• Sir Toppum Hat leads his merry band in their attack on the Mall, facing Jack's many ineffectual Home Alone-style traps. They cause some comical pratfalls, but don't actually slow them down or hurt any of them
• A bunch of (literally) clowns have just totally owned the mall rats.
• Hey, I wonder what became of all the actual weapons. Maybe New Zealand doesn't have any.
• Zandra, being the calm, rational sort, decides that it's all Tyson's fault for trying to cure Lex, and decides that instead of trying to stop the invasion, she'll just try to kill Tyson instead.
• Their best trap, dropping the gate to imprison Evil Boy George, nearly works, except that the gate gets stuck. Ryan just stands there watching in terror instead of, say, kicking the mad clown's brains in.
• Leah notes that the music during the fight, basically the only piece of incidental music in the show, is a terrible fit. I think it's the tribal chanting bit from the background vocals to the song "Return to Innocence". When that runs out, for no clear reason, they just switch to the instumental version of the theme music. Wait. Now they've introduced a new piece of music, an ass-kicking guitar version... of the same fucking song.
• Using the last remaining plot twist from Captain Power evil Boy George turns the tables by revealing that... Contrary to expectations, none of the clowns are actually hurt. At which point everyone gives up
• Top Hat's version of tormenting his slaves seems to jsut be shaking them a bit and acting crazy. Seriously, they would not have lost if they'd proved willing to actually try to hurt someone.
• Top Hat appears to be taking a shine to Zandra. Unfortunately, Top Hat shows affection the same way Lex Luthor does.
• KC saves Zandra from a fate worse than being married to Lex by tugging on Boy George a bit until he falls off of Zandra. Again, hit him in the head until he stops moving. Instead, he just annoys Boy George, who locks up the tribe and leaves them to die when he sets the mall on fire.
• At least the pile of junk Tophat sets on fire isn't made of cars. Those burn forever
• I've just figured out what the clown tribe's fighting style reminds me of. Grover Dill from A Christmas Story. The way neither he nor his toady ever actually did anything, just sort of snarled menacingly and pushed people a little. Soon as someone tried to actually hurt them instead of inciting playground terror, they totally folded.
• Note to kids: this only works on TV. Real bullies punch back. Real bullies are not cowards who cave when you stand up to them. Real bullies don't think the way normal people do: they don't comprehend that what they are doing is wrong, and will not comprehend that their actions have negative consequences.
• Lex Luthor manages to convince Ebony to help by... Getting old at her. Seriously. The prospect that he's been hanging around there infecting all of them with the virus makes Ebony get off her ass and come to save them all.
• Ebony makes creepy suggestions to the tune of wanting to kidnap Brady while the Locos toss the joint.
• After KLA ponies up the antidote, the others make a plan to recapture it from Ebony since they can't possibly risk losing it. I am still hoping it turns out that the lab they raided was working on viagra.
• Of course, they're recaptured after three seconds, so Amber threatens to destroy it, up until Ebony threatens to toss Bray off the balcony, which is as close to killing someone as anyone can do.
• Lex still doesn't want to take the antidote, of course, even though he's got a bad case of old, so Ebony forces it on her before buggering off with Bray and Lex in tow, Lex so they can see if he gets better, and Bray entirely to piss Amber off.
• If they had an antidote, why did everyone die? I mean, it hardly seems like, when everyone in the world is about to die, you'd really have much to lose by not just trying it.
• Also, if this turns out to be the antidote to a virus that has no cure, in a mutant strain that didn't exist at the time, I am going to spank them
• Ryan rescues their menagerie of pets from the broken-down lift using physical force. So far, violence has been the answer to everything
• Ebony forces Lex to take more antidote. He drinks it
  • Leah: Unfortunately...
  • Ross: (Professor Farnsworth voice) It's a suppository
• Zandra decides to sell all her designer clothes and jewelry for food and stuff, and start being responsible and grown-up. If I didn't dislike her so much, that'd be touching. Ryan, however, liked the vapid unpleasant Zandra.
• The password protecting the virus files is "please". Jackasses
• Just want to remind you, this password goes to files found on CDs found in a lab that was set to self destruct if you didn't give it the password.
• The virus has stopped making Lex old, it's just made him scrufty and covered in sores
• Ebony has a swimming pool. I don't know how New Zealand works, but if you left my parents' pool unattended for a year, it'd be green.
• Tyson announces that mirrors in the sleeping place is bad Feng Shuay, prompting me to give Leah a look over the fact that there are like four mirrors in our bedroom.
• The toy helicopter that Dal took some batteries for earlier. It's clearly a gas-powered helicopter
  • Leah: Maybe they needed the batteries for the remote.
  • Ross: Eight D-cell batteries?
  • Leah: They needed a lot of batteries to make up for not having any gas
• Ebony insists that she's changed, grown as a person. She explains this to Bray, who she is holding hostage. I guess she means that she's changed, say, her pants.
• It was polite of ConEvilCo to use full citations in the paper on the antidote to the virus that is as they were all dying of it
• An apparently passed-out Lex is attacked by a Loco who appears to be wearing a leftover stillsuit from Dune
• To help quench KC's love of gambling, they bet on whether the dog or the pig will find a hidden cracker first. The pig's skills lead it to the hidden treat on the couch first. Which is fine, because pigs are indeed good at tracking by scent. But... How did the pig climb up on the couch?
• Lex Luthor makes it back to the mall, where his is promptly blown up by their newest boobytrap.
• After Bray discovers that Lex has gone:
  • Ebony: What would you do? Hold him in your arms and nurse him tenderly until the end?
  • Bray: (pained) Yes!
• Of course, the surveillance footage they manage to get inside Locoland shows Ebony on top of a Bray whose anger at the situation is not visible on the film. So Amber instantly decides that he's decided he likes Ebony and has forgotten all about his tribe.
• Leah's leaving to visit her family over the weekend early Saturday morning, which has prompted us to consume this show with a sick obsessiveness, trying desperately to reach the season finale before she heads out. THis is kind of creepy.
• Nice of the evil scientists to thoroughly footnote their journal article on the antidote (Viruses don't have antidotes). This mentions something called "Eagle". Which prompts them to say "Eagle". Which, in Kiwi, is pronounced "Eggle". Since I had to read the wikipedia article on characters in this show in order to remember their names, I happen to know that at some point in the future, Amber is going to be called "Eagle". The thought of people calling her "Eggle" makes me smile.
• Meanwhile, of all the people in the world to get cured, Lex Luthor is starting to look less like he's wearing really unconvincing old-age makeup. Man, I and I was hoping he'd die.
• Meanwhile, "eggle" turns out to refer to a mountain. As usual, KLA works out something important, and everyone else's reaction is to assume he's crazy and making shit up.
• Ryan goes to apologize to Magenta for macking on Zandra, and asks if she's asleep. She says yes, and Ryan believes her.
• Lex Luthor's hair turns ungray. Which would be silly, except that it went gray overnight. So its silliness is all used up
• Ebony decides to go off and kill Amber as punishment for Bray not liking her. Won't Amber be surprised.
• Lex Luthor celebrates his recovery by reverting to being a total douchebag. Also, he draws a beard on himself.
• Tyson finds Lex recovered, and declares it to be the work of her spiritual visions. She also had a vision of an eagle and a mountain. KLA they ignore. Groovy New Age Spiritual Girl, they believe.
• Zandra again does her "I'd rather we all die of the virus than we do something Tyson wants to do."
• KC Tells Lex how Sir Toppum Hat tried to have his way with Zandra, and Lex Luthor gets all angry and wants to launch a suicide attack on the crazy-eyed psycho. Lex is an asshole when he's mad... And also all the rest of the time
• And, woohoo, Ryan and Magenta smoochies.
• And so the gang sets out for Eagle Mountain, prompting a montage of the season's exciting clips so far.
• Ebony is deposed by a coup led by a Loco whose voice has been replaced in post-processing by a much larger man. She's bravely defended by Bray.
• Trudy goes missing for about 30 seconds, then shows up again.
  • Ross: She's leaving a note for Bray.
  • Lex Luthor and Ryan run off to "scout ahead"
  • Ross: He's up to something
  • Leah: He's leaving a note for Bray too.
• The tribe's cart breaks down (!) in the territory of some crazies. Fortunately, at an opportune moment, Lex returns, on a motorcycle, Wearing Tophat's Top Hat
• Bray finds the mall abandoned, his car keys abandoned by Amber, and a note saying "Gone to Eagle Mountain". He gets all depressed, but Ebony has a plan. Leah: (Ebony voice) Let's go steal Tophat's motorcycle
• Leah would like me to reiterate that Lex looks really stupid with his makeup goatee
• When the tribe is stopped by extras from The Road Warrior, Ebony (!) save the day by showing up with on a bus.
• Typically, Amber refuses to let Bray explain about that little scene by the pool. Because Bray has always turned out to be duplicitous and selfish, and has time and again proven that he can't be trusted.
• Bray asks Ebony to explain that there's nothing going on between them. Ebony, of course, agrees, but would he mind putting his arm around her as she's cold. Bray, of course, forgets that Ebony wants to kill Amber and mutilate her corpse.
• But then, for some reason, Ebony actually does try to convince Amber that Bray won't have her. I can't tell if she's incredibly unconvincing on purpose, or because her actress isn't a very good actress.
• At Eagle Mountain, they immediately start wandering around pushing buttons, because the last time they went to a place run by this evil corporation, it blew up. Jack turns on the lights to reveal -- I think it may be a TARDIS.
• When Ebony outs Lex for dumping the antidote, Bray takes the fall. Because Lex and Bray have always been such good friends.
• Eagle mountain turns out to be a satellite tracking station, which fails to find its satellite, which they all find intensely disappointing, and a sure sign that they are all going to die. I'd be disappointed too, since it failed to find the satellite while showing footage that was shot from a satellite
• Lex Luthor does Bray a sold by telling Amber what a dumbass she's being for thinking Bray likes Ebony. They kiss and make up
• And then the satellite shows up, visible to the naked eye in broad daylight. This prompts a recorded voice to make booming pronouncements about how the tribe here is the last hope for mankind, and it's vitally important that they do exactly what it says, which is to....

