No Waffling

Amid the tangle of signs, roads, and stores in Gaffney, South Carolina a vision comes into view...

  This past Thursday I took a trip to South Carolina with Kathy to visit her dad, Walt. Walt is retiring from the college where he had worked for the past 25 years and he was being thrown a big retirement party. There were a number of reason I didn’t want to take this trip. The first reason is I hate flying. The second reason is that taking two days off work is taking two days’ pay off the table since I became a paid consultant in February and don’t get the benefits of sick days or vacation time. The third reason is that we have to board Daisy and Baxter and I don’t especially like to leave my favorite beagles in anyone’s care but mine.

  The main reason I shouldn’t have gone didn’t become apparent until the trip itself. An old friend of Walt’s was also going to South Carolina and had arranged to take the same plane with us and was going to stay in the same hotel with us and we were going to take her with us. The friend was very nice but was also handicapped which meant that she had to ride in the passenger seat of the car where ever we went while Kathy drove. This left me in the back seat with our son Matt and his wife. After being in a cramped airplane and then being on numerous cramped car rides and watching a football game on bleacher seats my back and legs were super sore from being twisted and cramped for hours on end. I know that this is a first world problem but it was my first world problem so I decided to give it the name of DPS for Distressed Passenger Syndrome and since I couldn’t find any references to it I have applied for a trademark and hopefully will be able to market an entire line of DPS™ merchandise in the future.

  Aside from my bout of DPS™, there were plenty of good points to the vacation. I got to hang out with Walt, sister-in-law Megan, brother-in-law Shawn and his family. I got a tour of the college, plenty of meals, and a great seat to the football game between the Limestone Saints and Catawba Indians. And this is before the highlight of my trip which was to eat at my favorite restaurant, the Waffle House for the first time in over a year!

Here is my father-in-law Walt with the brand new Chevy Malibu from his retirement dinner.
The portrait was done a few years back and will stay at the college forever.

  Thursday was full of travel. Up at 3:30, drive to Cedar Rapids by 6, arriving at Charlotte by 11:30, and then taking a van to Gaffney, South Carolina where we arrived at Walt’s house. Megan had a huge lunch spread waiting for us. We ate and then headed to the Hampton Inn where we were staying. There was time for a quick nap and then it was time to put on a suit for the first time in years and head to the retirement dinner. The dinner was at a real upscale facility with an open bar and servers bringing appetizers around. We mingled and then sat down for the dinner where Walt was lauded for his 25 years of stellar service to the college. He was presented with the Order of the Palmetto which is the highest civilian honor awarded by the state of South Carolina and a new Chevy Malibu among other gifts. By the time the dinner was over and we got back to the hotel it was after midnight east coast time which was 20 hours after I had woken up the day before in Marshalltown, Iowa.

  Over 20 years of waking up at 4am to walk beagles have rendered me incapable of sleeping late so I woke up on Friday at 5am east coast time. I worked for a half hour and played chess on the internet for a half hour. And then I played for another half hour. And another half hour. I just kept on playing until it was 9am and it was too late to go to the Waffle House because Kathy was up and Walt’s friend was knocking at the door to eat at the hotel’s free breakfast room. After that Kathy took Walt’s friend shopping for a half hour and I played more internet chess. Then we spend the day eating lunch (at the Olive Garden), having a tour of the campus on a golf cart, and then driving almost two and a half hours round trip back to Charlotte to visit Kathy’s brother and his family.

From the humble Waffle House kitchen comes the most amazing food!

  All the driving and riding on a golf cart aggravated my of DPS™ but the ride back was better because there were only two people in the back seat on the drive back. We once again got home near midnight and I once again woke up around 5am east coast time and I once again worked for a half hour but instead of succumbing to my internet chess addiction Kathy and I walked a mile to the nearby Waffle House. We arrived around seven and the restaurant was almost empty except for a lady who was sitting in the prime location at the end of the counter with a view of the entire kitchen. Thinking quickly, I angled Kathy and me to the booth that was closest to the grill. Our waitress Dee asked us what we wanted. Kathy had a waffle and eggs with orange juice. I had plenty of time to eat and plenty of time to digest with no long car trips scheduled to trigger another bout of DPS™ so I ordered the meal that was my staple of the last century when I lived for a couple of years in Florida : A T-Bone steak with eggs, toast, hash browns, and grits. The only thing I forgot was to load up my hash browns with all the toppings (SCATTERED on the grill, SMOTHERED with onions, COVERED with cheese, CHUNKED with ham, DICED with tomatoes, PEPPERED with jalapenos, CAPPED with mushrooms, TOPPED with Bert’s Chili, and COUNTRY slathered in Sausage Gravy. I knew I forgot when Dee told the cook she needed hash in the ring which meant a plain order of hash browns. It was ok, though, because my grits were almost immediately put in front of me and before I could devour the giant bowl two more plates full of food were headed my way. I pounded down my eggs, toast, and hash browns and saved the giant T-bone steak for last. All the food was awesome and brought me back to happier times of eating at the Waffle House every day when I lived in Florida, completely banishing thoughts of my DPS™. Kathy enjoyed her breakfast but not as much as I did because no one could have enjoyed a meal as much as I enjoyed my T-Bone with eggs, toast, hash browns, and grits. I chatted a little with Dee the waitress about how great it must be to work in the Waffle House, gladly paid the $22 check, and left a big tip with the anticipation of getting back to the Waffle House before our early flight out on Sunday.

