Sixty seconds of Sergio

Not sharing Eli's hesitation about blogging on subjects beyond my expertise, I thought I'd fix the dearth of spaghetti western blogging here at Rabett Run:



I've been watching the above clip for more times than I can count as part of a little project I'm working on.  It's the climax from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the second best of Leone's westerns, and the best climax.  The rest of this post is all spoilers, of course.

The part that really interests me is the final 60 seconds of the face-off, starting about 6:30 in the video.  Watch it once and it seems to end in a swirl of faces and a gunshot.  Watch it a couple dozen times and you get a story.

A timeline:

6:30 Angel Eyes starts inching his hand over to his gun.

6:33  Blondie looks at him, and he brings his hand back

6:49  Blondie looks at Tuco and gives him the slightest nod.  Now we who know the outcome also know there's no direct reason for Blondie to give a signal to Tuco - Blondie had tricked him and unloaded his gun.  It's what happens next that shows the reason - Angel Eyes saw the nod and flickers his view back and forth, unsure if there's a plan against him.

7:01  Unnerved, Angel Eyes starts slowly reaching for his gun, looking for Blondie to spot him moving.  Blondie never looks at him again, staring straight ahead at Tuco.

7:16  Angel Eyes takes an almost-last look at Tuco, hand inching closer.  Tuco's starting straight at Blondie.

7:17 - 7:27  Confusing closeups accelerate.

7:28 - 7:31  Tuco finally glances at Angel Eyes.
                  Angel Eyes nervously shifts his view between both opponents and makes his move.
                  Tuco sees the move and begins drawing himself (not that it matters).
                  A shot rings out, and Angel Eyes falls.  Blondie shot him without ever looking away from Tuco.

We learn later that Blondie had tricked Tuco by emptying Tuco's gun, so Blondie never had to really worry about Tuco.  Only by watching it closely do you see that Blondie also tricked Angel Eyes with the meaningless head nod to Tuco, and then by seeming to not pay attention to Angel Eyes, while watching him with peripheral vision and waiting for him to draw.

Nice.  Really nice.

Couple other points:  I had trouble with Angel Eyes walking across the line of fire between Tuco and Blondie earlier in the clip, but I finally realized it helped conceal his draw from Blondie even if it made the hand more visible to Tuco.  Maybe he wasn't quite as worried about Tuco.

At 7:32 you can see Tuco shooting his empty gun at Angel Eyes, i.e. not at Blondie.  Maybe it was just a response to Angel Eyes, but it might have been a choice.  Maybe that had something to do with Blondie's decision to spare Tuco at the end of the movie (not in the clip).

Speaking of the movie's end, Blondie tortures a guy with a fake execution/near strangling and he's "The Good"?  Maybe it was less jarring in the days before enhanced interrogation.  That's just one more good thing about re-electing Obama.

In the preceding movie, Angel Eyes was a good guy.  Nice climax as well, clip here.  Interesting how much swarthier Leone made the kind-of same character and same actor when he was The Bad.

I started watching this clip over a month ago, and immediately started getting lots of Romney ads on YouTube.  I thought that was amusing.

My review of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire: epic meh

So I can't exactly pan his books seeing as I've read the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series in less than three months, but if I could go back in time I'd warn myself, don't do it. Or maybe just read the first book, which is the best, and then watch the HBO Game of Thrones show as it gradually recapitulates the books (disclaimer: haven't seen it, but it gets great reviews).

The series is epic, but it's meh. The level of detail is stunning - I've never read a book with such descriptions of each dish of food at so many meals. The battles and intrigues are epic. And they don't lead to anything. Five books later, and I don't have a sense of a plot line that's really advanced from the beginning. The characters just run around in their clown car of a fantasy world, coming and going to various lands and occasionally getting bumped off. It feels like an alternate history, which is fine, even amazing, but after a while it just all fades into one damn thing after another.

Tolkien could wrap up a story arc in three books. Martin hasn't done it in five - he claims he'll do it in seven, but the last two haven't been written yet, so who knows really, and these aren't quick reads like the Harry Potter books. My suggestion is to just watch the show instead (based on all the rave reviews), it saves a lot of time. Of course, it's too late for me - I'll read the books when they come out.


UPDATE:  I half-expected to either get flamed or ignored, but apparently the rabbits agree that Martin's overrated. They provide alternatives.

