TV - Bedlam

I am a total sucker for ghost shows. I will watch any of them at least once. Maybe twice if nothing better is on. And I love British stuff. So a fictionalized account of actual deaths and ghosts in an historic British landmark is sort of exactly what I want out of life. Unfortunately, TV is created for the largest common denominator of any group, so my ghost shows get filled with quasi attractive, almost talented twenty-somethings, all of whom are at least half as interested in screwing as they are in dealing with the undead. Meanwhile, I go to sleep crying into my copy of The House on Haunted Hill and let the Erlkonig lull me to sleep.

The Premise

Bedlam Asylum has been closed for years after a scandal revealed the abuse of patients. The Asylum has been locked away for years, just sitting and taking up space, until the descendants of the last owner take over the property, creating a brighter future for the historic building by turning it into apartments.

(Raise your hand if you've heard a story like this before.)

The family patriarch is overseeing the remodeling, while his daughter and her friends live in one of the finished flats. In the premiere episode, we see him gifting his daughter with a ring which the crew pulled from the wall of the asylum.

(Raise your hand if you can taste the impending fail.)

In what will likely become a weekly formula, chaos ensues as skeptical people make elementary mistakes in the wake of an ghosts.

(Raise your hand if you want a Scooby Snack.)

And yet, I'm still watching.

The Characters

I am henceforth dubbing the cast as a whole Pretty-Prissy-People-With-Posh-Accents-And-Poltergeist-Problems until further notice. All individual characters will be given fake names until such a time as they warrant my giving a crap about them.

The main character, Sir Broods-A-Lot, broods frequently and is possibly even worse at deflecting questions about his ability to see ghosts than Melinda Gordon. Granted, he didn't have an awesomesauce grandmother to guide him through his powers (we don't think). Instead, he had an adopted family that thought he was crazy and an embarrassment, and eventually shipped him off to a nut house where he was pumped full of crazy-be-gone pills to try stop him from seeing all that ghost crap that made the family look bad. Unfortunately for them, the hospital gave him a clean bill of health, and decided he really didn't need any medicine since he wasn't crazy, and sent him on his merry, socially awkward but hot way. He still sees ghosts though, so the boy still has no credibility. The actor didn't have a lot to work with in the premiere; I can't quite tell if he actually acted the part of shy, reclusive, but goodhearted and earnest psychic, or if that's just what I read into the character. Anyway, he's kind of hot, so even if this show tanks, we'll probably see him again in some other BBC show - because God knows there are only ten actors in the whole of Britain.

Princess Snobby Slut is the cousin of Sir Broods-A-Lot, and she is snobbish and a bit of a slut. Don't believe me? Within the first ten minutes of the show, she seduces her male flatmate, knowing her other flatmate has a thing for him, mainly to prove that she can and to screw with the heads of all who know her. When Sir Broods-A-Lot bursts in during their foreplay to save her dumb butt from impending ghost-smiting, she is quite put out, and proceeds to make everything awkward for everybody. Forever. She does this again the following morning by completely dismissing the flatmate she'd been dry-humping only hours earlier. We learn through her other flatmate that this is rather typical behaviour from Princess Snobby Slut, and I am left wondering why I should care about her survival at all. Because I really, really don't. I can only hope that the writers have one hell of a character development arc planned out for her, otherwise I'm voting that she gets offed in the season finale. Of course in a series like this, there's a good chance they'd bring her character back as a ghostly adviser with a chronic case of stupid-bitchitis. Every genre has its' abused deus machinas.

Mr. Milktoast is the flatmate PSS seduced at the beginning of the show. Despite the kind of sleazy and assholish overtones his character was introduced with, I actual got to like him as the episode progressed. Suffering some kind of survivors guilt two years after the death of his brother, I can attribute his otherwise uncharacteristic interest in PSS as some part of his emotional trauma. Whether because he's still grieving or because he is supposed to be a nice guy, MM is the first character to really try get SBAL(look, typing out all these names gets hard after a few paragraphs) to talk about his ability and believe that he's not crazy. He and SBAL are going to be bros someday soon, I just know it.

Clueless Kitten is like Brittany Murphy's character in Clueless (you see what I did thar?). She's sweet, naive, totally out of her element, and everybody dumps on her because her spine is made of a single strand of candy floss. I'm really hoping she's just going to snap one day and stab PSS in the twat. Though given her proclivities as we see in later episodes, PSS might just be into that.

Finally, we have the dark, evasive, more than slightly menacing building owner who has taught his daughter, PSS, all she knows about being a snobbish slut. I really want to see more of him and his menacing hint dropping, but I fear that if BBC headed my wishes and made him a bigger character at this point in the show, he would lose his evil, pinch-faced, condescending charm.

Plot Devices and Other Points of Interest

Apparently, Sir Broods-A-Lot is notified of impending danger by supernatural text messages. I want to mock this, but one of my favorite shows involves an alien traveling through time and space in a police phone booth, so I really can't say anything. Judgement shall be withheld until further notice.

And where the heck does SBAL get his broody, psychic powers? That stuff doesn't just come out of nowhere - at least, it doesn't in GOOD fiction. While ep. 3 gave us part of the answer, there has to be more and revealing it all in season one would be disappointing. LEAVE US WANTING MORE, BBC! And was there an ulterior motive in SBAL's adoption? Given who it was orchestrated by, I would not be surprised at all.

Who the heck keeps warning SBAL about PSS? Why do they want her to live? I certainly don't.

