Summer TV: Let The Brain Rot Begin

It’s the summer season of telly and that means I’m trying to get to like things that I wouldn’t normally watch. For instance, I’m trying to come ‘round to a show called Castle.

(I know, I know. I should read a book. But sometimes I get home and I’m too tired to read. I just need something to wash over me that features pretty people doing interesting things. Like each other. I prefer to read when I can actually think.)

The lead actor is Nathan Fillion. I got to like him in a show called Firefly. If you like a bit of space-western and haven’t seen Firefly, give it a go. He was a likeable, charismatic, stubborn rogue and that’s exactly what you want in your space-cowboy. But he is particularly charmless in this crime show and I can’t work out why. It’s sort of like he’s run out of acting. Anyway, something cropped up when I was watching it the other night and it annoyed me. Because it’s Christmas, I thought I’d share.

A crime scene pathologist, or whatever she was, as she was describing what she was seeing on the corpse said, “Our vic died of a ess gee double-you.”

Now, I assume an SGW is a single gunshot wound. But why would you say SGW? The only reasons you use an acronym is to hide meaning or to save time and space. This acronym is not useful in either. She wants to communicate clearly to her audience and SGW has as many syllables as single gunshot wound. Not only that, it sounds awkward saying “a SGW”. I became sensitive to the use of W in spoken acronyms when I was little because I thought it was interesting that NSW was slower to say than New South Wales. Just one of those things.

Anyway, the take home message here is that I am getting distracted by things like that. Probably not a high recommendation for the show.

Maybe I’m wrong about SGW. Maybe it stands for Stargate Wollongong. There seems to be a Stargate series with every other address out there. Again an acronym I don’t get. They shorten the titles of these shows to SGA (Stargate Atlantis) SGU (Stargate Universe) but they spell Stargate as one word. But that won’t stop me from going back for the second part of the new Stargate (this one has the Universe address).

I’ve never watched a Stargate series - I didn’t find the movie compelling. Well, that’s the first reason. The second reason is the fans. There’s something about them that warns me off the show. The upside is that, if I’ve been wrong and the collections of SG TV series turn out to be the finest franchise ever to grace our increasingly large screens, I’ve got thousands of hours of the stuff to trawl through. Even though I’m tackling it out of order, I will be giving SGU a go. It had a nice premise and the right pompous characters died in the first hour.