Don’t mind me

Reinventing this poor old blog again. Need a place to write about what we’re watching (Mr. David Copperfield and I), what I’m reading, whatever.

We’re watching Alias. About halfway through season 2, I think? Via Netflix. Never saw it when it was airing. Love Jennifer Garner, love spyfulness, so this was inevitable viewing for us sooner or later. Am really enjoying it, despite certain eye-rolling flaws. For one thing: it’s so tee-vee. I’m seeing that TV drama has come a long way since the early part of this decade—actually I’m seeing techniques mature quite a bit over the course of these first two seasons. Fewer wide-eyed, gape-mouthed closeups before commercial breaks. I really do love Jennifer Garner, and I like the vulnerability she brings to her badass secret agent awesomeness, but she does do a lot more Shocked Face than I’d think Sydney Bristow really has time for. How can she simultaneously be a superb actress undercover and have a terrible poker face when something catches her by surprise?

I don’t like how the show takes torture so lightly. Characters are brutally tortured and bounce right back. Marshall, Will? (Ha—all we need is a Holly.) Where’s the post-traumatic stress syndrome? The jumpiness, the nightmares, the fearfulness? I have to wonder if this show is part of what dulled society to the horrors of torture (along with 24, oft criticized on this point) in a way that made things like Gitmo and Abu Ghraib easier to ignore. We did ignore them, on the whole.