Reviews: Daybreakers and McClatchy's story on restarting chimp medical experiments

Daybreakers is an above-average vampire flick, partly for the premise: instead of being a hidden minority, in the near-future the vampires have won and run the world, with a small number of remaining humans being all that exists for the carefully controlled, medical blood farms.

There's a certain environmental analogy in the film: some vampires ask their complacent colleagues what will happen when they've drunk the last human blood (there will always be more is the answer). I think we have an even better analogy, though.

McClatchy reports that the US is considering restarting the use of chimpanzees for medical experiments. Just like some vampires in the fictional movie believed it was wrong to use their closely related species of humans, however inferior the humans might be, many people and even a major pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline) oppose this experimentation on great apes.

McClatchy's reporting is good and detailed and has two flaws: first, it's not clear exactly how the chimps would be used. Many were previously infected with Hepatitis C, so this research could potentially benefit them. More to the point, any research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm the chimps isn't too controversial. I think the researchers' comparison to human volunteers doesn't work, though: you don't have shoot human subjects with anesthetic darts on a daily basis in order to get blood samples from them. Overall, I doubt the proposed research matches the benign standard that I could live with.

The second flaw is the assertion that chimps do not make particularly useful subjects for human medical research. I highly, highly doubt that to be an accurate statement. It treads into the animal rights version of science denialism, and provokes the over-reaction from people like Mark Hoofnagle who can't stand animal rights activists and miss the point that sapient species need to be treated differently.

I suspect a much better version of the utilitarian argument against using chimps for medical experiments is that they're too expensive to use, especially if you accept that we must treat them decently. To me, that would mean teaching them sign language, something you could easily argue is a necessity to avoid unnecessary harm, and should be enough to make it way too expensive to use chimps. There ought to be a law on this, and I think we could get one on a state by state basis.

Reviews: The Gold Rush (1925) and True Grit (2010)

One of the reasons I subscribed to Netflix was to see the old classics that are the basis of modern films. I haven't done it as much as I should, but I did finally watch Chaplin's 1925 film, "The Gold Rush". The version I watched is kind of a cross-over between silent film and the talkies - in 1942, the film was re-released with Chaplin doing a narration.

Anyway, the slapstick humor passes the test of time, and I can see a lot of carryover into Jackie Chan and Steven Chow. Worth checking out.

The other random film I saw semi-recently was the Coen brothers' version of True Grit. Reviews last year got it wrong, calling it a genre film and not a true Coen brothers' film. More recent reviews, as Pandagon points out, mistake the female lead as being in line with other hypermasculine action flicks that happen to have a female protagonist acting just like a male would. The Coens aren't really holding out any of their characters as true heroes in recent films, with only partial exceptions, and the ending of True Grit makes it clear that the same dark viewpoint continues in this film. It's definitely a Coen film, if you like that kind of thing.

Reviewing The Greatest Show on Earth: read The Ancestor's Tale instead

I'm a big fan of Richard Dawkins' science writing (haven't been interested in his atheism stuff). His latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, unfortunately doesn't appeal that much to me, and I can only think of a limited audience who should read it. Science and evolution afficianados should instead read The Ancestor's Tale or any other Dawkins book, instead.

I guess he felt he hadn't comprehensively addressed the evidence for evolution.  You can't - Darwin had compiled too much evidence to do the comprehensive job he had planned, and it's increased exponentially ever since.  If you're trying to provide a tool useful for arguments with creationists, though, I wouldn't write a narrative book at all - I'd create a manual, something that allows easy referencing and searching for various arguments, maybe based on Panda's Thumb or the countless other resources out there.  Dawkins kept recommending Jerry Coyne's book, Why Evolution Is True, and maybe that's a better book for the evolution champions.

The book would be an excellent read for someone who actually takes creationism seriously, but I doubt they'll read it (or this blog post).  It might also be good for Dawkins fans who've read everything else from him and want something new - he's said his next book will be a children's book on myths, so the good science will be a while before we see it again.  Everyone else should find more interesting content in Ancestor's Tale.

UPDATE:  maybe worth adding that Greatest Show has received pretty good reviews, so most people disagree with me.



Bonus blogging:  why in heck did John Kerry have to hire a conservative that was spreading, in a stupid or deceptive fashion, extensive pro-torture propaganda?  If he wanted to reach out with an affirmative action hire of a conservative, there are plenty out there still who don't believe in torture.

