Late review of Fox's "Gotham" and the season premiere of ABC's "Agents of SHIELD"

Fox's "Gotham" might have gotten the highest level of buzz during the summer, so I was pretty keen on checking it out. I'm not the biggest superhero story fan (unless you consider Jack Bauer to be a superhero), but "Gotham" has an undeniably appealing concept: what was the city of Gotham like before Bruce Wayne became Batman?

To be clear, this is not the 1960s Adam West/Burt Ward campfest. It's not even the Michael Keaton/Val Kilmer/George Clooney series of movies, which while considerably more serious than the TV series, were still full of bright colors. Nope, this is very much in the style of the Christian Bale "Dark Knight" trilogy: dark, grim, unrelenting, and mostly unhappy.

CBS's "Scorpion": Review of pilot episode

My TiVo is close to overflowing, as I still have 12 episodes of the second season of "The Americans" to get through, and a bunch of new shows are debuting this week, as well as old ones returning. I decided to start with CBS's A-team of nerds show, aka "Scorpion," to see if it's worth a season pass.

The premise of the show is that a group of social misfit geniuses based in a rundown warehouse in L.A.are the key to fixing crises that are otherwise beyond our government's ability to solve. The most recognizable actors in the show are Robert Patrick (the liquid metal terminator) as the government agent who calls on the misfits, and Katharine McPhee ("American Idol" runner-up; "Smash" co-star) as the single mom of an autistic genius boy.

The crisis in the pilot episode involves a corrupted software patch in LAX that cripples the airport's ability to communicate with airplanes. Unless the problem is fixed, planes are going to start falling out of the sky.

Yeah, it sounds kind of ridiculous. At least in "Die Hard 2," the planes were kept in the airspace above Dulles by terrorists who had commandeered the communications and could issue deceptive orders to the pilots.

And of course, the nerd/genius characters are pretty much what you'd come to expect, more character tropes than actual characters.

Still, this is the kind of show that CBS knows how to produce in a slick, glossy format with neatly packaged resolutions in a 59-minute program. It's kind of like "CSI: Misfit Geniuses," or "NCIS: Nerdville." It pretty delivers what it promises, it's entertaining, and it'll probably get decent to good ratings.

I'll stick with it for now, as it's watchable, and there's hope that it will follow the path of "Person of Interest" (also a CBS show), which started off as a procedural of the week before developing arcs in season 3 that blossomed into a season-long arc in season 3.

Book review: "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets"

I haven't watched "The Simpsons" in about 12 or 15 years, but Simon Singh's The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets is a book that really tickles my fancy despite my having thrown my lot in with the dark side (i.e., law) after my earlier days as a math/science nerd.

I didn't realize that the show has been chock full of so many math puns and jokes, some of which are readily apparent with no special math skills required, and others that take advantage of, say, differential calculus or number theory.

I especially liked the discussion of how one of the writers used a computer to find a set of numbers that seemingly disproved Fermat's Last Theorem, which posits that there is no number n > 2 for which the equation:

x^n + y^n = z^n

where x, y, and z are integers. It's a theorem that some people thought would last the test of time; there's an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where Captain Picard is, in his spare time, trying to prove it in the 24th century. Actually, though, it was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles, a feat that author Singh wrote about in another book.

Anyway, the Simpsons writer found a set of numbers x, y, and z, which seemed to satisfy the theorem with n = 12. At least, it did if you used a basic calculator that displayed only a few decimal points of precision. If you used a computer, you'd see that it didn't satisfy the equation perfectly.

How neat! And all that work for something that shows up on a chalkboard in the background!

The book contains five sections with math jokes, and I'm pleased to report that I've gotten the humor in all of them so far (I'm about halfway through the book), thus providing some evidence that I haven't completely lost my math/science credentials despite having been in the law school ivory tower for over a decade now.

Should you drink wine instead of working out? . . . Um, no.

 

The Huffington Post has an "article" that people who like alcohol but hate exercise will definitely gravitate toward, as it's titled, "Is Drinking Wine Better Than Going to the Gym? According to Scientists, Yes!"

Now, there's been a lot written generally about some health benefits from moderate wine-drinking, but I don't think I've ever seen a claim that it's better than exercising. Yet, the HuffPo article is lacking in any details and furthermore, lacks a link to the study that it cites:

NBC's "America's Got Talent": the winner

Well, that's another season of NBC's summer smash hit, "America's Got Talent," in the books. Who won? Was the winner deserving?

Happiness is . . .

My happiest moment during today's half marathon:

Marathoners had to go straight, while Half Marathoners got to turn left . . . only 3/4 of a mile left at that point!

What is MeTV doing with "Mission: Impossible"???

What in the world is MeTV doing with "Mission: Impossible"? The 60s/70s spy show is on at 11:30 pm every night, and until recently, the episodes were being shown in the order in which they originally aired. (As with many shows, the order in which episodes aired is not always the order in which they were produced. I have Patrick White's excellent book that covers everything about "Mission: Impossible," so I'm able to determine both the broadcast order and the production order.)

Having endured the Peter Graves-less first season (in which Law & Order's Steven Hill played robotic team leader Dan Briggs), I felt entitled to see seasons 2-7 in order. Well, I was less interested in season 6-7, where the IMF team mostly took on domestic organized crime.

For a few weeks, season 2 episodes aired in exactly the order I expected.

And then, all of a sudden, a third season episode aired out of order. And then an earlier third season episode, and then a sixth season episode, and now it looks like we're getting fourth season episodes. (Interesting side note: Martin Landau and Barbara Bain left the series after three years. Landau was replaced by . . . Leonard Nimoy, which is doubly interesting since Landau was offered the role of Spock but turned it down for "Mission: Impossible"!)

I still enjoy catching up on this show, but it's quite disorienting to be getting essentially random episodes thrown at us.