Despite all this though, I do keep hoping for more. Maybe season 3 will be even better. A few thoughts and feelings…

• The wardrobe – I know, I keep harping on this one, but I really wish they would bring back some of the fashion flair from the pilot, in particular with Magnus. The second season is at least more consistent, but I can’t help but feel like I’m watching yet another Hollywood remake of a comic book with a “modernized super-hero outfits.” And in some episodes it goes a little farther and Magnus almost looks frumpy. Kate and Tesla stand out as the exceptions to this as their character’s wardrobes really fit their characters well. The worst wardrobe of course still goes to Zimmerman who’s “I’m not Daniel Jackson” pretty-boy styling does not match his character in the slightest.
• Edginess – The second season does a lot better with this, there are some really dark almost Whedonesque moments which is where the show really shines. The show needs to keep going in this direction. The best episodes continue to be when Tesla and Druid are there because their flawed characters add a chaotic side to the show which it really needs. And in this season you finally get to see Druid act like Jack the Ripper, though shortly after that, they write it off as a “possession” from his teleporting.
• Politics – Politics are boring and aggravating and can drag even the best stories down. They were a constant thorn in Stargate’s side with all the “shut down the Stargate program” nonsense and they are showing their ugly face in the second season of Sanctuary with all the “let’s fire Magnus” crap. At least in the X-Files, the government *was* the bad guy so when the politics came in, there was a reason. It is nice that they focus on the Sanctuary being more of a network and not just Magnus’ little party, but the whole Big Bertha stuff really detracts from the show. Here’s to hoping they ditch that whole subplot for season 3.
• More! Man, I hate these stupid 13-episode series. Come on SciFi and give them their full 22 episode run.

frustration builds.

• OGG Sucks: Sorry Mozilla. I’m all for open standards and I love my Firefox, but damn, OGG is a piece of crap video format. I may as well go back to FLV with Sorenson Squeeze. The videos look like shit and they are 2-3 times as large, not to mention that there are next to no encoding tools for any OS other than Linux. Took me an hour to find one for Mac that didn’t require command line. Sorry Mozilla, I’m with Apple, Google and Microsoft on this one.
• Quicktime is really slick. As much as they totally lost the video wars, Quicktime is miles ahead of all the other video plugins, Flash included. It’s too bad it requires crappy javascript code and a proprietary plugin. If Apple had opensourced Quicktime a decade ago, Flash would never have made it past being a vector animation program. If the Windows world wouldn’t hate me, I’d just encode everything in Quicktime and say to hell with them. It’s got quality, fast load times, customizability, multiple versions, scalability and a fucking gajillion encoding options.
• FLASH should never have been allowed to do video. Flash is great as a web app development platform and vector animation tool. But it’s an evil bitch from hell for video. I will be so glad when IE puts in HTML5 support. I’d even encode all my videos in OGG format just to get away from having to sell my soul to Adobe to encode a video. Seriously, I am not paying $600 so I can write Flash video files that reference h.264 files. And I’m not paying some other company $100 a year to do it for me.

030310 Distortion