Avatar story line is cliched but accurate (mostly)

The basic story in Avatar is that a technologically-advanced civilization intrudes upon another with less technology, and bad things happen to the latter group. Rightwingers see the obvious parallels to Native Americans, and this makes them oh so angry.

One can critique the film's plot as not being especially deep, but that doesn't make it wrong. If it's at all helpful to the wingers, this kind of thing happened and is happening all the time. Instead of white Europeans and Native Americans, I saw a similar process in Burma between the ethnic Burmese military junta and the minority/hill tribe Karen people where the junta wanted to run a natural gas pipeline to Thailand, (with French and American oil company help). Jared Diamond's book Collapse discussed how gun-wielding Maori decimated the hunters of Chatham Island.*

I'll make these critiques of the Avatar story line in terms of accurately depicting our world:

• The natives remained completely united. That never happens. The colonizer always finds allies among the natives, exploiting existing rivalries and tensions.

• The natives don't want anything the moderns have. That's not true, although they might be better off without much of it - alcohol, opium, shiny beads, guns, and saggy pants.

• The natives are completely good. Also untrue - instead of bad guys versus good guys, the real world is more like bad guys versus less-bad guys. The distant or maybe not-so-distant ancestors of the natives almost always did what's being done to them, taking the land from someone who was there first. I doubt there's any human society that didn't do bad things on a regular basis to themselves or their neighbors.

None of the above excuses the worse sins of the invaders, of course.

We could say these aren't flaws in Avatar because the natives aren't human, but then it's also not much of an allegory for this world.


*Wiki does claim the Chatham Islanders were nonviolent, which strikes me as complete bull.

A negotiated solution will eliminate any need for violence in Avatar sequels (spoilers)

(Avatar plot spoilers below)

Readers will be relieved to learn that the violent action sequences in Avatar do not need to be repeated in the two sequels that Cameron's been talking about.

It seems pretty obvious that as Cameron plans it, the humans will still want the unobtainium, and won't be caught by surprise as was the case this time with a small human expeditionary force facing the globally-united Na'vi. So the sequel will be a massive human attack on Pandora - call it, say, The Humans Strike Back. It will end somewhat inconclusively, until the third movie where the Na'vi leave their world, get into an outer space battle, unexpectedly convert one of the bad guys to their side and then win. Call that one the Return of the Na'vi.

That sequence is all unnecessary. The key issue is that Hometree, which formerly blocked human access to the largest amount of unobtainium in hundreds of miles, is now gone. Obviously it would be better to have been saved - riches of Pandora are at the surface and all that -but I've learned in my environmental career that once you've lost, you move on.

So rather than fight each other, I can provide a completely different plot for the two sequels. In the first sequel, we have a Star Trek Next Generation-style plot, where everyone sits around a table and conducts dramatic negotiations that if they break down, could lead to violence. Fortunately, Pi'kart of the Na'vi realizes that they can let the humans mine the unobtainium where Hometree used to be, without further harm to the moon's environment. They also allow mining at other already-disturbed sites, and they offer cooperation on learning about the planet's biological wealth. Everybody wins!!

In the last movie, the Na'vi return to their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We've already seen the hunting side, so this movie should focus on gathering. I suggest two-and-a-half hours of watching the Na'vi dig out blueish tubers from the ground. The climax would be a fifteen-minute struggle to pull out an especially-tough tuber, with a team effort victoriously resulting in a slow-mo explosion of dirt as the tuber is finally wrenched out.

No need for Cameron or the fans to thank me for the plot fixes.

Credible scientists don't necessarily mean credible science

There seems to be increasing connections between climate denialism and evolution denialism, with the creationist Discovery Institute increasingly interested in denying anthropogenic warming.

At my most cynical, I think this is a bank shot by the more strategic climate denialists who are worried about the Christian envangelical environmental movement getting out of hand, and see this as a way to slow it down. Only slightly less cynically, it's the creationists trying to glom on to a slightly less discredited form of science denialism than their own dreck, and using climate denialism as a gateway drug to the harder stuff.

I just finished watching Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, the Nova documentary about the lawsuit that blocked using public schools to teach intelligent design as a way to introduce creationism in the classroom. It's a good documentary although it could've gone faster (which is why Netflix is great - I watched most of it at 1.4x speed, and some of it at 2x speed).

