- Look what Radiohead done started, everyone. After the British rockers made their last album In Rainbows available for download on their website and allowed fans to choose the price they paid for it, leading to a lot of free downloads (me included), Chris Martin and the boys of Coldplay are following suit, albeit on a limited basis. With their own new album, titled Viva la Vida, dropping soon, the band decided to release the album’s first single for free on their website. Violet Hill is available for download for a week at www.coldplay.com, having been put on Tuesday morning at 7:15 a.m. and running through next Tuesday morning. I like the concept, mostly because fans get gouged so much by musicians for albums, concert tickets, merchandise, etc. It’s nice to see a band give fans something for free, even if it is just one song from an album. Of course, there are some people out there who find ways to get entire albums for free, but I can’t say I know anything about that. It’s not like I’ve ever borrowed a CD and ripped a copy for myself without paying or anything, never……
- A world without Clark Kent. That was the theme of Smallville this week, taking the Man of Steel out of the equation. As things got underway, we were in the present and Clark was telling Chloe that in spite of BRAINIAC traveling back in time with his cousin Kara and getting ready to kill Clark as an infant before he could be put in his spaceship and sent from Krypton to Earth, he wasn’t going to go back and try to stop it from happening. An S.O.S. message from Kara on 1989 Krypton urged him to take the metal disc that serves as a key to send Clark to the fortress and use it as a means to get back to 1989 Krypton fell on deaf ears. Clark told Chloe the world would be better off if he’d never arrived. It was then that the metal key began humming and giving off light. Clark was transported from the Kent barn to a bizarre world that gave him his own Miracle on 34th Street moment. He was dropped into a world where he had died on Krypton and never made it to Earth. In that world, Chloe was about to get married to some random guy, Jimmy Olsen was a bumbling photographer at the Daily Planet and Lois Lane was his Pulitzer Prize-winning editor. Lana was living in France, married to a wealthy philanthropist and the mother of two beautiful children. Lex Luthor was president and Milton Fine, a.k.a. BRAINIAC, was his chief advisor. Lex was busy with a plan for world domination, creating a major nuclear threat to the United States so he could launch a nuclear attack on the rest of the world. He had Lois seized by the Department of Domestic Security because she uncovered the plan. Lois’ contact, the woman Clark knew as Sheriff Adams in Smallville, told Clark in the bizarre world that Lois was a lost cause now that she’d been seized by the DDS. Clark continued to go throughout the bizarre world, starting at the Kent Farm and meeting the boy who was Clark Kent when he never came to Earth. Using information from Jimmy, Clark was able to track down Lois and save her from the government, but that was far from the end of his troubles. Back at Jimmy’s apartment, Lois shows Clark what President Luthor is really up to. Clark tells her who Milton Fine really is and that he’s the only one who can stop the plot. Lois helps Clark don a classic Superman look, the Clark Kent/dark suit/glasses get-up, and he goes to the press conference where Lex is set to announce his plans. There, Clark comes face to face with Kara, who in this world was found at Reeves Dam (just like in the world that actually happened), but by Lionel Luthor. She was raised as a member of the Luthor family and is one of Lex’s trusted advisors. She also stumbles on the plan to create a false pretense for nuclear war, but Lex tells her that it’s the right thing and that she needs to fall in line. When Clark clues her in to who Fine truly is and what’s going on, they go to Lex together to stop the nuclear launch. Lex tells them that the plan is to wipe out most of the world’s population, saving only the best and brightest in America and under Lex’s leadership, rebuilding and repopulating the Earth. That leads Lex to shoot Clark twice with Kryptonite bullets and shoot Kara as well. Kara is then carted off for treatment and Clark is left with Fine as Lex heads off to the NORAD command center to be safe from the upcoming nuclear war. Fine informs Clark that he plans to use Kara to release Zod, the Kryptonian warlord, from the Phantom Zone, and with Lex (the human vessel for Zod) under his control, he can pair Kara and Lex together to repopulate Earth with Kryptonians and recreate Krypton on Earth. At this point, Clark is shot again by Fine but is simultaneously taken back to the “real” world. There, Jor-El tells him that Clark’s own refusal to accept his destiny forced Jor-El to show him the glimpse into the world without him. Clark changes his mind and uses the key to travel to the Fortress of Solitude, where he can then be sent back to Krypton circa 1989. He and Kara manage to save baby Clark from BRAINIAC/Fine, sending the tiny tot on his way to Earth. Clark actually has the über-weird task of putting his own infant self into the ship to go to Earth, one of the weirder moments in the history of this or any other show. Kara takes on BRAINIAC as this is going on, stabbing him with a chunk of rock and then smashing his prone body with a huge hunk of the same material. However, a demented, laughing BRAINIAC seems to be mocking Kara as she does it. We find out why (sort of) when Lana remains in a coma even when BRAINIAC is destroyed, leaving Clark devastated. He thought killing BRAINIAC would heal her, but it didn’t . He and Kara made it back to present-day Earth, but both wonder about BRAINIAC. How is he still controlling Lana? Lex is concerned too, having sent his doctors to examine Lana and being told her condition is “alien,” unlike anything known on Earth. It’s also irreversible and she’s getting steadily worse, prompting Lex to ask Clark if he knows what caused the coma. Clark lies and says no, which Lex clearly doesn’t buy. At episode’s end, Clark is still researching her condition, trying to find help. Instead, he finds Lois, who offers to console him by buying him a beer. While the two of them go out for a drink, Kara is at the Kent Farm, getting a drink in the middle of the night when she collapses and gets an odd, far-out look in her eyes. It’s hard to tell if it’s because of what she’s looking at or maybe if it’s something going on inside her head. Either way, it’s eerily reminiscent of a scene from early in the series when Martha Kent collapsed while getting a drink in the very same spot in the kitchen. This time, we’re left hanging until next week, so until then, that’s all……
- In looking at last night’s Lost, you have to wonder if you’re being tricked or if you’re seeing things right because on the surface, it seems like an episode that didn’t accomplish much. In the flash forwards, we learn that Jack is able to get over his hang-ups and be a part of Kate and Aaron’s (Claire’s baby) lives. In fact, they live together and are doing quite well - or so it seems. Jack and Kate are in love, Jack proposes to her and she says yes. Jack is growing into the role of dad, he’s become a successful surgeon again and life is good. But a trip to see Hurley at the mental hospital sends Jack off the rails. Hurley has stopped taking his medication because he believes that he and the rest of the Oceanic Six are really dead. The world they think they’re living in is just the afterlife, according to Hurley. He still sees and talks to Charlie, who died on the island at the end of Season Three. Charlie even gives him a message to pass along to Jack, that Jack shouldn’t be raising Claire’s son. The talk with Hurley rattles Jack so bad that he starts seeing his father around at the hospital, even though his father died in Australia years ago. Jack gets a prescription for sleeping pills, starts hitting the hooch and gets into a confrontation with Kate. She’s been sneaking around, lying to Jack because she’s doing a favor she promised to do for Sawyer, who we learn “decided” to stay back on the island, according to Jack. Even off the island, even with Sawyer still there but Jack and Kate gone, the love triangle rages on. Back in the here and now, Jack’s appendix is about to burst and it’s up to Juliet to remove it before it does. The flash forwards come throughout Jack’s surgery, which is good because much more of seeing the cutting, the blood and his insides was going to make me nauseous….but I digress. Juliet was able to do the surgery only after sending Jin, Sun, Daniel and Charlotte to the medical station for surgical supplies. While there, Jin notices that Charlotte understands when he and Sun speak Korean. He later confronts her about it and she denies it until he threatens to hurt Daniel if she keeps lying. Once Jin gets her attention, he makes her promise that when the helicopter comes back, she’ll get Sun on board. Meanwhile, the surgery goes off well, despite Jack’s stubbornness. He insists on being awake during the procedure and having only the surgical area numbed so he can see what’s going on and talk Juliet through it. But when Jack becomes fidgety, Juliet and Bernard decide to chloroform him and knock him out. They send Kate, who has been holding a mirror up above Jack’s abdomen to help him see what’s going on, out of the tent. After that, the surgery goes along