• Ryan does not comprehend that he has bought himself a a whore. This is because Ryan is a moron. Fortunately, Magenta's pimp is a femmy guy who a stiff breeze could kick the ass of. Violence has been the answer to everything in this show.
• Ryan has never heard of bulimia and worries that it's contagious. He explains that he's run away from the tribe because he's sick of Lex Luthor treating him like he's stupid. Ryan, if you don't want to be treated like you're stupid, you'd do best to forsake the company of man. I understand that in New Zealand, there are quite a lot of sheep. Some, but not all, of them are dumber than you are.
• That said, it looks like Ryan and Magenta are about to fall in love over his watching that she doesn't throw up.
• Amber decides to forsake responsibility and run off with Sasha Baron Cohen as he walks the earth being a free spirit. Wonder how long this will last.
• Meanwhile, Magenta and Ryan have got themselves a pet pig, which they name "Porky", because in New Zealand, trademark laws work differently.
• In a consistent show of the writers not paying attention to the passage of time, Bray's trial is now days ago, despite it only being about half an hour since the proceedings were interrupted by Glenn showing up.
• Lex decides to kill a hen for a special honeymoon dinner. As I recall, though, the whole reason they went to visit the farm girls is that they didn't want to kill the chickens.
• Amber comes back to tell everyone that she's decided to be carefree and irresponsible and run off. But she can't leave without being passive agressive about how they've let the place go to pot in the three days she'd been gone. Amber, the high horse doesn't work like that.
• Lex Luthor offers a piece of chicken to the little girls. Who are distraught about the disappearance of their favorite hen. Because Lex is a douche.
• Everyone decides to forgive Magenta when she comes out of the closet about her bulimia, but they're all little bitches to Amber for wanting to leave. Except for Sasha who is a total dick to everyone for daring to think that you should take responsibility for others
• Five minutes after they leave the mall forever, Amber decides to go back. Ten minutes after that, she has some misty watercolored flashbacks about how much she misses him.
• For Patsy's birthday, they hold a party and play Incidental Music From The Tribe on the boom box. It is the only CD they have left.
• Amber, deciding that she must stay at the mall and can't shirk her responsibility in favor of love, has wandered off to angst over Sasha and shirk her responsibilities
• Patsy has an episode over the fact that she's one year closer to the age of certain death. Which reminds me that we don't know much about this virus. We know that it spread "too fast" for any adults to have survived (Bad survival trait for a virus), it doesn't infect children. We're not told what the age of consent is for viral relations -- the oldest anyone seems to be is about 16. Since half of them are past puberty, it's not puberty (I could believe that it was indeed puberty and the virus burned itself out a year or so ago -- about the time Trudy was getting herself impregnated by Zoot. Bad Zoot. Naughty Zoot.). The virus is still around (at least, they think it is) and is probably airborn. In short, virus of plot convenience, which does not behave like real-world viruses would.
• Magenta's off the wagon the instant everyone starts fighting again.
• Kiwi Love Actually sees an adult man on the security camera footage, but everyone thinks he's crazy, and can't determine anything from the grainy, staticky, black and white video other than that it was probably a person, and had gray hair. On a black and white video.
• Zandra is of course jealous that Ryan is happy for once. Because she is, let's face it, the least sympathetic character in the series
• Lex Luthor's plan to get Bray kicked out by hiding water bottles in his room works instantly. As always. It takes 0 seconds for everyone to turn on Bray.
• Lex immediately tells his wife about his evil plot, meanwhile Ryan and Kiwi Love Actually already know that it's a setup. Kiwi Love Actually convinces Ryan to grow a pair and confront Lex, whose response is to pimp his wife out. Magnificent Bastard.
• Magenta, of course, walks in on Ryan with Zandra draped over him. Before running off to binge and purge, she asks Ryan if he needs any help. Did she just suggest a threesome?
• • Leah: (About the mystery adult) Or maybe it's a mutant
  • Ross: Because it's after the apocalypse. They have those.
• The "Adult" is a kid in old-age makeup. I am not yet sure whether this is his schtick or just the craziest casting decision ever
• Ryan predictably folds, and Lex just threatens KLA into not speaking up. See? Violence is the answer to Everything
• So, Lex Luthor's plan is to get rid og Bray, then of Amber. He also plans to kill Jack, and I think he means to get rid of Magenta too. Does Lex want to be the ruler of a tribe consisting of his wife and a bunch of ten year olds? Really?
• No Grown-ups for thirty-nine episodes and now two all at once.
• I believe Bray calls Lex Luthor a "Filthy lying piece of dart."
• And the weakest link is... Bray. He decides to run away. That'll show them.
• But when KLA decides to give Lex up, KC jumps on the grenade, which will of course, prompt Lex Luthor to try to contrive a reason why Bray should have been exiled byt KC shouldn't
• Which becomes a moot point when the Old Dude shows up, and turns out to be Lex Luthor's old buddy Glenn, who we had previously seen back in episode 1 being thrown to the dogs, then durign the tribal gathering kicking Lex's everloving ass. So, new fact about the virus: it makes you look like you're wearing unconvincing old age makeup. It also gives you facial hair.
• Speaking of which... Eveyrone's clean-shaven. I get that they're all kids, but I started drowing stubble at 12.
• Lex Luthor does the first responsible thing he's ever done, and voluntarily goes into isolation since he's been exposed to the virus. Maybe this will finally mark him not being a douchebag just for its own sake.... Nah.
• By the way, Patsy's also quarantined, for exposure to Glenn. Who she found when she went out to look for him because she alone believed Jack, out of her desperate need for there to be an adult still around, as it means there's hope for not getting the virus. So if there's one thing the writers do get, it's irony.
• They have used the word "idea" four times in two minutes. Being Kiwis, they pronounce it "idear". It is the single most grating thing about their accent.
• In a show that they have more solidarity than brains, the tribe decides to take turns grabbing Patsy, the idea being that they'd rather all be infected together
• So they're gonna have a go at curing the virus. Yes. Really
• The threat of the virus scares off the Locos, worsened by KC misquoting Dirty Harry. "Do you feel lucky?"
• KLA discovers from a medical CD that viruses can mutate. "Just like computer viruses." I think I am going to cry.
• Tyson is upset that no one's listening to her and everyone is trying to find a cure using science and stuff instead of by meditation and spirituality.
• Everyone loves the pig more than the dog. The dog will now get depressed and run away.
• Zandra promises Glenn that she'll run away with him if he gets better. Unfortunately, he starts getting better. Now Zandra is hoping he kicks, because boy would that be awkward.
• Good news, everyone...
• KC's words on returning: "Who died?" Ah, Lex's protogee.
• So, the virus has something to do with an anti-aging experiment... Holy crap, this isn't our Earth, it's the parallel earth from the Star Trek episode "Miri".
• The gang goes to "Hope Island", where Evil Inc. set up their virus creation lab. The fence is not electrified, but they have a frakking minefield in front of the gate.
• Lex Luthor checks if the fence is electrified by touching it with a dry stick. WOOD DOES NOT CONDUCT ELECTRICITY AND COMPUTER VIRUSES DO NOT MUTATE
• Tyson sneezes. twice. This means she's got the virus. Where's your buddha now, bitch?
• Upon entering the lab of evil, they start deciding that random test tubes might be the antidote for the virus (VIRUSES DO NOT HAVE ANTIDOTES AND COMPUTER VIRUSES DO NOT MUTATE). Won't they be surprised when it turns out they want the next lab on the left, and Bray has just found the cure for male pattern baldness. Had viagra been invented yet in 1999?
• So Bray and Amber, having come all the way to Hope Island to penetrate the evil lab, immediately leave Dal, Lex Luthor, and the dog to find the cure while they have a long, meaningful walk on the beach.
• Oh, and if you enter the wrong password to the lab computer, the lab kills you. Let me get this straight. The governent of New Zealand contracted out to a company apparently run by Doctor No to make them an anti-aging serum, and when it turned out to be an uber-palgue, they decided to go out of their way to ensure that if everyone got wiped out, the cure to the plague would be protected by automated defense systems to murder all intruders? Maybe Ryan will turn out to be the president's son.
• Lex Luthor, showing the most sense he's ever shown, points out that this can't possibly be an inescapable death trap, since there's a countdown, and it doesn't make any sense to have a countdown if there's no way out.
• The batteries KC swipes to use to pay for his gambling habit, the batteries which must logically have been depleted and recharged, are still in the original plastic wrap.
• While trapped in the lab, Lex is forced to reveal to Bray that he can't read. Lex has now told 2/3 of the tribe that he's illiterate, but they're not to tell anyone.
• Desperate, they decide to short out the breaker box, by touching the two conveniently pre-bared wires.
• As the timer hits zero, they manage to open the door and escape. Leah remembered that there's three more security doors. The writers didn't.
• The explosion of Hope Island uses a leftover explosion sequence from Captain Power
• They reckon that the random vial they found is the cure, so they try to make Tyson take it. She refuses on religious grounds, even though they're pretty sure it's the cure. Despite not having found any sort of notes or explanation, or any files or documentation, or a label saying "this is the cure", or a sign saying "This is a lab where we work on the cure," or even whether the cure is meant to be administered orally, intravenously or, say, as a suppository.
• Jack is still crippled from having his ankle fractured during Lex Luthor's bachelor party. I have no idea how time passes in this show, so he's either been on crutches for two days or four years by now.
• Lex, by the way, has the virus. And he's not going to risk taking the antidote, despite wanting to force Tyson to take it.
• Bray tells Amber that he's into her, and then, I believe, picks fleas off of her.
• KC gambles away the pig at the convenient underground casino, so Cloey decides that poker is a sucker's game, and insists that they win back the money playing a game which actually has some strategy -- roulette.
• The prospect of his impending death makes Lex Luthor act all noble and patch things up with Ryan, open his soul to Zandra, and generally seems like a nice guy. Either he's really dying, or this is a convoluted scheme of some sort.
• Tyson cures herself using karma, meditation, and honesty, and offers to help Lex Luthor do the same, provided he can be pure of heart and soul. So Lex is basically fucked.
• So, when Lex decides to remake himself as less of a dick, Zandra decided to put her foot down and not support him, because it was Tyson's idea. Better to die of the virus than to cure yourself using a technique endorsed by the girl who slept with before you got married.
• KLA freaks out when Lex Luthor is nice to them but doesn't want them to keep trying to decrypt the evil computer from the lab, and shouts "Is this the 21st century or the dark ages?" Actually, it looks like the 80s.
• As part of Lex Luthor's purification process, he burns his clothes, but promptly finds a new short with PVC strips across the nipples. Are these common in New Zealand?
• Lex's apologies are probably going to take the next ten or eleven episodes
• So, it's kinda touching and all, with Lex Luthor confessing all the crimes that everyone already knew he'd committed, but I think telling his wife that he married her just for the sex was probably an unsound move.
• Since KC has been gone for days now, it occurs to Ryan that this could be a problem, as the gamblers might force him to tell them where his tribe is holed up so they can rob them. Meanwhile, KC is being beaten by the gangsters to find out where the tribe is holed up so they can rob them.
• Amber and Bray have been doing nothing but each other for days, and this is the first they've heard of it. So, when Amber's happy, she neglects her leadership duty. When she's sad, she neglects her leadership duty. Why was it that Amber decided to stick around again? Oh. Right. Duty.
• The Gambling den is run by a gang called "Tribe Clowns", run by an escaped Boy George impersonator and sometime Bat-Villain called "Top Hat", who apparently makes the Locos look sane.
• He gives KC a villain speech about how much he loves burning things, and how he will set anything on fire. So that's who keeps setting the cars on fire!
• Those people who had "Episode 45" in the office pool for "How long before Trudy decides to become a jealous little bitch again, you may collect.
• Lex Luthor decides to forge an alliance with Ebony to save the Mall Rats from Boy George and his Legion of Clowns. Yes. Lex Luthor, their resident villain, wants an alliance with Ebony, the big bad, to save our heroes from the Giant Space Flea From Nowhere.