The documentary is a useful reminder to realists and a caution to climate skeptics, in that it shows a tiny handful of real scientists, professors even in the relevant fields, who deny evolution. If you're a climate skeptic that just hates it whenever we compare your views to creationism, this is a problem. The view of a few credible scientists who oppose the mainstream view on evolution either negates the existence of a consensus, or alternatively the climate skeptics have to acknowledge having a few aging climate researchers on their side isn't sufficient proof to deny the climate consensus.

I think the most reasonable view is that a small number credible scientists can go off the deep end and believe something unreasonable even in their own field. That's what happened with evolution and happened in the climate field.

Ticking time bomb torture and Inglourious Basterds

Ticking time bombs are a topic again on the right, thanks to The Underpants Bomber. Could it have made sense to "harshly interrogate" the bomber after subduing him to find out if there are other bombers on other planes, they ask. Given that neither the Underpants Bomber nor the Shoe Bomber from years earlier were involved in coordinated attacks, I think their cases argue against the hypothetical reasons to torture people.

But what about 911, where there was a coordinated attack? I think the problem with the moral "dilemma" is actually making the time short enough to rule out traditional interrogation while still being able to acquire reliable information from someone who has the easy choice of lying for a few minutes. My response to this argument:

I think torture could result in accurate information, but only when there's time to corroborate the tortured person's claims and inflict more severe torture if it turns out he or she lied. Game theory has shown that repeat player games are the ones that establish a level of trust.

That's the main problem with many ticking time bomb scenarios, including the hypothetical one that didn't actually happen last Xmas - the tortured person's best strategy, if he's got useful info for the other side, is just to lie during the few minutes that he needs to lie. Soon he's in the hands of the police.

Or the bomb explodes, which is preferable to captured person and there's no way for the interrogator to know otherwise. Even if you defeated and captured Mohammed Atta on the plane he hijacked, he can deny he knows of other hijack attempts or even name wrong flights, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Ticking time bomb justifications seem to either come as a vague claims, or hypotheticals that haven't occurred in real life. I don't doubt that it's possible to come up with a dangerous hypothetical, and maybe torture would be justifiable then, but a pro-torture policy doesn't seem to have a lot of justifiable application in the real world.

The exception to this would be wartime. I finally watched Inglourious Basterds, an okay-but-not-great Tarantino World War II film. In one scene, the American soldiers fighting behind German lines have captured German soldiers and need info on what threats they face. This seems a good case of a ticking time bomb scenario, and the Americans could have set up a scenario to retaliate against an informer giving false information. I think this could happen a lot during war. The fact that wartime torture of enemy soldiers is the one area where torture is most disfavored seems meaningful to me.

Right imitates left in a good way (if you're on the left)

One of the few things that conservatives did better than progressives in the US was to welcome converts. On the left, it seemed that anyone repudiating their past just got criticized for their past, while people on the right loved conversion stories.

But now, following Representative Parker Griffith's party switch from Democratic to Republican, the conservatives are trying to make life as difficult for him as possible. Yes, the switch is minor bad news for the Dems, although it's part of the long history of conservative Southern congressional seats switching to the Republican party. The consolation for the left is the hostile reaction Griffith is getting on the right, and what it says about the insularity of the conservative movement.

On a related note, climate denialists still seem to love a good conversion story, something like "I used to believe in global warming, but then I heard the excellent points raised by Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and now know the truth." I translate that as really meaning "I used to pay no attention to global warming and was only vaguely aware of the issue. When I finally became more interested in my conservative political values, I started paying attention more, but only to factoids that reinforce my conservativism, and global warming doesn't fit what I would like to believe." Maybe they'll start hating the converts too as their circle shrinks.

Unrelated bonus blogging - recently watched two good movies, The Descent and Out of the Past. Descent was a good horror flick, with an all-female cast and some technically accurate rock-climbing (ignoring that the skill required is professional level, not something amateurs could do). Out of the Past was a great 1947 film noir with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas at the beginning of their careers. Also watched Oldboy - I've gotten used to violence in films over the years, but that was just too harrowing for me.

The Gingrich Effect

I've stolen the headline from Balloon Juice, and I hope the name sticks to this study: overall divorce rates for couples where one partner is very sick stays at an average level, but only because healthy women are much less likely to divorce a now-sick spouse while healthy men are much more likely to divorce their sick spouse. A healthy man is seven times more likely to divorce a sick spouse than a healthy woman is.

