Monday,
March 17, 2008

Off to the peridontist, heigh ho

My poor beloved spent the night in a certain amount of agony from his tooth issues (we tried alternating hot and cold packs until the Vicodin finally kicked in). After an early-morning call to the dentist, who decided that he did see a spot in one of the upper teeth where the pain was worst, Lyndon procured a 4:00 PM appointment with a local peridontist for a root canal.

Thanks be to Cthulhu, it went swimmingly. There may be one more in his future, however, as the root canals were done in teeth that had something of an experimental filling treatment while we were living in Montreal, and now it turns out that the treatment, when done with amalgam, can cause inflammation and require a root canal 10-15 years later. He still has one more tooth that was presumably filled with this method -- our regular dentist is going to yank the filling in a couple of weeks and replace it with amalgam, so hopefully that will head off another canal.

Lord, but I love British SF

I stumbled across a website for a British SF series call Primeval and ordered it on spec. So far I'm halfway through the first episode and damn, I'm glad I bought it.

The premise: when strange anomalies in time start to appear all over England, Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) and his team have to help track down and capture all sorts of dangerous prehistoric creatures from Earth's distant past. Cutter is Scottish, snarky and haunted by the loss of his wife, who is supposedly dead after disappearing in the Forest of Dean (yes, there's a place in England called the Forest of Dean. Remember, this is a country with towns named Dorking -- Forest of Dean is relatively normal). Cutter's team of assistants are pretty standard as it goes for supporting characters, but they're fun nonetheless: a skilled tracker (James Murray) who doubles as secondary male eye candy, a nerdy college student (Andrew Lee Potts) who's the Velma of this particular Scooby Gang, and a cute herpetologist (Hannah Spearritt). Ms. Spearritt is also a former member of Sclub7 (one of those Steps/5ive-type singing groups), and has apparently drawn a certain amount of crap for her acting chops. As I never heard of Sclub7 before, I thought her acting was quite all right, although it would be nice if the producers would let her wear something other than underwear in the scenes at her flat. Yes, guys, we know she's a hottie, let's move it along, shall we?

Although James Murray does take his shirt off quite a few times, so I can't really complain all that much. Heh.

Back to the review. Cutter and Co run into trouble with a government coverup attempt masterminded by a cool brunette liaison (Lucy Brown) and her condescending counterpart in the Prime Minister's Office (Ben Miller, doing a marvelous job of playing the bureaucrat you most want to bitchslap into the next county), and things only get even more complicated when Cutter discovers that his wife may not be lost after all. The dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures (and we are talking some seriously heinous creepy-crawlies) are created by the same people who do Walking with Dinosaurs, so there are no cheesy old-school Doctor Who-style special effects here. And since it's a British show, whooee, the writing is absolutely killer. If you liked the X-Files and British SF, you'll get a big kick out of Primeval -- Joe Bob sez check it out.

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