Okay, so a screencap of a briefly-seen hallucination of something that might have some big teeth is probably one of the more… let’s say eccentric choices I’ve made for a screencap for this blog. I guess that means the jerk who keeps pilfering my images for his classic TV blog will give this one a miss. But I picked it because, for the first time in a long time, something onscreen really got under our son’s skin, briefly, and gave him enough of a fright to send him hiding under a blanket. His much-loved security blanket stays in bed these days, but we have cozy and comfy light bamboo-fiber blankets on the couch, and one of these hallucinations was all he needed to hide his head from the others.
Anyway, I wonder whether “Hot Zone” was originally intended to immediately follow the two-parter “The Storm” and “The Eye”, because it deals with a damage assessment of the flooding. In one of the “suburbs,” a search party finds a previously unknown bio-lab and they let something out. The strange infection kills its victims in precisely the same time and in precisely the same way. In the way of these things, somebody refuses to shelter in place and insists on returning to the “city” so he can infect everybody. How prescient of the writers.
I don’t talk about the acting on Atlantis nearly enough. More precisely, I don’t talk about how good David Hewlett is. Faced with his imminent death, he gives a hell of a good farewell scene, perfectly balancing the character’s sadness that he didn’t accomplish all that he wanted with his hilarious, petulant selfishness. Everybody else in the series is really good as well, but I think everybody’s at their best when they are playing off Hewlett, especially Rainbow Sun Francks, who knows just how to poke holes in him.
Funny sort of synchronicity with today’s viewing. I pointed out that this morning, we saw Martians killed off by Earth bacteria, and this evening, we watched people from Earth get killed off by alien bacteria. I often call our boy “Baby Drax” because he can be so literal. He corrected me. “This wasn’t bacteria, Dad, it was nanobots!” Not the same at all, no…
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 