Last week, for the first time in years, I found myself home sick from work. I’ve had a few minor colds over the last few years, but I mostly dodged them with little more than sniffles. Not this cold. On Monday, it waylaid me a few minutes after I got back from skiing when a terrible shiver ran through my body, and didn’t leave until the weekend.
My normal go-to movies when I’m sick are The Back to the Future trilogy and The Matrix trilogy (yes, all three movies; I watch them for the shiny) but I’d recently re-watched both so I found myself scavenging Netflix for alternatives.
I came up with two. The first was the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, which I watched curled up on the couch with my yellow lab Indiana warming my feet and a mug of ginger ale to soothe my throat. I was in the mood for some good ol’fashioned space battles, and Battlestar fit the bill. The series holds up well; watching it today it’s easy to see the aftershocks of 9/11. The shell shock from the apocalypse is a big aspect of that, but so are smaller things like the Wall of the Dead. The relentless negativity of later seasons, including the dour, downtrodden world of New Caprica, hasn’t appeared yet. Instead there’s despair tempered by hope for distant Earth.
I wasn’t thrilled with how the series ended; I thought they missed a lot of cool opportunities to explore the “War with God” hinted at with the Lords of Kobol and the Cylon’s One God, I enjoyed returning to the beginning of the series.
The second series I watched was the BBC’s Sherlock, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Star Trek Into Darkness) as Holmes, and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) as his assistant Watson. It’s set in the modern day, but its inspired by the original Sherlock Holmes stories. It’s an unusual series, in that each season consists of three super-sized 90 episodes. There have been two seasons, giving us a total of 6 episodes, which seems like it’s not much until you find yourself sick, sitting on the couch and happily drinking in hours of Sherlock-inspired mystery. A third season is planned, but unfortunately the Sherlock stars went and got famous, so filming Season 3 has proven to be a challenge.