There's just 7 more episodes this season, so I assume they're building up to something. Hopefully, we'll get to see it before Leah makes me stop watching for the weekend...

This Is What the Class War Looks Like (via)

This is his argument? This is his argument? "I didn't need the money, I didn't want the money. I did it JUST TO HURT THE POOR BECAUSE I CAN MUAH HA HA."

I have a vague theoretical notion that there was a time when you could be a conservative on the basis of sound economic and social principals, and not because you were a cartoon supervillain.

Purely theorhetical.

• Magenta is resorting to increasingly desperate means to fuel her puking addiction.
• Amber likes Sasha, which is hard to believe, because Sasha is singularly unlikable.
• The new wind turbine charges some batteries, so they immediately decide to put on the Soundtrack from The Tribe and hold a rave.
• Remember how Amber liked Sasha? This has resulted in the first instance of Bray turning into a jealous little bitch all season
• In search of supplies for the wedding, the men all decide to trade with a group of roughneck lesbians on a farm, led by the fat coarse one, who becomes the first woman in the series Lex Luthor actively dreads sleeping with. She's accompanied by the really butch one and, close as I can tell, Freema Agyeman.
• I hope they shout "Kill the pig / Spill its blood." when they butcher the pig they bought. Which I suspect won't happen, because Ryan nearly offers his body to Lex in gratitude when he sees it.
• Meanwhile, Zandra reveals a diamond necklace which Magenta will later steal to trade for binging supplies.
  • Trudy: Are those real diamonds
  • Zandra: (words to the effect of "yes")
  • Leah:Really? They don't look real.
  • Ross:Neither did the handcuffs.
• Lex Luthor throws in his favorite CD in exchange for some hard cider, which the leader of the farm girls says will "Put hair on his chest." I assume she is speaking from experience. Also, I believe this marks the first time that it's been the characters and not the audience that has needed to drink to get through the episode.
• Sasha and Amber have at least a snog before he leaves, but she's looking kind of post-coital in the next episode.
• Tyson appears to wear her underwear on the outside of her pants.
• Zandra appears to use the term "on the grog" to refer to Lex Luthor's drunkenness (which it appears, has been a problem in the past). Is this a real Kiwi term, or some sort of Way Cool Totally Radical post-apocalypse term?
• Unfortunately for Magenta (but possibly fortunate for Zandra), Zandra's diamonds are indeed fake, and Magenta can't trade them for a fix of that sweet, sweet beefaroni.
• They've pulled the Name That Tune trick so often that I can't tell if the music at the wedding is the incidental music, or if they're using the soundtrack as her processional.
• So Lex Luthor and Zandra are now married. The vows he needs Ryan to write for him because he's illiterate turn out to be better than Zandra's "And I vow the same," bullshit. Seriously, what's her excuse?
• Much of the next episode is devoted to Lex and Zandra, two patently dislikable people, and their pillow talk.
• Increasing the creepiness of this nightlong marathon, Leah and I simultanteously made the "Spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam" joke when Zandra suggests "Beans and beans, beans and eggs, eggs and beans, or eggs and eggs," for breakfast.
• After a night of sex, and a morning of sex, Lex gets out of bed still wearing pants, and I believe Zandra is now less naked than when she got married.
• Sasha reminds Leah of her ex. I have never felt more secure in my masculinity,
• As of Episode 33, Magenta's scavenging for a binge, Kiwi Kid From Love Actually has a broken ankle, Bray is being a little bitch, Ryan has decided to run away from home and has taken up with Beavis and Butthead, KC is hung over, and Amber has gone off to frolic in the park with Sasha. Yes. Frolic.
• Apparently, there is a thriving economy supporting bulimics in the future, as Magenta appears to have an actual dealer who will trade her for food. When Magenta has nothing to trade, the dealer appears to be willing to set her up for a life of whoring out her body in exchange for binge food.
• Amber goes for a walk on the beach wearing a sports bra and sarong, which I believe makes her less clothed than Zandra right now.
• I realize that infants aren't meant to be great actors, but the foley of the baby cooing is overlaid on footage of a baby who clearly is not making any sort of noise.
• Lex and KC bond over their mutual illiteracy. Getting laid regularly has made Lex Luthor a much nicer person.
• KC has decided for some reason to murder Kiwi Love Actually Kid. I kinda think that KC had a thing for Jack, and now that he's got Dal back, he's all kinds of jealous
• Ryan happens upon Magenta's drug dealer (who is now helping her get over her bulimia), who takes him in and is very nice to him, offering him sex with this redheaded chyk they've added to their lucrative cottage brothel industry

