Weekend Viewing

I must have had a rougher weekend than I realized because I could barely drag myself out of bed this morning in spite of going to bed fairly early the night before. Then again, it was very good sleeping weather, cool and a bit crisp after days of mugginess. It was the kind of day when it would have been silly to force myself out of bed for no real reason other than that it was time to get up. There may be walking this afternoon because it's the perfect weather for it.

It was the weekend of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking, so a lot of my weekend viewing was related. There were some good documentaries on the Discovery Channel, History Channel (yes, actual history on the History Channel!) and on PBS. I'm not really obsessed with that story, but it's one of those events where I can't seem to wrap my head around it. I keep trying to imagine what it would have been like to be there and what I would have done in that situation, but it's so far beyond anything I can imagine that I can't ever really get there. I end up with mutually exclusive hopes for myself -- I'd hope that I'd be brave and self-sacrificing enough to help others, but then I'd also hope that I'd be clever and resourceful enough to survive. I was rather amused by one of the Discovery Channel shows, which followed one of James Cameron's expeditions to the wreck. He may be a jerk, but he's a big geek about this stuff, and watching him get excited when they found one of the staterooms that they re-created for the movie was fun. They'd built their sets from photos, but then he saw the real thing at the bottom of the ocean, and it was still very much like his set, down to the clock that was still on the mantelpiece with the hands stuck at the time of the sinking.

I also watched the British miniseries written by the writer behind Downton Abbey (some were calling it Drownton Abbey) that was on ABC, and I rather liked it, but mostly because of the format. It was four episodes, with three shown back-to-back on Saturday, and when they hit the iceberg before the 45-minute mark in episode one, I was wondering how they'd fill in the next three hours. It turned out that each episode covered mostly the same events, but each time from a different perspective, so that we'd get the context behind something we merely saw in passing in the previous episode. I've always wanted to do something like that in a book. The miniseries also gave us a preview of the next Doctor Who sidekick, as that actress had a medium-sized role in this. She was mostly cute and perky, so it was hard to judge, and of course it all depends on the character they write for her, but she didn't make me cringe.

On another viewing note, I didn't realize it until I saw something about it this morning, but Eureka is returning tonight to SyFy for its final season. I'd thought this was a summer series, but I guess they're burning it off in the spring and will bring on something new this summer. So, if you thought you had to wait until July for the cliffhanger to be resolved, you're kind of in luck.