Dexter 5x02

Dexter takes a plunge in the pool, much like Don Draper in Mad Men’s “Summer Man” (4x08), trying to wash away his sense of guilt over Rita’s death. Plus, he’s worried that the FBI is suspecting him of murdering his wife. They drill him about his alibi, his night trips in his boat. They keep quizzing him. After a burst of anger, they calm him down. They know he didn’t kill his wife, he was at “The Trinity Killer’s” house as part of the police team. What they are hoping for is a clue why Arthur “Trinity” Mitchell would want to kill Rita. “Because he’s a serial killer,” he quips. After the interview, the FBI agents tell Lt. LaGuerta that the only other lead they have is the name “Kyle Butler.” That is, the name Dex went by when dealing with the Mitchell’s, but they don’t know that. Not yet, at least.

Dex is also worried about the kids, or rather about how he will deal with his dark urges when he becomes a single dad. Cody seems to handle the situation fine. For him living in the condo with Deb and Dex is like camping. But Astor is still bitter. The next day, Dex finds them in the old house, skipping school, looking at the bathtub where it all happened. Astor feels Dexter betrayed her trust. She was led to believe he would make things better, but they only got worse. She tells him she wants to live with her grandparents. Cody would rather stay with Deb and Dex, but Dex can’t split them up – knowing how much he has always relied on Deb (and vice versa). They are moving to Orlando.

Miami Homicide is called on the scene of a horrifying crime scene: a woman’s decapitated head with eyes and tongue cut out, and her mouth cut open. A local Hispanic police officer tells Deb that all the candles and attributes are associated with the Santa Muerte cult (like in Breaking Bad). Det. Quinn’s hunch is that the murder is drug related. The Latina officer suspects the murder weapon was a machete – not an indication of gang warfare. Not much later, there’s another victim. This time an apparent suicide. It’s the husband of the decapitated women, who took his own life with a shotgun through the head. Did he kill himself after murdering her? Or did he take his own life because he couldn’t save her in time?

When moving things from the old family house to his condo, he can’t help noticing some drops of blood in the rented van. After an U.V. inspecting he puts together the pieces of a brutal murder inside the van. Despite the situation with the kids, he can’t help himself and checks out the name of the previous person who rented the van. His name is Boyd Fowler, who works at the Department of Sanitation in dead animal pickup. Dexter reasons that the better killer he is, the better father he will be – focused. So, he follows Fowler around and learns he dumps barrels in a remote lake – with dead women inside. He’s hot on the trail of another sick psychopathic serial killer, one who kills young women, dumps them in barrels of formaldehyde, and collects locks of their hair.

This was another deeply gratifying, emotional episode. The scenes with Dex and the kids were very touching. In a way, it was inevitable that Astor and Cody had to get out of the picture (gracefully). It would be difficult offering a compelling story arc. Plus, the family life would only become a burden for the Dex’ Dark Passenger. On second thought, I found it a little contrived how Dexter got on the trail of that Fowler freak. Is this new serial killer going to be this season’s main story, or is the machete murder going to drive the main plot? Is Quinn going to uncover Dexter as “Kyle Butler”? (The Mitchell’s provided composite sketches that he may piece together.) Incredible how this show leaves the audience guessing!

Burn Notice 4x13

Welcome back, Michael Westen, we’ve missed you! Glad you’re still alive, though barely. He’s been in a coma, on life support for three days. “Where Am I?” “Miami.” That telecom CEO John Barrett is dead – thanks to Sam and Fiona – and so are most of his henchmen. But the briefcase with Simon’s coded bible is still missing. He’s barely on his feet and he already attracts an unwitting client in the hospital after a large explosion in South Beach brings in many wounded victims to the emergency room. This is where the plot’s credibility gets stretched beyond my comfort zone, because apparently the criminal defense attorney who Michael last helped retrieve his daughter, is now hell bent on revenge: for the target of the South Beach bombing was the gang leader behind the kidnapping. Very effective method of elimination: blow up explosives on a busy stretch of town to kill your archenemy. Naturally, the attorney did not get his hands dirty, but employed your average run-of-the-mill fantastically fanatic narcissistic paranoid psychopath with delusions of grandeur wishing to rid the earth of all the scum willing to blow people to smithereens in the process.