• Dalek gets himself locked up by the evil crazy nomads, and still can't quite get that they're evil
• Meanwhile, Magenta finally starts to feel guilty about leaving Trudy to die.
• The all-consuming plot-arc for this set of episodes is an impending meeting of all the tribes, wherein a bunch of tribes which are mostly psychopaths will all hang out together and make peace. This can't possibly go wrong.
• Zandra makes Lex Luthor "dump" Tyson, which, of course, surprises her, as she didn't actually think they were going out.
• In this week's "Remembering Zoot", Bray flashes back to Himself crying out in anguish over his brother's death.
• The head of the evil nomads is outright offended by the supposition that he's a cannibal, and says, as if he's doing the explanation scene at the end of an episode of Three's Company where they explain that the crazy scheming everyone's been doing all episode has been predicated on someone having mis-over-heard a conversation, that they're not cannibals: they're slave traders.
• Big market for slaves? I guess.
• The cars. Are still. On fire.
• Bray goes to meet with Ebony, who convinces him that the impending intertribal meeting is on the level, by explaining, in better diction than most adults, that times are tough, and she'd rather rebuild civilization than be the lord of the flies. Bray instantly believes her, since he is, as previously established, a moron.
• Bray returns and is chewed out for meeting with Ebony, Zandra points out that he always runs off without telling anyone to do his own thing, ignoring all the consequences for the others. Zandra does not point out that nothing he's done has had any negative consequences.
• At the meeting, there will be a dance-off. Yes. Really.
• When Amber goes to see Tyson about the dancing and the trouble she's caused what with the sleeping with Lex Luthor, Tyson is practicing her dance moves to a cassette. Of the incidental music from The Tribe.
• Lex Luthor gives Zandra a ring he made from bits of an alternator, and she goes all gooey and agrees to move in with him but not have sex. Given that it is after the apocalypse, this seems like a raw deal.
• Part of Zandra's plan here is that she will "test" Lex. He passes if he can live with her while not getting sex. Given Lex's track record, I gather that failure on this test would take the form of raping Zandra. Zandra has not thought this plan all the way through.
• Zandra also, offhandedly, announces that she'll marry Ryan if Lex fails to not have sex with her. Now, I know I've mentioned that these people are stupid. But Ryan has told Zandra at point-blank range that he is in love with her. They are really making me feel sympathy for this girl.
• Bray tries to sell windmill technology at the intertribal meeting, because Kiwi Kid From Love Actually hasn't told him that the damned thing doesn't work. (Probably because Lex Luthor nicked a bit of the alternator to make a ring. He offers it up by saying "Unlimited. Free. Power. We have the technology."
  • Leah and Ross: We can rebuild him
• The major sticking point of the meeting seems to be that everyone is perfectly happy with their slavery-based economy, which operates on the basis of whipping kids while they pedal on stationary bikes hooked to cassette players. Dystopia, right, so everyone's got 80s boom boxes.
• In other news, Magenta appears to be Bulimic. Which seems outright rude when it's the post-apocalypse and food is scarce.
• Poor Ryan. Someone just let him know that the ten thousand dollars he's been hoarding is missing.
• Lex Luthor, who had been convinced that the meeting was a bad idea, seems to be determined to make this be true. First, he gets jumped by the guy he sold out way back in episode 1, then the bit he stole from the alternator means that the tribe is sure to get ripped into tiny little pieces by the big kids.
• Just noticed. The power walk in the end credits, which shows the characters sort of playing on the beach -- Zoot's in it. Which means that it's not, strictly speaking, in continuity, like the power walk at the end of Buckaroo Banzai
• Leah posits an alternate possibility: Maybe in the season finale, they discover Cylon ressurection. All this has happened before.
• "The Locos pride themselves on their breakdancing."
• Have I mentioned lately that I am sick and tired of the "I'm so sure I'm going to win that I will cheat." The Locos win the danceoff by threatening to murder the Emcee. Which means that Amber loses her side-bet and is now a slave. Meanwhile, Zandra tries to return the missing copper wire, drops it down a hole in the ground, and this gives the Locos time to smash the turbine as punishment for daring to try to make life a bit less terrible.
• But as it turns out, violence is the answer to this one. Lex Luthor starts a fight and everyone escapes.
• Trudy thinks Magenta's having morning sickness as she's carrying Bray's child. This is the same mistake Leah made because, come on. Bulimia?
• The handcuffs restraining Dal are quite clearly made of plastic
• KC takes about 5 minutes longer getting back from the escape, so they assume he's dead.
  • Dal: Who's KC?
  • Leah and Ross: Your replacement
• Magenta (whose name, by the way, is actually "Saline", I think) finally tells Trudy about how she'd left her to die when she'd poisoned herself. This will undoubtedly make Trudy have some kind of weird angry episode. But I just want to point out: At the time this happened, Trudy wanted to die, and Magenta is the only one who even came close to respecting her wishes.
• Sasha Baron Cohen, the newest Mallrat, is a wandering jester who followed Dal home because they were chained to each other. He's trying to compose the theme song from The Tribe
• Sasha sends the kids off to get "hair combs". Are there some other kind of combs in New Zealand?
• Speaking of Sasha playing the theme song... I wonder if the intro will encode the co-ordinates for real earth
• Lex Luthor turns out to be illiterate. This is supposed to explain some of his actions

• Trudy ended the previous episode by popping enough sleeping pills to escape this episode, showing her textbook lack of concern for her baby. So far, this show has given me a total lack of sympathy for a rape victim, and a total lack of sympathy for a suicidal teenage mother.
• Speaking of lack of sympathy, Magenta finds the baby crying with Trudy unconscious in a puddle of pills, and decides that it would be best to not tell anyone, and just wander off with the baby making wistful statements about how much better a mother she'd be. Lex Luthor, as we have previously established, falls into a coma after sex, so it takes him about halfway through the episode to show up and find out about that.
• And the moment Bray announces that he's going to go out in search of supplies, Celine decides that he's going to go off and make wild passionate love to Ebony. Because Bray exudes some sort of weird psycho-jealous-bitch pheromones.
• Amber gets mad at Bray, because he "led Trudy on." He denies it, but Amber shames him by pointing out the way he kept asserting that he would take care of her in her time of crisis and protect her and her baby, with all his "finding her a place to live" antics and his "getting food and supplies" antics, and his "keep the Locos from murdering all of us" antics. The asshole.
• I just noticed. Zandra's ass is enormous.
• Is "Zandra" a real Kiwi name, or is iit one of those post-apocalypse made up names, like "Zoot" (Zoot's real name was Martin)?
• When Bray returns with supplies, Amber makes some hurtful quip to the tune of how she's surprised he came back. Every time Bray leaves, they're surprised he comes back. After the apocalypse, the survivors will lose the ability to learn from the past.
• Speaking of which, I had realized some time ago that Amber is played by the same actress as played the Sixth Ranger's disappeared girlfriend on Power Rangers a couple of seasons ago. I just realized that the dude who plays Bray is that sixth ranger.
• Sleeping with Tyson makes Lex decide to be less of a jerk to Zandra. Now, Lex and Tyson are the only two members of the tribe to have actually done it, and yet seeing Lex talking to Tyson does not send Zandra into a jealous rage. This is because Zandra is incredibly stupid.
• Since Paul the deaf kid's disappearance seems to be permanent, he's replaced by the young theif KC who wanders in and burgles the place. He's voted in against the objections of the Kiwi version of the kid from Love Actually, who he gives a look that indicates that he wants to bed him.
• Meanwhile, Dalek and Trudy run away and join up with a happy friendly tribe who have "We are an insane suicide cult of the sort the ATF tends to light on fire," writ on them so large that it could be seen from space.
• Incidentally, Dalek tells Trudy an old family saying, "When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade," in a way that indicates that the saying is not a well-known platitude in New Zealand. I guess the 0th season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 never made it over there.
• The crazy cultists are very nice to Dalek and Trudy, aside from occasionally telling her that she'd make a good mother, but they get all creepy and evasive when asked how they stay clear of the Locos. So when Trudy decides to become maternal, and splits to go reclaim her baby, the crazy people freak out, and have to restrain themselves lest Dalek cotton on to the fact that they've got horrible horrible plans for him. Fortunately for them, he's really unimaginably stupid.
• Trudy and Dalek mention that they were living in "Sector 10" of the city. Do New Zealand cities break down into numbered sectors like in dystopian science fiction, or did the writers just forget how the setting works?
• When Amber bitches out Trudy upon her return, she says, "You went out with my mate and came back without him. We had the same plans, him and me." Now, as I mentioned, Amber's accent is way less Kiwi than the others, but this line was really meant to be said in an over-the-top Dick-van-Dyke-in-Mary-Poppins Cockney.
• Very cutely, Tyson reassures Zandra that she wasn't having a relationship with Lex Luthor, she just slept with him a few times. I think this same scene happened in an episode of Night Court with Bull and Dan.

