bad guys

(S10E16) After a week of hellish home buying, Bad Guys was a welcome episode of SG-1. I didn't take the plot very seriously - and neither did the entire cast. Most of the performances were a bit over the top - from the hysterical screaming woman to the hero wannabe security guard. Despite being completely unrelated to the current story line, the writers did make some effort to tie things in.

(S01E06) I've never been a big fan of gritty crime drama, which is why "The Fifth Quarter" has never been my favorite short story of Stephen King's. It's a very bare bones tale of a man whose friend is killed over a buried stash of millions of dollars and his subsequent quest to retrieve four pieces of a map, each belonging to a different "bad guy." It's not really typically "King" and even he acknowledgers in the Notes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes that the story is more like something that would have come from Richard Bachman (his occasional nom de plume) or even Richard Stark, the malevolent writer from his novel The Dark Half.

Of course, I can't really blame King for wanting to try something a little different once in awhile, but in a lot of ways the story works much better in a visual medium. The problem is, one hour isn't enough for a story that is this involved. Screenwriter Alan Sharp fleshes the story out by giving the protagonist (Jeremy Sisto) a wife and kid, and everyone in this episode plays their parts well, trying to convey a lot of backstory in a short time so we can get to the blood and guns. If anything, the episode suffers from trying to cram way too much drama into a short amount of time. I think this would have worked much better as a feature film, following Wilie (Sisto) as he hunts down the men who killed his friend and begins to piece together the map that will lead he and his family to a better life. That could still happen, I suppose, it's not like they haven't done multiple adaptations of King's work before.

Dog the Bounty Hunter, which I like to think of as the Cops I don't feel guilty about watching, will return to A&E for a third season starting in February. While I never make plans to watch the show, every time I come across it whilst channel surfing I have to stop and check it out. I typically don't care for reality programming, but Dog himself seems to hearken back to the days of Mr. T and Hulk Hogan when tough-looking rogues punched out bad guys while reminding kids to stay away from drugs, respect their mothers, and drink plenty of milk. If Norman Rockwell were alive and today and tuned into how the human race stumbles through the 21st century, he would totally paint this show.