Some interesting comments at Balloon Juice. Someone points out that women often have financial reasons for staying in a marriage that men often don't. OTOH, that doesn't explain why women decrease their divorce rate - a seriously-sick husband is less of a financial advantage than a healthy one.

Other comments highlight how women are conditioned to be caretakers while men are disproportionately unable to handle being around someone sick (obviously, lots of generalizing here). I think it's interesting because it doesn't come close to eliminating the moral flaw, but suggests that women are challenged in an area where they are most prepared to overcome the betrayal temptation, while men are the least ready. Bottom line though: even if you're so ethically weak that you can't take care of your wife, that doesn't require a divorce.

No one raised the Medicaid issue: a divorce might not be a betrayal, but a way to protect the healthy spouse's assets while the sick spouse gets Medicaid assistance, and the relationship continues in an unmarried state following the "paper divorce". Not clear why this would create a gender differential, though. Maybe men have more assets from prior to the marriage that they can protect through divorce?

There may be some partial explanations, but men don't look too good in all this.

And there's always exceptions. A horrible spouse may be richly deserving of divorce papers and that might not change immediately after a cancer diagnosis. I doubt that describes Newt Gingrich's first wife, though.

Unrelated: just watched an old Coen brothers' film, Miller's Crossing. Very good, and very dark. This excellent, spoiler-filled review describes the conflict between ethics and love in the form of two fighting gangs and within the persona of the male lead. I completely disagree with the review as to which side won in the lead's mind.

And with that, I'm travelling for a bit, so there'll be little or no blogging until December.

The link between Sin City, Tropic Thunder, and Pineapple Express movies

All of them featured a lead actor in physical combat with a much smaller opponent. Does three make a trend? Anyway, I like the idea that the hero of the story isn't such a triumphant fighter that he always goes up against the odds.

Another welcome development I think I've noticed is more movies without a gratuitous sex scene. If it's an integral part of the movie, fine, but otherwise I'm glad the studios are dropping it.

All three movies were pretty good, by the way.

Review: Hard Candy is so much better than Juno

The girl whose over-praised acting got her an Oscar nomination for Juno did a much better job in an earlier, better, and very different movie - Hard Candy. Almost every review I've read included a spoiler from the first third of the movie (even the label on the Netflix DVD had a spoiler), so I'll avoid that by just saying it follows the consequences during one afternoon when a male photographer is inappropriately flirtatious with a teenage girl. If you like movies with a lot of moral ambiguity, even some remaining at the end, this is a good one. There's one stomach-churning scene, but the violence is implied and off-screen. You also have to suspend your disbelief about aspects of the girl's character, but not as much as in Juno.

I can't say too much more without giving away spoilers, so I'll just stop by recommending it.

Review: 1.5 original things to say about Slumdog Millionaire

Like everyone else, I really enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire. Good date movie, even a good family movie for older kids who can tolerate some violence. Like some critics, I think it should have ended ten minutes earlier before dealing with the final contest question, but it's okay anyway (and end credits were excellent).

So I hope I have something original to say about it. The half-original musing is thinking it might not be well-received in India when it opens there this month - the hero is a Muslim whose family suffered from violent Hindu attacks, and it doesn't show India's downtrodden as being well treated. Should be interesting to see that reaction.

More original, maybe, is thinking there's a resemblance between this story and the Ramayana. Maybe it's just due to the fact that there's only so many ways to tell the "boy loses girl" plot, but that both stories take place over many years and that the hero is assisted by his brother seems interesting.

Anyway, definitely worth watching.

Review: Team of Rivals is good, but not well-rounded

I wish I knew of a well-rounded biography of Lincoln that gave him all the praise that Goodwin does in Team of Rivals while holding back none of the criticisms for inevitable mistakes. The author is battling people I don't care about: trolls attempting to reanimate the reputation of the slave-owning Confederacy, and idiot historians who try to carve a reputation for themselves by chiseling a piece out of Lincoln's. I'd rather see some balance to Goodwin's constant praise for Lincoln, especially in his occasionally-cynical political maneuvering that was probably necessary to get to victory.

Still, the book gives a good feel for history in the Northern states from the early 1800s to the Civil War, through the biographies of the four main rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860. Lincoln's ability to work with all his rivals in his cabinet was amazing, but has limited relevancy: Obama and Lincoln are very different, despite the gift of rhetoric and intelligence they both share.