• I'm sorry. What? "This is a new civilization and we get to make all new rules." Okay. I can deal. But for some reason they've decided that the right response to Lex Luthor trying to rape Zandra is for Zandra to propose to him. And he accepts. This makes it all better. I suppose I can't quite get around the idea of a kids' show whose raison d'etre isn't to teach kids important lessons about how to
• Even after the apocalypse, Zandra and Lex Luthor have to wait until they're fake-married by Hsu Tai (Whose real name is Tai San, so I will switch to calling her "Tyson", as I am less likely to misspell it). What is this, a Stephanie Meyer novel? (Seriously, in The Host, Melanie has to wait six months to sleep with the love of her life, because she's not 18, and therefore it would be wrong. After the entire human race has been subjugated by aliens.) But as this is The Tribe and not an edgy Young Adult novel, Zandra remains the second least sympathetic character in the series.
• Ebony, Zoot's evil second, crashes the wedding and gets captured. Then, in a re-enactment of an episode of Angel, she nearly convinces everyone to let her out by threatening their masculinity. Showing the sort of sound tactical judgment that he has become known for, Lex Luthor unlocks her cage to spar with her. Showing the fidelity for which his financee loves him, he instead beds her. Now, it's a rule of this show that if a man enters the presence of a woman other than the one who's lusting after him, she immediately assumes that he's cheating with this interloper. Witness Trudy about Bray and Magenta, Trudy about Bray and Amber, Trudy about -- well, actually, we've expended our supply of age-appropriate women. But also Zandra about Lex and Ebony. But at least she's right this time.
• Lex Luthor, apparently, rolls over and goes to sleep after sex, because Ebony escapes. Ebony has this mascara stripe around her eyes which makes her look like in New Zealand, there aren't any racist implications to comparing someone to a racoon.
• Trudy doesn't care about the defense of the Mall from the impending Loco attack, because she saw Magenta snogging Bray earlier, which is much worse.
  • Leah: I thought you said that she was the only one acting like a real teenager
  • Me: (whispered) As it turns out, I'm old, and hate real teenagers
• Upon hearing that Bray was seriously macking on Magenta, Amber instantly becomes a bitch to her too.
• The afforementioned macking happened just after Bray and Magenta had a conversation about how, with the city darkened by apocalypse, you can see the stars, and then some wistfullness about civilization rising again.
  • Me: New Zealanders were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. And they have a plan
  • Leah: [Bray and Magenta snog] All this has happened before. It will happen again
• Lex Luthor's excuse for getting locked in the cage while Ebony escapes is that she pretended to be sick and he went in to check on her. Aside from Lex being a terrible liar, if he'd just told the truth except for the bit about doing Ebony, everyone totally woulda bought it. "Hey guys, she told me I sucked, so I went in to rough her up. Turns out I suck, and she kicked my ass." I suspect that Lex being an awful liar is going to be a recurring theme.
• No one's seen Paul the Diferently Abled One in a few episodes. It would be totally awesome if we just never see him again and never get any explanation.
• Bray, fulfilling his one character trait, does a runner. He persuades Ebony to, instead of launching a counter-attack, to start her own religion.
• It has only just occurred to me that Lex Luthor's only outfit is a pullover and rainbow suspenders. He's like a post-apocalyptic Robin Williams.
• Trudy misplaces her baby, by virtue of somehow having overlooked the fact that she was still in the last place she'd left her. Trudy truly is the mother of the year here.
• Tyson, whose idea it was for Zandra to marry Lex Luthor, has decided to throw herself at him, because her complex Granola Girl spirituality is complex and confusing.
• In Kiwi, it appears that you use the indicative in many contexts where we USAnians would use the gerund. Trudy accuses Magenta of "kidnap", Tyson finds that Lex Luthor has made a "punch bag". It's creepy and weird.

• Ryan (Lex Luthor's flunkie) sharps the little kids at poker, finally finding his intellectual equals in people under the age of eight.
• Cornered by the Demon Dogs, who apparently are a tribe similarly evil to the Locos, Lex Luther and Dalek decide to split up. The Demon Dogs are entirely befuddled by this, and their leader just stands there looking back and forth. No wonder they mistook the Sattelite of Love for a dog bone.
• Magenta seems like she's got her eye on making off with the still-unnamed baby. Trudy, after being thoroughly unpleasant at all times except when she was delerious with fever, turns out to be a crazy, manipulative bitch.
• Dalek, who after a touching moment a few episodes back, decided not to take a picture of his dead family, stopped while running from the demon dogs to get a baseball mitt.
• For the love of God. Zoot appeared in like 10 scenes, and 8 of them were just the same shot of him looking menacing from the back of his police car, but they keep flashing back to him. He's had more screentime since he died than he ever did when he was alive.
• The new leader of the Locos is some chyk who it is implied would not like it if she found out that Zoot had fathered a child by some other girl. Episode 9 ends with her looking menacingly at the camera through the flames of, I believe, Zoot's funeral pyre, which, of course, is still burning. I think maybe they've decided that in the fictional world of this show, fires, once lit, will remain burning indefinitely, as, it seems, it was only the adults who enforced the idea that fuel is depleted as it burns.
• In episode 10, Bray talks Amber into running against Lex for leadership in an election, which Amber decides to throw, in order to teach Lex an important life lesson. In the post-apocalypse
• Meanwhile, Bray laments over his dead psychopath brother. Oh, dead psychopath brother, how sad it is that we can not be a family, you and me and your girlfriend and daughter, we could give up your lifelong orgy of destruction and just settle down somewhere pastoral.
• And, of course, everyone votes for Lex Luthor, because he threatens them. They elect the guy whose whole schtick is that he's evil. They elect Doctor Insano President.
• Amber throws the race because she thinks it's important that Lex believe he won fairly. Of course, since Lex thinks he won by coercion, I don't know if that counts.
• Also, Lex doesn't find it odd that he won with 99% of the vote. Who voted for Amber? Bray, obviously, and Amber if she's got any sense, because, let's face it, if no one voted for her, it would look rigged. So who's the third?
• Trudy cycles between accusing Bray of having a thing for The Girl Who Looks Like Magenta, accusing Bray of having a thing for Amber, and insisting that she loves Bray. She's emotionally inconsistent, sort of nutty, and a moody, angst-ridden manipulative bitch. In other words, she acts more like a 14 year old girl than any one else in the cast.
• Which reminds me. Episode 10. A 14 year old girl has given birth, a gang of kids has committed murder, and Lex Luthor has kinda sorta killed a man. There is no way this show could ever be aired in the US.
• Now that Kiwi Haley Joel Osmet (You know, not really. You know who he is? He's the Kiwi version of the kid who found the Doctor's watch in "Human Nature". Y'know, the little kid in Love Actually whose dead mom was married to Liam Neesen and who had the crush on the little girl that sang that number in that play.)
• The choices of times for the heartwarming music to kick in are a little surprising, like when Lex apologizes to Ryan for knocking him down in training. I guess this is to indicate that Lex is like a father figure for the tribe. A drunken, abusive father figure prone to fits of violence
• Lex Luthor: "The trick to leadership is to never be predictable." Oh my God! George W Bush learned his leadership skills from Kiwi Television
• Magenta makes bread. They eat it from bowls with spoons. Does bread mean something different in New Zealand?
• Lex Luthor finds that despite his tough-guy act, he can't murder Cloey's pet cow. So he lets it go, then claims he was jumped by one of the crazy tribes. And insists that the last he saw, the cow was being brutally killed and sodomized. He says this to Cloey, and, as far as I can tell, he says it for no reason other than to be a dick.
• Trudy is in full-on Fatal Attraction mode. Again, still acting the most like an actual teenage girl of any of them.
• Lex Luthor leads the search party for Cloey, and he intentionally leads them in a stupid direction so that his leadership is consistent with his story: instead of taking them in the direction the cow would have gone, he takes them in the direction of the tribe he claimed took the cow. Which means he's knowingly leading them on a wild goose chase just to be evil. Lex Luthor doesn't think his evil through very far, does he?
• And yet, the Locos have indeed gone into the woods, where Cloey and the cow have gone, rather than into the city where Lex Luthor is leading the rescue party. Jean-Paul Sartre has joined the writing staff.
• At the end of episoode 15, Cloey is rescued by a new girl, a sort of weird zen hippie chyk whose name I have forgotten, but who I will call "Hsu Tai" after the Chinese girl on The Tomorrow People. She speaks entirely in platitudes, which leads me to believe that after the apocalypse, she holed up in a fortune cookie factory for six months.
• Hsu Tai eplains that she was destined to come hang out with the tribe in order to reaffirm their bonds by giving them a name, and, Lex Luthor being the one who gets to make this decision, they go with "Mallrats", implying that only the works of Kevin Smith will survive the apocalypse. I think I liked them not having a name better.
• Trudy decides at the last minute to join in their femmy little ritual of solidarity where they choose their name, thus indicating that she's decided to stop being a crazy bitch and actually contribute something to their new little civilization. Then she walks in on Bray making out with Magenta. Wonder how long this "Not crazy" phase will last.
• And to celebrate Cloey's safe return and their new name, they do what The Matrix Reloaded tells us must always happen when a post-apocalyptic civilization decides to celebrate: they hold a rave. Remember: post-apocalyptic priorities: Ridiculous makeup, check. Hair dye, check. Extasy, check. Rave music, check.

