

Still, for 15-year-old cats, that’s not really too bad.

We had a more exciting day today, since I wanted to go up to the city for Borderlands Books‘ 12-year anniversary sale. We left early and got breakfast in San Carlos, but realized that we’d be getting to the bookstore well before their sale started, at noon. We tried going into Golden Gate Park to visit the botanical gardens, but there was no parking. However, we saw a sign on the way for the Disney Family Museum, which recently opened in the Presidio, and decided to go check that out.

Even with a $20 entry fee, I figured there was still some chance that it would be little more than a few trinkets that Diane DIsney Miller had inherited from her famous father, perhaps with some notes on his life. But in fact it was much more than that, and we spent more than two hours going through it (and could have spent more time than that).

There’s not much left inside that looks like an old Presidio building – they clearly spent plenty of money to make it a modern venue, with computerized displays in addition to the memorabilia, and even a theater in the basement. The reception area has hundreds of awards that Disney was given during his lifetime (including most of his Academy Awards) on display. Inside is an impressive collection of photos of Walt and his family, and many DIsney memorabilia, including a polo cup he won, one of the trains he built for his home, the fiddle his father played, and many of his early drawings (some the originals, most reproductions). The earliest known drawings of Mickey Mouse are among he collection.

The narrative is well-written, although the layout of the individual rooms makes it sometimes difficult to know where to start, so sometimes you experience things out-of-order. While it admirable grapples with a few of Disney’s less shining moments (such as the early 40s animators’ strike), it oddly glosses overt the construction of Disneyland, which occupied Walt for several years and was one of his greatest accomplishments.

While some have cautioned that the museum is more about Walt and less about Disney, anyone interested in either the man of his company ought to enjoy the museum. It’s a good companion experience to the biography of Disney I read a few months ago.

After the museum, we stopped for sundaes at Ghirardelli Square, and then headed to the bookstore, where I picked up a few things, and we got to see Borderlands’ two hairless cats, Ripley and Ash, the latter of whom I hadn’t met before.

The only blemish on the day was having trouble getting dinner cooked (stuffed pork chops from the supermarket that took about 25 minutes longer to bake than advertised), and watching the Patriots mysteriously hand the Sunday night football game to the Colts by not punting the ball on 4th-and-2 at their own 30, leading by 6 with 2:30 left in the game. WTF??? The Pats lost 35-34. Gah.

But that aside, it was a day of pleasant surprises, so I can’t really complain.

Torchwood Season One

It took a while, but we recently finished the first season of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off about a team in Cardiff, England defending the planet against alien incursions, and featuring Captain Jack Harkness, the occasional guest-star of Who. As I’ve done with Who, I’ll list the first season episodes in order of most to least favorite, and as usual my comments below will contain spoilers.

  • Captain Jack Harkness (written by Catherine Tregenna)
  • Ghost Machine (Helen Raynor)
  • Out of Time (Catherine Tregenna)
  • They Keep Killing Suzie (Paul Tomalin & Dan McCulloch)
  • End of Days (Chris Chibnall)
  • Countrycide (Chris Chibnall)
  • Random Shoes (Jacquetta May)
  • Greeks Bearing Gifts (Toby Whithouse)
  • Combat (Noel Clarke)
  • Everything Changes (Russell T. Davies)
  • Small Worlds (Peter J. Hammond)
  • Cyberwoman (Chris Chibnall)
  • Day One (Chris Chibnall)

A friend of mine said on Facebook that you have to look at Torchwood as a guilty pleasure. That would be fine – since much of this season is very poorly written – except that I already tend to see Doctor Who as a guilty pleasure, and Torchwood is a big step down from it, so where does that leave it?

The most frustrating thing about the show is that the Torchwood team are mostly incompetent, which is a big change from most shows of this type where the government organization protecting us from the unknown is instead highly competent. But this isn’t really a theme of the show, it’s just a lever used for the stories: The characters are incompetent, so they do stupid things, and that results in problems.

So, for example, in “Cyberwoman”, Ianto has been hiding his half-cyberized girlfriend in the basement of Torchwood since the Battle of Canary Wharf back in Doctor Who season three. He doesn’t really have a plan to reverse her condition, and he certainly doesn’t trust that his co-workers would help him. Naturally it all goes disastrously wrong once she gets loose. Or the first episode, “Everything Changes”, when the characters are making selfish use of the alien artifacts that Torchwood has access to even though Captain Jack’s told them not to. All this would make more sense if the team were more of a research organization, but that’s not really what they do, and it’s certainly not what they’re set up to do. This pattern continues through the season finale, “End of Days”, when the whole team turns against Jack to do something remarkably stupid which puts the whole world at risk. I can’t count the number of times I said, “Maybe next time you’ll listen to Jack!” at the television during the season.

Not that Jack is a whole lot better, since he’s written very erratically. He’s certainly the most competent character in the group (although Tosh is okay; she’s a fair sight better than Gwen, Ianto and Owen), but he also swerves from being empathetic to being very callous and uncompromising. It’s like the writers couldn’t decide if they wanted him to be a tough-as-nails leader, or more of a heroic figure like the Doctor.

The season’s rocky start has one good episode, “Ghost Machine”, and a decent one, “Countrycide”. The former is an atmospheric story about a device that can show echoes of the past, while the latter is a creepy horror story whose punchline is very different from what you’d expect. But neither of these are episodes to build a season on; in a better show, they’d be meat-and-potatoes episodes rather than the standouts. And they’re amidst dumb episodes like “Cyberwoman” or the immeasurably stupid “Day One” with its sex-obsessed alien killer (gah!), or the faerie-inspired but muddily-plotted “Small Worlds”.

The series does get better as it goes on, though. “They Keep Killing Suzie” features the forgotten Torchwood member from the first episode coming back to cause trouble, a well-constructed episode that unfortunately peters out with a pointless chase sequence at the end. “Out of Time” involves some people from 1953 brought forward to the present and having to adjust to a very different era. It’s one of the more thoughtful episodes in dealing with this premise seriously. And the best episode of the season is “Captain Jack Harkness”, in which Jack and Tosh are thrown back to 1941 during the dawn of World War II and have to figure out how to get back even as Tosh is the subject of anti-Japanese sentiment. They also meet, well, Captain Jack Harkness of that era, who’s not at all what they were expecting.

That episode sets up the last episode, “End of Days”, in which the mysterious goings-on turn a promising set-up into the team turning against Jack pointlessly and resolving into another stupid monster story. It’s a bombastic story but it’s frustrating and not very satisfying. And it ends with Jack disappearing to adventure with the Doctor at the end of his third season, which makes the series feel even more like a spin-off which is subordinate to its original series.

Torchwood has all the ingredients to be a solid series, perhaps a little derivative of The X-Files, but with a flaboyant, unusual star character, an inventive visual look to the team’s headerquarters, and an unusual pedigree. But the writing just doesn’t follow through on the series’ premise, and rarely delivers stories that either make much sense on their own terms, or involve characters doing things that seem sensical. Overall, it’s mediocre, and never truly great.