With the media all over Barrett’s global conspiracy, Vaughn stops by to apologize to Michael for busting in on their meeting with Barrett guns a-blazing, and to say goodbye. Jesse is back on board, reluctantly, not to make nice – on the contrary, he’s meaner and leaner than ever – but to finish the job and find the coded bible. It leads to another trail of blood. (No doubt they are not going to get their hands on the thing until the end of the season.) At the end of the day, Madeline asks her son why he does what he does, the vigilante stuff and the pursuit of those who blacklisted him. He has been thinking about it every day since the day he got burned, but he doesn’t know. A little trite. There were some good bits this episode. Fortunately Michael was evidently still suffering from his wounds – rather than walking out of the hospital kicking ass. It all did feel a little contrived, though, and so much got crammed into the episode it was hard to keep track.

Weeds 6x12

This season the twists and turns on Weeds, as Nancy and family meander on and off the road, have been hilariously entertaining. Now the season is drawing to a close already. Last week we were left to wonder why on earth Nancy would tell her side of the story to this nebbish journalist guy Vaughn. When we pick up the story, we find Nancy murmuring about swing parties until he breaks her off and gets to the point: who killed Pilar? He seems to know a lot, and runs the theory be her that Shane killed Pilar. She doesn’t reply. Andy has shot a fake video to convince Daoud Mahmud he’s killed Hooman Jaka. But the video is not enough. Before Mahmud will give them their passports, he wants Jaka’s dick. Andy and Hooman walk into a morgue and ask, well, for a dick! The attendant cuts it off, hands it to Andy with the wise words, “enjoy that cock.” A scene ensues when Mahmud still doesn’t believe Andy. Out of spite Mahmud’s wife is willing to give him the passports for $5,000.

Meanwhile, Doug has returned to Agrestic (renamed Regrestic) to collect his passport so he can join the gang to Copenhagen. The scene in the living room when he discovers his wife has remarried is funny beyond description. (Kevin Nealon is such a comedic talent!) His wife’s new husband is good-looking for his age, an architect, a great cook, a jazz pianist, he used to know Jack Kerouac a little and he’s friends with Sidney Poitier. Hilarious! For his part, Sileas learns who his real father is and decides to stay in Dearborn, rather than join his family abroad, while Shane and Warren plunder the storage room filled with undelivered mail for Christmas cards money. Will Nancy leave for Copenhagen without Silas? Well, there was that cliffhanger in the last minute...

Gossip Girl 4x08

Just when Gossip Girl has been nominated for Favorite TV Drama in the 2011 People’s Choice Awards, your one and only Cricket was considering quitting it. “Really?” I hear you wonder, “Only now?” Yes, halfway through the fourth season I am starting to find the trivial trials and tribulations of Manhattan’s Upper East Side elite are getting just a tad tedious. But, what the hey, I’ll finish the season anyway. It’s only a couple more episodes. When it comes to Chuck and Blair, we would have thought peace in the Middle East would happen sooner than peace on the Upper East. But they’ve been making nice – very nice. Still, Blair is embarrassed and decides to have a Blassectomy, to chuck Chuck, rather than have excessive ex sex. Serena is still struggling to stay away from Professor Colin Forrester, the guy she met only a few weeks ago – always scooting different women into cabs – but she hates seeing her life pass her by while waiting for the semester to end.

Stalking Flatchester caught cousin Colin kissing Serena on video, but will she risk his reputation only to bring her down? Dan catches Serena coming out of a cab with Prof. Forrester, while Serena catches Chuck and Blair returning from a quickie in Morningside Park. Nate discovers that Juliet doesn’t live in the building where she claims to live. He confronts her while he recruits Vanessa to find her real address. We are made to believe that she is willing to give up all the lies for Nate, but now Vanessa has the memory stick with the naughty pictures of Colin’s teacher’s pet. As always there’s a party, at the opening of the New York Ballet winter season this time, and everyone is there. Let’s just say it wasn’t a ball. Nate and Serena, Chuck and Blair gang up on Juliet and with the ugly duckling exiled from main street, who else can she turn to than the other exile, Jenny? Yes, her, oh, and Vanessa, too, of course, the other outsider. Will they form a fearsome threesome, or will they turn into tiresome triplets?

BBC Oceans: Arctic Ocean

Only about 5% of the world’s oceans have been explored. This program has aimed at bringing the earth’s seas closer to home. In this last installment, the scientific exploration team takes us to the Arctic Ocean, one of the most hostile bodies of water on the planet – and naturally one of the least explored. Global warming, obviously, is changing this ocean dramatically. Already one and a half million square miles of the arctic ice cap have melted in the last thirty years. Paul Rose and Tooni Mahto dive beneath the polar ice cap to see what may be causing the ice cover to shrink – in addition to the increase of air temperature. What we learn is that the more ice melts, the more the surrounding water absorbs heat of the sun light, due to which the water temperature increases, thus causing the underside of the caps to melt from below. With the opportunity at hand, Lucy Blue and Philippe Cousteau Jr. take measurements of the thickness of the ice. Only caps as thick as six feet are likely to survive the summer. Their measurements confirm scientific calculations that much of the polar cap is less than six feet – and thus the loss of the ice cover is only going to accelerate in the near future. This is disconcerting to human survival, because the more ice is lost, the faster global warming will become. Perhaps already in 2013 the Arctic Ocean will be without ice during the summer. As all the world’s oceans are connected with the Arctic, currents will be effected, and thus the Earth’s climate patterns. The importance of the North Pole can thus not be overstated.