While I've been writing this, Battlestar Galactica ended its run. Four years after the apocalypse and not a single person wearing silly Beyond Thunderdome makeup. They came so close.

Lex Luthor's sidekick notices that someone's nicked their stockpile of cash, and he freaks out and lays traps to catch the culprit, which proves that this guy is a fucking moron.

Somewhere between episodes seven and eight, they reveal that Zoot Suit Clockwork Orange is the father of Trudy's still unnamed baby, which Bray reveals by bringing the craziest motherfraker in the city to their secret hiding spot, whereupon the guy who runs the craziest most ass-kicking gang in the city promptly trips over Lex Luthor's shoe and falls to his death. Amber still has yet to say anything that sounds like natural dialogue for a person under the age of twenty-seven, but I've noticed that she sounds more American than anyone in the last four seasons of Power Rangers, and I'm including Jason David Frank. (She even says "Idear" instead of "Idea" the way that an American does when he's pretending to have a British accent). Also, Amber has now said "poor little thing" about someone for about the one thousandth time. Everyone dresses up even more ridiculously than normal to hold a funeral for someone they don't actually like to begin with, and they mention that "The graveyards are all full", which means that as 99% of the population was dying of the virus, they at least had the consideration to bury themselves..

Also, I've determined that this show has something like 400 episodes, so from now on, I'm going to condense about five episodes per post.

Zoot is given a viking style burial with a funeral pyre on the beach. For this they need a boat, petrol and everything on the beach that burns. Bray also reveals that he knows Zoot's real name, and it becomes clear to me fully 20 minutes before it does to everyone else that they were, in fact, brothers back before the apocalyse. Everyone wears silver eye makeup for the funeral and looks like extras from a Styx video. Amber lets her hair down and looks like Daryl Hannah in Clan of the Cave Bear, if you couldn't afford the real Daryl Hannah and got, say, Lori Singer instead.

And in case we had any doubt that Zoot really is dead, they did the one thing that in the land of television guarantees that you can never turn out to have mysteriously survived what looked like certain death: they give him a "Yes, he's really dead" montage, showing all the touching clips from Zoot's tenure on the show. That is, they show the same clip of him shouting "POWER AND CHAOS!" that is part of the title sequence, and a scene from earlier in this very episode. Let's face it, Zoot was not really a character, which is why I didn't even mention his name until the previous post.

The Girl Who Looks like Magenta From The Rocky Horror Picture Show is much happier now that she knows Bray is unentangled, and, for that matter, now that Lex Luthor is officially a murderer, or, at least, a minor obstacle whose simple physical presence caused the death of what passes for a master villain in this show, Zandra stops fawning over Sidekick Boy and all but dry-humps Lex Luthor on the spot.

Cloey catches Bray talking to Zoot. If that nonsense made any sense to you, you've watched more of this show than I have. Zoot, as it turns out, is the Alex-From-A-Clockwork-Orange guy who runs the Locos, who I am totally sure is gonna turn out to be Trudy's Baby-Daddy.

Kiwi HJO, who has been hoarding a secret stockpile of food, gets all bitchy when redhead dye job girl asks to use some of his water ration to bathe the baby, who is now old enough to stink.

Cloey agrees to keep Bray's dirty little secret friendship with this season's big bad in exchange for guaranteeing the safety of her pet cow.

It turns out that Shortround's name is "Dal", not "Dell". Not that either of these is, so far as I know, an actual name, but we get to see it written down when he raids his late father's medical office.

Oh, and the cars are STILL FUCKING BURNING.

In which Bray runs off to find stuff suitable for infants, Trudy runs a fever, and the cars are still on fire.

Notably, though there is no visible gap between episodes 1 and 2, dialogue in episodes 3 and 4 claims that they've been living together for "a few days". Episode 5 is set just hours after Trudy delivers, but everyone has had time to redo their ridiculous makeup (Everyone except Lex and His Big Dumb Sidekick have revised their looks).

I finally work out that Amber's sidekick Shortround is named Dell. It confused me for a moment since the first time I notice it, they're looking at a laptop. This is a very 1999 vision of the future, so they're trying to use it by ooking up medical information on a shareware CD-ROM. Fortunately, this future isn't a 2008 future, where all that sort of crap would have been superceded by the internet. Back in 1999, we hadn't even worked out a consistent capitalization of "internet" (Seriously. I read a novel around then which insisted on talking about the "InterNet". Since it was a very 1996 vision of the future, it talked about how the "InterNet" had been replaced by the "Global Information Superhighway", a system under tight government control which connected, I think, all traffic control systems to hospital power supplies to toasters. So that an evil alien computer virus could go all SkyNet on us.)

Dell gets sent off on a suicide mission to find antibiotics, raising hopes that he won't survive. Meanwhile, the little kids gorge themselves on Kiwi Haley Joel Osmet's secret cache of candy and get sick, causing people to momentarily think they have the virus.

Which means that kids in general, and the survivors in specific don't have any particular kind of immunity to the virus, which means that there's absolutely no rhyme or reason to why there even are survivors, or, more likely, the kids don't understand how viruses work, or, most likely of all, the writers don't.

This episode's best line:

Zandra: Can't you just imagine me in lingerie?

In which Trudy has a baby, Cloey walks her pet cow, Lex looks menacing, and hot water is essential.

Seriously, does anyone know what you use the hot water for during a childbirth? Also, Red-Blue-haired-girl, who Wikipedia tells me is named Zandra, talks Lex into giving her some parcetemol in exchange for the promise of no sex, proving that Lex Luthor is an idiot. Immediately after delivering the baby which everyone thinks is his daughter, Bray does a runner, and instantly, everyone assumes that he's abandoned his girl and child and they begin plotting revenge. I think it's safe to assume that he'll be back in an hour or so.

The cars are still on fire, and, I swear to god, Cloey frolics with a cow until the Locos come and she runs away. She's sneaking off with food for her pet cow. At some point, this cow is going to become delicious.

As a change from my recent hell-bent pursuit of recapturing my own youth, I decided to take a stab at recapturing someone else's.

For the past few years, much of our fine American entertainment has been outsourced to New Zealand. Yes, Australia's Canada has provided its lush landscapes, moderate climate, and non-SAG actors to such US-targeted productions as Farscape, Xena:Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journies, Power Rangers, and Lord of the Rings. But did you know that New Zealanders also make their own television programs, featuring local non-SAG actors who don't have to pretend they have American accents? Why, they even have their own culture and lifestyles which you or I might find strange and incomprehensible. Unless, of course, you are yourself a New Zealander, in which case, you probably find my Saturday Morning Cartoon-esque Mighty Whitey approach to your culture kind of insulting, unless, of course, you've got a good sense of humor. I suspect New Zealanders have a good sense of humor, because they call themselves "Kiwis", after a kind of delicious fruit with the mouthfeel of a cat's tongue and a kind of flightless waterfowl. Flightless waterfowl is the most ridiculous thing known to nature, so I have to assume that Kiwis have a pretty good sense of humor.

Anyway, one of these shows which I keep hearing about all the time (Except by "all the time", I mean "two or three times," which is a lot by the standards of New Zealand Television, as the list of all shows I have ever heard about on New Zealand television consists of: this show) is called "The Tribe". It's a show from the early part of this century with shades of Lost, Lord of the Flies, and... Um... Well, I haven't watched that much yet, and I was planning to rattle off a long list with something silly at the end, but the truth is, it's basically just every "The whole world is a post-apocalyptic hellhole" show you've ever watched.

The story is this: A plague has killed all the adults, and it has therefore gone all Lord of the Flies in New Zealand with kids forming little miscreant tribes and the more sociopathic kids preying on the less sociopathic ones and so forth.

I'm one episode in, so I haven't really made much sense of it all yet, but given that the plot is Post-Apocalypse+Parental Abandonment+Photogenic Youngsters+Angsty Science Fiction, it's basically like this show was made by taking the eigenvector of my taste in television. All it's missing is giant robots (Though I gather a reasonable percentage of the cast went on to be Power Rangers).

