Happy Thursday, everyone! And for all of us in the USA, it's Thanksgiving, a holiday with...complicated underpinnings of invasion and religion and such. But it's also a holiday to come together with family and...well, that's complicated as well. But I do hope that those of you celebrating have a good holiday with as little stress as possible. Also, please don't laugh at my Bears too much if you watch that game.
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Let's start with this find, the complete series of The 4400. One of the more interesting weird series to come out of the Canadian-filmed science fiction boom of the Aughts that continues to this day, this was an interestingly weird series about 4400 people who suddenly appear from a ball of light on the shores of a Washington state lake. Of course, it's more complicated than that when we find that all of them are people who had mysteriously disappeared over the last 60 years. Federal agency nonsense ensues, they all have certain powers, oh why were they returned and by whom? All of this shown off by a real banger of a USA Network theme song.
Lovely singing by Amanda Abizaid! And hey, there's a name you might have noticed in the credits: Mahershalalhashbaz Ali. Now usually credited as Mahershala Ali, this was the first time I noticed the future two-time Oscar winner. He's quite good as one of the returnees, in his case a Korean Conflict vet taken in the '50s who has returned to a vastly different world for him.
This brings me to why I want to check out the new reboot of The 4400 on the CW, Apparently the returnees are a primarily African-American cast who've been thrust into the future and I'm very curious what the thrust of this new series might be.
The original series of The 4400 is all on Netflix. The new series is on the CW app.
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It's been quite a while since I started reading the Outlander series (Wiki tells me the first novel came out 30 years ago and I simply cannot believe that). It's a series I quite love, with time travel and romance and fighting and Celts of all stripes. I'm years behind on the TV series (I think Netflix has the first four at the moment) but I've seriously loved the casting for it. And two of them, Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish, put together a series for UK TV (and Starz in the US) titled Men In Kilts about their travels across Scotland. This is the companion book to it and hooooooo boy even flipping through it it is a lot of fun busting each others chops about motorcycles, kayaking on Loch Ness and 9 AM whiskey flights. This really might be might light reading for this holiday weekend.
Also, let's enjoy the fantastic theme song for Outlander.
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A few years back, Emily St. John Mandel published a fantastic pandemic novel titled Station Eleven, mostly set 10 years after a global flu that, well, wipes out most of humanity. Now, it might feel a little bit too close to home right now and especially the upcoming HBO miniseries based on it (which weirdly enough was apparently filmed mostly before the shutdown). But it's a lovely, sad novel that is very much worth your time and now I found this, another novel of hers that I've never read and will get to soon.
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One last thing for this week, my Batman Hallmark decoration. And yes, it does say various Batman things. So please, enjoy this holiday season as much as you like! Decorate early if you like! Keep the decorations up as long as you like!
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