The receding ice cover certainly threatens animals who rely on it, and most vulnerable of all is the polar bear. Yet, just as important for the eco-system are the crustaceans near the bottom of the food chain on which even whales feed. The team is very fortunate to spot several dozen white Beluga whales around the fjords of Svalbard. Lucy also examines how humans have exploited these waters for centuries. She takes us to the remains of Smeerenburg (“blubber town”), Europe’s northernmost outpost on Spitsbergen, settled by the Dutch Northern Company in 1619 as a whaling station. Walruses, too, were nearly hunted to extinction for their fat. Now on Spitsbergen, the population has increased to about two thousand – and they may actually be benefiting from the rising temperatures. At the edge of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, Philippe and Lucy are surprised to find a colorful underwater Garden of Eden, of red soft corals and pink anemones, green kelp, as well as starfish and crab. Overall, I guess the Cricket has been too spoiled by David Attenborough’s amazing nature documentaries, because in comparison BBC’s Oceans is disappointing. Throughout the series the focus was very much on the four members of the team, which distracts from the natural beauty that allegedly is the show’s main subject. At times it was nearly impossible to make out what they were saying through their snorkels – nor do I know why we should care whether or not they have seen this species or that natural feature before. There were, to be sure, some beautiful and interesting scenes. And for that I am grateful.

In Treatment 3x02

Paul Weston’s second new patient this year, Frances (Debra Winger), is a well known movie and stage actress who has trouble remembering her lines. Paul tries to find a way through her evasive façade fast to find out what may trigger her mind blanking. She’s divorced not too long ago, and her teenage daughter is acting up. She’s struggling with a sense of guilt, but refusing to accept she bailed out on her daughter. She’s insecure about her age, but is defiant about that, too. And then, after ranting on about one thing after another, and losing her train of thought, she blurts out that her sister (who used to be Paul’s patient eighteen years ago) is sick, stage-four breast cancer and doctors have stopped chemo-therapy. Paul suggests she deliberately came to him to learn more about her sister, that she may have chosen her new job to escape the troubles in her life, and that she may be losing her train of thought during rehearsals just as she did earlier when she got angry. After her time is up, Paul calls a doctor acquaintance for a referral to a neurologist. Last year his father died of Parkinson’s, and now Paul’s hands are starting to tremble. Could it be a symptom? So, while Frances was rattling on about teenagers and divorce, getting older and death, all of that was hitting home painfully.

Tinariwen: Imidiwan

It has been a long while since the Cricket chirped musically, so it is high time to do something about it! Let me thus introduce to you the Tuareg seven-piece musical collective known as Tinariwen from Mali. Their style has been described as Desert Guitar Blues. The irony is, perhaps, that Tinariwen is rooted in traditional West African music that itself is the ancestor of the American Blues. Add Malian influence (think Salif Keïta and Ali Farka Touré), plus Tuareg and Berber, mix in a few sprinkles of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Santana and Dire Straits, and you’ll get a unique blend that sounds simultaneously modern and as old as the world, both pleasantly familiar and surprisingly otherworldly. Other reviewers use words as “hypnotic” and “mesmerizing” to describe Imidiwan (“Companions”; 2009), they refer to the scorching Saharan sun and the dusty desert winds, they allude to their rebel past and their persistence not to cater to Western commercial pop rock expectations. All of this is good and true. Yet it hardly comes close to prepare the listener for the beautiful music of this album. The Cricket hears layers of ragged (mostly electric) rhythm guitars over a dragging bass, droning percussion, hand claps and finger snaps. Above the rhythm section soar sinewy melodic leads that remind these ears of John Lee Hooker and J.J. Cale. Then there are the achingly wistful vocals full of deeply personal emotions that resonate across the globe – even if we cannot comprehend the lyrics (translations are included in the booklet). Celebratory choruses offer occasional reprieve, especially on the upbeat “Lulla.” It’s only the bonus track “Desert Wind” that sounds out of place – as it moves gratuitously into Brian Eno territory. Still, those last few minutes should not detract anything but the warmest recommendations. Have a listen yourself. Tinariwen will soothe your soul.