Now, remember, this is television aimed at kids. And it's produced by a country whose primary export, unlike the US, is not entertainment, and if British television and Japanese television and Canadian television is any indication, the rest of the world believes that spending actual money on the production of television is a shameful extravagance. And it is to some extent a soap opera (So I've been told. It's kinda hard to tell the difference between a soap opera and a character-driven story with substantial plot arcs, though. Especially since sci fi fandoms are dominated by high-functioning crazy people who call anything with any kind of character development "soap", insist it's for girls, who are gross and slimy and have cooties, and why doesn't anyone like me when I am so clearly a superior intellect in every way? And hey, give me back my lunch money!), so I'm guessing that it's going to be a little rough.

Which is why you're coming with me. Here are my observations on episode 1...

• This is the 80sest vision of the future since Max Headroom. Only when Max Headroom was on, it was the 80s. This show is ca 2001
• In the event of apocalypse, I wonder how long it would take me before my priorities shifted to include giving myself a weird Beyond Thunderdome makeup job.
• In every street scene, there has been a car on fire. Exactly how long after the apocalypse do cars stay burning?
• In this dystopian future, food and gum are valuable commodities. Weird 80s-style punk rock hair dye and makeup are apparently not in short supply.
• It has not yet been made clear how long after the apocalypse this show is set. It can't be long, since a bunch of unattended prepubescent children are still alive on their own just sort of wandering around, and none of the people who were young enough to survive the plague have grown up yet. But it's long enough that food is no longer readily available, and all the good stuff has been looted. I'm fairly sure that if production stopped dead tomorrow, it'd take a heck of a long time for the surviving population, which appears to be something in the neighborhood of 50, to loot everything.
• The bad guys, the "Locos" are a tribe that drives around in a police car, led by a kid who appears to be playing sort sort of Nazi version of Alex from A Clockwork Orange. It this is the near future, and he's, let's say, 16, it's kinda inconceivable that he'd have seen A Clockwork Orange.
• The good guys, whose names I have not managed to learn yet, consist of a couple of random groups of kids who have all happened upon each other, and then stumbled upon a kid who's fortified a mall. They've also captured this small gang consisting of two reasonable people (aside from the makeup and dye jobs. Seriously, in a desperate struggle for survival, everyone has time to keep up their dye jobs?) and their unreasonable boss who pisses off the Locos for no clear reason other than that he's a punk. I suspect they will become the loveable-but-untrustworthy-antiheroic foils to the rest of the tribe.
• There's two other folks who started out somewhere pleasant, then ventured out into the wasteland for unclear reasons. They haven't interacted with anyone else yet.
• Seriously, this show has the look and feel of something that was made by PBS, except that it's not educational. And is instead making me feel dumber. I keep expecting Video Toaster special effects (Which I am learning to identify on sight, by the way. That's kinda cool.) I'm vaguely reminded of an old show set on a post-apocalyptic earth about the Dewey Decimal system. It was called "Tomes and Talismans", which I mention here because from time to time I forget the title and have a hell of a time finding anything on the internet that reminds me of it.
• The credits list this show as having a Story by ... Based on an Original Idea by... I assume the "Original Idea By" guy is the guy who wrote "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome"
• At least this show has an excuse for the post-apocalypse looking like the outback.

Episode 2 hooks up the other two with the tribe, along with the revelation, unless I overlooked it in the previous episode, that Trudy, that's the girl of the other two, is about thirty seconds away from childbirth, which, I guess, can give us a ballpark figure for how long it's been since civilization collapsed.

• In Episode 2, Clockwork Orange Guy holds a book burning. Just to prove that the Locos are evil. Because only evil people burn books.
• As predicted, the Gang-of-Three has been allowed into the Tribe. Bad Dye Job Girl seems to be on the frindge of being a good person, whereas their evil leader Lex Luthor is a dick, and let two of their gangmembers get captured by the Locos. I can't seriously believe the idea that the Locos actually murdered the fallen gang members, being, fundamentally, a bunch of unruly children (After all, if they were that kind of crazy, they'd be doing something more evil than burning books. Like burning babies or something. So I'll assume that they instead lost half their GP and were sent back to the last save point.
• Lex Luthor really is kinda stupid. His whole argument seems to be "Let us out of this cage, or we'll hurt you when we get out of this cage which we can only ever do if you let us out!"
• New guy, the one with the pregnant girlfriend Trudy, gains their trust in about three seconds, then steals their food, then comes back with his pregnant girlfriend, and a bunch more food. Did I miss a step in his logic here?
• Trudy is bothered when the girl who Wikipedia tells me is named Amber doesn't use her name when she asks about letting them stay. Trudy is nine months pregnant and the world is kind of a shithole. I think she could be a bit more gracious.
• Also, Trudy's hair is half black and half blue. Even pregnant and on the run, she can keep up her dye job in this post apocalypse.
• The cars are still on fire. Are Kiwi cars all made of thermite? (Fun fact: Once you start thermite burning, there is no way to make it stop until all the thermite has been consumed)

Episode 3 centers around the debate as to whether or not to let Trudy and her boyfriend Bray join the tribe. Lex Luthor is against it for reasons which entirely make sense but which don't count because it's obvious that he sees Bray as a threat to his becoming the alpha male, while Amber is for it because she quite clearly wants Bray to tell her about this earth-thing he calls "Heavy Petting", until the final scene where she does a face-heel-turn and decides to kick them out. Also, Lex Luthor forces unwanted smoochies on the two-tone-hair-girl from his own gang (Her hair is half red and half blue, so that we can keep her separate from Trudy. She also looks a bit like a girl I went to college, enough that I kept glancing up at the screen and saying "Hey, what do I know her from?") in order to cement our belief that he's a total douche.

• Cloey, the weirdly shell-shocked little girl who led Amber and whoever it was she started out with, let's call him Shortround, to the rest of the children, spends this episode dangerously wandering off unattended to follow a cow into Loco territory. Someday, TV writers may realize that viewers can only stand so much of cute childlike characters who unthinkingly lead everyone into danger, like the kids who go playing in the zombie-filled wastelands in zombie movies, or the kids who sneak off to get a good look at the ghost and get captured, or Gilligan.
• Bray and Trudy get voted off the island. It's Lost, it's Survivor, it's Mad Max, it's all this and more!
• The frakking cars are still on fire. The Locos apparently all stick together and patrol the city in an orderly fashion, so who the frak is tending all these fires until they get there?
• Every time someone refers to Bray as the father of Trudy's baby, Bray and Trudy look away. It's obviously supposed to be a big surprise when we find out he's not, so don't spoil it for anyone.
• It's not possible in TV for pregnancy to lead to anything but a sudden screaming birth at the worst moment possible, so you bet your sweet ass that Lex Luthor doesn't even have time to extinguish her torch after voting her off the island that Trudy goes into labor
• Fun fact: In New Zealand, Macaroni and Cheese comes in a can.

Me: Hey, look who the guest star is in this episode!

Leah: He looks familiar. Who is he?

Me: Imagine him doing the Truffle Shuffle.

Leah: The Truffle Shuffle?

Me: He's the fat kid from The Goonies

Leah: I thought that was--

Me: No, you're thinking of the fat kid from --

Both: Stand by me

(That waiter? Jean Luc!)

That guy who threw a shoe at former president Bush has been sentenced to three years in jail.

How is it that we've managed to turn the cradle of civilization into America's running gag?

There is the best line from the article:

Zaidi became a folk hero of sorts in the Arab world after hurling both shoes at Bush, with considerable speed and accuracy, during a news conference Dec. 14. Bush, a nimble athlete with great reflexes, successfully ducked

There's also this:

Zaidi's siblings were angrier, as the crowd and police pushed and shoved each other. "Maliki is ready to give his wife to Bush just to keep him happy," one sister said.