On a related note, there are a group of messages SBAL keeps receiving that are frighteningly contradictory, as though there are two forces, one trying to get him to stay to help a female character, and the other telling him it's no use and to go away. This intrigues me and it should intrigue you too. It is one of the more potent foreshadowing tools and it keeps me coming back.

The last owner of the facility, when it was still an asylum, was removed from his position and was in the process of being brought to trial for rampant abuse of patients. However, he died before he could be tried. I smell a finale enemy.

To explain the growing paths of UST would require a wall and a few balls of multicolored yarn to map and explain. If we could just get some solidity on just ONE of these, I would be the happiest girl. But being confronted with all of them on top of the plot makes it very hard to explain to my brother when he asks me what's going on.

Final Thoughts

They have already tried my patience by killing a cat. But there are enough things going on that make me curious and keep me entertained that I'm going to continue watching until they either jump the ghost shark or kill another kitty.

President Obama and the Curious Case of the Nobel Peace Prize

There are moments in history which, upon remembering, you will be able to recall exactly where you were and what you were doing. The assassination of Kennedy, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 are all embedded into the American consciousness. Now, for me, listed among those life changing and world altering events, is the moment I heard the news that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I recall that morning perfectly. As I heard the news, a strawberry Pop-tart hovering inches before my mouth, I looked at the TV screen and thought to myself, ‘what the hell?’

I want to make two things perfectly clear before I go any further.

1. I AM an Obama supporter

2. I am NOT totally happy with ever choice he's made since his election, nor with the number of issues he's failed to address.

But I like to give my elected officials the benefit of the doubt. They deal with a ton of issues, all of which have hundreds of crucial details politicians have to keep track of in order to make informed decisions. How many of us have the time to learn and understand the reasoning behind the decisions politicians make anyway?

But still, what has Obama done in the past 11 months that makes him worthy of a Nobel Peace prize? Was there a deficit of candidates? I found myself asking this whenever the subject came up. Surely there had to be someone else.

In fact, there were a record number of nominations this year for the Nobel Peace Prize. There were over 205 nominees for 2009, besting 2005’s record setting tally of 199. Of the 205, 172 were individuals and 33 were organizations. Obviously, Obama didn’t have a lack of competition. Some highlights of the list of 2009 nominees include Denis Mukwege, Sima Samar, Ghazi bin Muhammad, Greg Mortenson, Piedad Córdoba, and Wei Jingsheng.

Dr. Denis Mukwege helps women of the Democratic Republic of Congo recover from rape. Congo has one of the highest rates of assault and sexual sadism in the world. Women are raped and tortured with mind boggling frequency and Dr. Mukwege and his clinic is the only place left to turn. Dr. Mukwege has done surgery on over 21,000 women, set up wards and clinics for their care and health, helping victims to physically reclaim a part of themselves which has been brutally taken away.

Sima Samar was the first Hazara woman to obtain a medical degree from Kabul University. After her husband disappeared during the communist regime in 1984, she put her education to use by building hospitals and schools for girls and women in Afghanistan. Currently, Samar is the chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and UN special rapporteur on human rights in Sudan.

Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad is a philosopher who, in the wake of 9/11, has encouraged religious dialogue, centering especially on the relationship between Islam and other faiths. In 2005, he brought many prominent Islamic scholars together to work out a “theological counter-attack” against terrorism. Muhammad also signed an influential letter, A Common Word Between Us, in response to a lecture by Pope Benedict XVI which was deemed by many to be an attack on Islam. The letter read, “Without peace and justice between these two religious communities there can be no meaningful peace in the world.”

Greg Mortenson has built over 84 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, educating children outside the limitations of religion. He also wrote the book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time which is now required reading for military leaders and humanitarians. Mortenson has been shot at, kidnapped, and has two fatwas issued against him by local clerics for teaching girls. His mantra; politics won’t bring peace, people will bring peace.

Piedad Córdoba is a Colombian senator whose work negotiating with the guerilla group Farc has earned her the nickname “woman of peace.” Córdoba has helped negotiations with Farc and in 2007 secured the release of 16 hostages. Though political opponents claim that she is too close to Farc, the success of her work speaks for itself. Regarding her opponents claims, she says the political division with only be solved with negotiations and dialogue. “We have to finish this conflict with words and dialogue.”

Wei Jingsheng is called the father of Chinese democracy. A former electrician, Jingsheng became the figurehead of the democratic movement. He was jailed for 18 years for his democratic activities until international pressure forced the Chinese government to release him. During his imprisonment, he wrote letters to the regime on toilet paper which was smuggled from his cell and printed. Even after his release, he openly criticized the communist regime and called for democratization, leading to another jail sentence. Jingsheng famously wrote the Fifth Modernization; “We want to be the masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors.” This is Jingsheng’s seventh nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama was awarded the Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” So, Obama won because those riots and black power revolutions southern ministers and governors were warning us about never came to pass? Okay, I might be being a bit too harsh. Nobel officials said they chose Obama to rally support behind his initiatives to end nuclear arms, ease tension with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism. All of these are good things. Personally, I think President Obama has done a lot of great things, and that he can and will definitely achieve more during his presidency. But in the face of the other candidates and their achievements, I’m not entirely convinced he’s done enough yet.

Apparently, Obama doesn’t think he’s done enough either. Nobel award winners receive S1.4 million cash prize and President Obama has given his prize money to charity. I'm guessing he wanted to keep the peace.