Salmon Chase presents an interesting figure forpondering over morality. He was the only rival in Lincoln's cabinet who never came around to admiring him. Consumed with ambition, he never stopped scheming to be president and died unhappy because he missed that goal. At the same time, he was the strongest, consistent opponent of slavery and supporter of black men's rights of all the candidates, with positions far ahead of Lincoln's. His morality and ambition were in direct conflict, something he never quite worked out, and didn't seem that likeable a figure in the end.

Other points: the one interesting-to-me argument Goodwin takes up is refuting the theory that Lincoln was gay (not that there's anything wrong with that). She effectively demonstrates that men from that period were much more emotionally and asexually intimate than us folks.

The book helped me think about whether Lincoln could've saved the South from punishing Northern retribution and eventual repression of black populations. I still think he would've failed, that there was no real compromise between Northern desire for revenge and white Southern determination to oppress blacks. Still, Lincoln might have taken a bit of the edge off from either side, and that could've brought the civil rights era a generation earlier than what did occur.

Finally, I was struck by how many of these strong men had become emotional wrecks in their early lives due to the deaths of people they loved, even in a historical period when sudden death wasn't unexpected. We're a strange species to have evolved to be so dysfunctional following events that are very likely to occur. I think it shows how important relationships are to our survival that dysfunctionality is a necessary side-effect to the evoluntionary drive to create those bonds.

UPDATE: Guess I'm not done commenting - Goodwin weighs in on Lincoln's spirituality. He was clearly a deist, at least. She's convinced he didn't believe in an afterlife - I'm not sure she proved that, but maybe I'm forgetting her evidence. If she's right, you probably couldn't call him a Christian, so I guess he'd be unelectable today.

Reviews: Arab Labor, and the Aubrey/Maturin novels

The Arab Labor show and Aubrey/Maturin novels have nothing to do with each other, but I really enjoyed both.

Arab Labor depicts a middle-class Israeli Palestinian, neurotically trying to conform to expectations in both Jewish and Arab worlds, and generally bungling it up. This review of the show describing it as the Palestinian Seinfeld gets it right. Link TV has the first show available on the web, and I hope the rest show up on Netflix at some point so I can see them.

The Aubrey/Maturin novels formed the basis of the Master and Commander movie that came out several years ago. The series takes the Horatio Hornblower, naval historical fiction to new levels both in nautical detail and in story-telling. The nautical detail I skip, mostly, but it still adds to the authentic feeling, and the story-telling's great. Great for time-wasting.

Review: The World Without Us

My very-informative reaction to The World Without Us: ehh. My apologies to Juniper Pearl if she's still coming around here, but I feel the same way about this book as I did with Malcolm Gladwell's Blink - a decent magazine article has been overstretched to book length.

I've always thought it would be kind of cool to watch nature reconquer our civilized spaces, and there's a fun animation showing this at the book's website, but after a while the fascination with the idea fades away. And the book uses that idea mostly to show how badly we've screwed up the planet, which I guess is okay but depressing.

The book isn't bad. The part about the Korean Demilitarized Zone was interesting, as well as the potential danger from microparticles of plastic to ocean life. I think he's got a bit of a Jared Diamond problem though of covering too many subject areas to be completely accurate, without Diamond's high ratio of interesting ideas that makes up for occasional errors.

Worth skimming, I think, but I can't tell people to rush out to get it.

Just enough Deadwood

I recently finished watching Deadwood’s third and last season on Netflix. Best television series I’ve seen, which is especially high praise considering that I often had to go to the Television Without Pity website afterwards to decipher the dialog I just heard.

It’s an extremely violent cowboy Western showing the founding of a new town, much of it written in Shakespearean style, complete with iambic pentameter. That alone is enough to make it interesting. The crowning point is that deals with the physical and moral sacrifices to find a home and develop “civilization,” with costs you weigh for yourself, for people you love, and for people who stand your way.

I had felt there was a serious flaw in the third season, but the finale fixed it in my opinion. I can’t write about the flaw without spoiling the finale, so I’ll just put something in the comments. Still, the first season was the best. I know the show was canceled only because of poor ratings, but I think that might be for the best.

Great story, great dialogue, great acting, and I’m glad it ended. Highly recommended.

(And now I just watched Battle Royale. This high-quality violent stuff is a little disturbing, especially when I seem to appreciate it.)