• There's been quite a bit in the news about the holocaust-denying bishop. Lots of folks think it's uncool that His Holiness un-ex-communicated (recommunicated?) him, because, well, he's a fracking holocaust denier. Comparatively few people have pointed out the church's position on this: "Saying the Holocaust didn't happen is untrue. But that doesn't make it heresy." C'mon. If you could be excommunicated for being a jackass, Augustine of Hippo would never have made Sainthood.
• Another thing hardly anyone is mentioning is that this bishop wasn't excommunicated for being a Holocaust denier. He was excommunicated for the more or less totally unrelated matter of the fact that he'd been appointed bishop by a breakaway archbishop who didn't have the authority to appoint bishops. The whole sect got excommunicated en masse for breaking away from the Church.
• Speaking of news, I'm told that newspapers are failing. Everyone is up in arms and trying to find a way to save them. Most of these proposals are following the example of the music industry and the movie industry: if new media is hurting the sales of your old media, try to force new media to suck. There was a fellow on The Daily Show whose proposal was "Work out a way to stop people from getting news on-line for free." Has anyone actually sat down and answered the question: So what if newspapers fail? I mean, really, aside from the fact that they've existed for as long as anyone can remember, is there any actual value to newspapers in the world we live in? Obviously, it sucks that newspapermen will be out of work, but, well, no one's bitching about all the lay-offs in the cuneiform industry, and no one's looking out for the old fashioned manual typsetters' union. I mean, really. It's not like dead tree format is somehow an inherently better way to receive news. In fact, it's worse. The day Mr. Obama won the election, this news appeared on the front page of (almost) every newspaper in the country. The day Mr. Obama took office, this news appeared on the front page of (almost) every newspaper in the country. There was two, maybe three articles worth of news in these events, but there were hundreds of articles published and millions of trees deadened to deliver this piece of information. Which is fine, I think that the election of President Obama is awfully newsworthy. But there is only a finite amount of dead tree. So every article about the Obama election pushed out one article about something else. A newspaper must by its very nature deliver only those stories which are of the broadest interest, and it can cover only a very few of them in any sort of depth. Back in 1997, when I was about 2 or 3 weeks in college, two newsworthy events happened at nearly the same time. But there's only so much news you can cover if you're constrained to filling the corpse of a tree, so the death of a popular British noblewoman pretty much stole the news cycle from the death of one of the greatest humanitarians of our time. When I was young, my dad got the Evening Sun, which was the penultimate of what had once been, I think, five editions opf the newspaper that came out in a single day. But in the late 1980s, well before the rise of the internet, the Evening Sun was found surplus to requirement, and the paper was only published once a day. Which means that you get one set of articles in the space of 24 hours, each of which takes time to write, and has to be brought to your house via a car or truck from its place of publication. Which means that you are never going to read anything in your daily paper that is less than 12 hours old, often more like 24-48 hours old. Newspapers aren't searchable. They don't include cross-reference hyperlinks. If I'm interested in the content of an article, I can't ask the newspaper to show me more about this subject. Look, folks. It's not that my generation is a bunch of attention-deficit, myspace-loving, twitter-pated know-nothings. It's that, and I can not stress this enough, Newspapers are simply not a very good way to transport news to people compared to the internet. If he coulda, Ben Franklin totally would have been writing Pennsylvania-gazette.typepad.org
• Of course, you can't wrap fish in a blog, but that's not much of a reason to keep newspapers around
• Speaking of new media, folks are up in arms as usual about kids using things like myspace and facebook and all that, because these are SCARY NEW MEDIA and not wholesome ways of social interaction like banding together to go outside and play improvised sports games using sticks and strings, egg cars, walk down railroad tracks and through leech-infested swamps to find a dead body, evade the Fratellis while searching for the lost treasure of One-Eyed Willy, bond with members of other social cliques during detention, torment classmates on suspicion of homosexuality, or all those other wholesome social interactions they misremember from when they were children. Again, has anyone ever actually checked to see whether there's any kind of measurable detrimental effect of this? That it's really unhealthy for kids to make friends based on mutual interests and shared goals, values, and the like, rather than on an accident of geography? Also, shouldn't it be good that kids spend more time reading and writing? 3ven 1f they r writing 2 a bff4eva lol?
• Speaking of children and wholesome social interaction, I've hit that age where my friends are starting to become parents, and therefore by proxy, I'm learning how much childraising has changed since I was myself a child and got raised. We often stop and pause to note all these "ridiculous" safety precautions everyone's expected to take all the time and how cherished childhood institutions like "Stick your baby in a small cage and leave it alone for a few hours while you do something else," "Let your child play with things that produce heat, have sharp corners, or break into tiny swallowable parts", and walker frames have all gone the way of the dodo. Invariably, someone recalsl that we had all those fun dangerous things, and nothing bad happened (This effect is even more prominent when dealing with people of my parents' generation who were, I believe, as children, this is at the age of like 3 and under, if I understand, play alone in the woods, with guns and knives, wearing clothing which was made of -- I think there had been a study done proving it was healthy -- gasoline-soaked asbestos and chewing tobacco, all the while drinking straight whiskey (it helps with teething).). We keep forgetting that when we were kids (and, more especially, when our parents were kids), every once in a while, a young child would die or be horribly disfigured, and that was totally okay. I mean, it was sad, sure, but, hey, sometimes babies just drop dead for no reason. Seriously. This was common enough that both of my parents had siblings who died in infancy.
• Speaking of disapprovable safety, however, I had to drive Leah's car just a short distance a couple of weeks ago. Her car has something like six hundred airbags. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on how many accidents were caused by airbags -- the added bulk of their storage causes all the trim on her car to stick out about three inches farther than it needs to. She's got blind spots you could park a Buick in, because those airbags are obstructing the view.
• Incidentally, Leah and I live together now. We are still working on integrating our separate gigantic stockpiles of possessions. Leah is much more comfortable stacking things up into tall, unsteady piles than I am. Whenever she does this, I hear John Cleese reminding me, and I can not stress this enough, that there are still many things which have not been put on top of other things.
• Immediately prior to her moving in, I bought a new boiler, as mine was busted. Because googling did not easily get me to an answer for this until much tryign and hand-vetting of answers, here is a google-friendly summary of an issue you may encounter if you are ever in this situation:
  I have STEAM HEAT. At the END OF CYCLE I get a LOUD WATER HAMMER or STEAM HAMMER sound from NEAR THE BOILER. I wanted to know HOW TO STOP STEAM HAMMER SOUND NEAR BOILER AT END OF CYCLE. It turned out that if the WATER LEVEL in the boiler is low enough that AT THE END OF CYCLE when as much of the water has turned to steam as is going to, the level of LIQUID water in the system can drop to a point where even though the LOW WATER CUTOFF hasn't tripped, the water level is below the NIPPLE IN THE HARTFORD LOOP. Which basically means that the opening where the WET RETURN system (which is a pipe that hangs off of the main steam pipe so that the returning water doesn't have to push past the steam to get back into the boiler) comes into the boileris above the water. If that happens, the returning STEAM can get into the HARTFORD LOOP. The whole system is connected because this is a single pipe system, but there's a loop that is physically closer to the ground, where the water will accumulate, following the force of gravity, while the steam, which is lighter, will stay in the the top loop. The Hartford Loop is a looping section between the two which exists to equalize the pressure between the side of the system that is full of steam going out to your radiators and water coming back from them. If steam is forced into the bottom loop, it will bang around in there causing a LOUD WATER HAMMER SOUND which occurs right at the END of the cycle. HTH. HAND.
• Also, I just love to say "NIPPLE IN THE HARTFORD LOOP":
• I also had the living room painted red and the bedroom painted green. I am red-green colorblind and this gets me out of ever being allowed to make important decorating decisions. The dining room is battleship gray, because we neglected to tell Leah's uncle that he didn't need to prime it when we hired him to do the painting.
• I got the place recarpeted as well. (We are now into the range of about $10k I have spent in the past three months on this place). When carpeting, there's a tool you use to pull the carpet taught to the wall. It's got a heavy end with hooks that goes against the carpet and a padded end you strike with your knee repeatedly as hard as you can. I wonder if "Carpeter's Knee" is the common name for some sort of chronic knee injury.
• Yesterday, I got to stay home from work on account of snow. Specifically, on account of the three-inch accumulating, all-day, school and business-closing snowstorm. In March.
• New theory: Starbuck's dad is Daniel The Cylon Everyone Thought Was Dead
• Eleventh Hour: Based on a british show which ran 4 episodes and wasn't very good in spite of starring Patrick Stewart, this American show is pretty good and is the only TV show I have ever seen which got that being a genius is not the same thing as being autistic. But halfway through the season, the writers seem to have said to themselves: "Y'know what this show needs? A comedy relief black guy." So they added one.
• Knight Rider ditched half its cast and reformatted to make it more like its predecessor. They also removed their first-half-of-the-season trope of having at least one girl in a skimpy bikini in every episode. Which was The only good thing about the show. The voice of KARR was provided by Peter Cullen, who did the original KARR, and also the voice of Optimus Prime. The body of KARR appears to have been also played by Optimus Prime. But we only see KARR for about 3 seconds, and it's filmed just like the incomprehensible fast-moving jittery scenes from Transformers, plus it's night so I can't really tell. On the plus side, the past few episodes have featured a cute kid, a corrupt hick cop, and a pair of humorous mentally-handicapped car theives, so they really are getting closer to the style of the original. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it was only by the standards of the early 80s that the original Knight Rider failed to suck.
• 'Frack' has entirely replaced 'Fuck' in my normal usage except when I am in physical pain. Now, middle school kids, don't frack this up for us by using it so much that they promote it to be a real cuss word.
• I also have started using the phrase "Surplus to Requirements" a lot
• Rush Limbaugh 2001-2008: "Democrats hate america because they won't support the president just because they disapprove of his policies, and if they really loved america, they'd want Bush to succeed". Rush Limbaugh 2009: "I want Obama to fail. I hope america goes into the toilet because then we will win."
• Speaking of Republicans, I'm not really a pinko, but every time I hear a republican scream "They're trying to turn America SOCIALIST!", I think, "Yeah, and that would suck because laissez-faire capitalism has worked so well for us recently."