just fine and Jack pulls through. While this is going on, a different drama is raging in the forest. Sawyer, Claire, Aaron and Miles are heading back to the beach camp from the barracks, but they have to stop and camp for the night in the middle of the jungle. Before that happens, they have a near-miss with the SWAT-type assault team from the freighter, led by the angry captain of the boat named Keeme (sp). The captain and his men nearly find the small traveling party but the freighter’s resident helicopter pilot Frank Lapidus finds them first and warns them to take cover, lest Keeme and has men find them and kill them. Lapidus then tells the assault team that they need to get moving to make it back to the chopper by nightfall so he doesn’t have to navigate in the dark with only Daniel’s coordinates to guide him. As Sawyer, Claire, Aaron and Miles bunk down for the night, Sawyer warns Miles to keep his distance from Claire, but those words prove unfortunate when Claire wakes up in the middle of the night and wanders off. She initially sees her father, who is also Jack’s father (a fact neither of them is aware of), holding baby Aaron. In the morning, Miles informs a waking Sawyer that Claire walked off into the jungle during the night with a man she was calling “Dad.” Sawyer looks for her but finds only Aaron, wrapped in his blanket, safe and resting on a huge, sturdy leaf of a jungle plant. Claire is gone, nowhere to be found. That’s how things end for this week, so like I said, it seems like a fairly pedestrian episode, but with Lost, nothing is as it seems. Next week there is supposed to be a huge leap backwards in time, something that will explain a lot about the island’s mysterious nature, according to tvguide.com. That being said, see you back here next week……
- Well so much for stars of kids’ TV shows being role models for the millions of kids who watch them. Jamie Lynn Skank, er, Spears shot that idea to hell when the star of Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101 got knocked up at age 16 several months ago. Not exactly the best example for the kids, eh Zoey? But at least kids still had Hannah Montana to look up to, right? Umm, no. Miley Cyrus, daughter of the world’s most famous mullet, Mr. Achy Breaky Heart himself, Billy Ray Cyrus, has made a sexually-tinted mistake of her own that has to have millions of moms and dads cursing under their breath as they try to figure out how they’re going to explain why Hannah Montana is popping up in risqué pictures where she’s wearing nothing but a silk sheet. Famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz took the picture, which shows Cyrus with her back exposed and only a sheet covering the rest of her. No sooner did the pic hit the web than Cyrus began apologizing for it and issuing statements about how embarrassed she was. Should have thought of that before you agreed to let Leibovitz take the picture, M. You and your dad both had a chance to see it and you didn’t object until it came out. Now you’re scrambling because the negative reaction is hurting your career and your fans? Chalk this one up to a life lesson and move on, kiddo. See, this never happened with my childhood idol, Bozo the Clown. Bozo never appeared in any revealing photo shoots, nor did he become pregnant at age 16. They just don’t make kids’ heroes the same way in 2008….
- Speaking of things for free…Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Television group will be giving a little something back to loyal fans of its hit shows by creating a new website where episode of great, no-longer-running shows such as Friends, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, etc. will be available for viewing. The new site, TheWB.com, will be up and running some time in August and will be supported by ad revenue. It will be an on-demand video network aimed at 16-to-34-year-olds, which were always the WB’s target demographic anyhow. Ever since the WB merged with UPN and formed the CW (killing off tons of great shows in the process), a lot of shows fans loved were either inexplicably canceled or have just faded into oblivion. There will also be site-exclusive content that you can't get elsewhere, including shows by people like O.C. creator Josh Schwartz. Warner Bros. also plans on adding an application that will allow Facebook users watch shows on that site. A supplementary site called KidsWB.com will offer shows like Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo. So if you’re unable to find your favorite WB shows on anywhere and don’t have the capability to borrow the DVDs and copy them for yourself have any other means to watch them, TheWB.com could well be the answer for you.
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