The Limestone Saints and Catawba Indians played an entertaining and competitive Division II football game.

  Saturday was the day of the big college football game between the Limestone College Saints and the Catawba College Indians from Salisbury, North Carolina. It was a nice warm afternoon and we had seats on the 50 yard line. My DPS™ started acting up from sitting on the bleachers for a couple of hours but the game was very entertaining even though the home team Saints lost 45-28. It was a 4 point game with just eight minutes left before the Indians got two scores in a 10 second span a minute later to put the game out of reach. After the game we went for a donut a Sunny's Donuts (the best donut shop in South Carolina) and then to dinner and hung out at Walt’s house at which point the lack of sleep over the last three days finally caught up to me and I fell asleep in an easy chair until it was time to go home for the night.

At Sunny's Donuts you pick your donut and the filling you want and the donut is then prepared for you.
Here is my lemon injected glazed donut!

  On Sunday I once again woke up around 5am east coast time and I once again worked for a half hour and once again suppressed my desire to play internet chess and headed with Kathy to the Waffle House. The restaurant was empty and we grabbed seats at the counter with a full view of the cooking area where a server was using a squeegee to clean the floor. I’d have loved another breakfast of T-Bone steak, eggs, hash browns, and grits but with the nauseating plane trip home just a few hours away I decided to keep it light and have some hash browns SCATTERED on the grill, SMOTHERED with onions, COVERED with cheese, CHUNKED with ham, DICED with tomatoes, CAPPED with mushrooms, and TOPPED with Bert’s Chili. I learned my lesson from my trip to the Liberty, Missouri Waffle House last year and passed on having my hash browns PEPPERED and remembering how the chef was incredulous at my having both chili and country gravy on my hash browns passed on the country gravy.

Round two at the Waffle House on Sunday saw us get Kathy's eggs and waffle and my SCATTERED, SMOTHERED, COVERED, CHUNKED, DICED, CAPPED and TOPPED hash browns. I think my plate looks a lot like what heaven must look like!

  Kathy ordered a blueberry waffle with eggs and orange juice and we watched Roger the cook fire up my hash browns while he was scrambling Kathy’s eggs and prepare her waffle. While we were waiting I struck up a conversation with Nana the waitress who told me that lots of people have chili and country gravy on their hash browns and that she and Roger had been working the night shift at this Waffle House for over 20 years! Roger brought our food over and I mentioned that when I first started going to the Waffle House you could only get the hash browns scattered, smothered, and covered. Roger started telling me about all the changes he had seen in the past 25 years. For example people can get their hash browns in a bowl with eggs and sausage.

  The hash browns were awesome with each bite exploding with flavor. There was no way I couldn’t be full after eating that massive plate of hash browns. I was so happy after my hash browns I asked Roger if I could take a picture with him. Roger was OK with it and Nana the waitress brought me a Waffle House cooks hat and wanted to be in the picture too. I paid my $13 for our meal, left a large tip, and even bought a waffle house coffee mug.

  Since I was full of hash browns SCATTERED, SMOTHERED, COVERED, CHUNKED, DICED, CAPPED and TOPPED I was in a dream like state during the hour long car ride to the airport and slept most of the way through the two and a half hour trip in the tiny tube of death called an airplane. Except for my DPS™ it was a great trip. I don’t know if I would have felt the same way if there hadn’t been a Waffle House to eat at. I mentioned the trips to the Waffle House to some of my co-workers and I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they react when the Waffle House comes up in conversation. Some people roll their eyes and if they’ve been to a Waffle House it is a sure sign that we just don’t share the same world view. Some people get a blank stare because they’ve never been to one which is understandable since there are no Waffle Houses in Iowa or New Jersey (where I have spend 55 of the past 57 years). But when someone smiles knowingly I know they see the world the same way I do and are enlightened to the wonders of the Waffle House.

After taking care of the floor and cooking, Nana and Roger gave me my own Waffle House hat and posed for a picture,
ensuring me many happy memories until I can get to a Waffle House again.

TV Review - Fear The Walking Dead - Second Half Season 3

   WARNING : FEAR THE WALKING DEAD SEASON 3 EPISODES 6-16 SPOILERS BELOW!!!

The highlight of Season three was the massive zombie horde!

  My last review of AMC’s 'Fear The Walking Dead' was in June after the fifth episode of the current third season. I wrote how I felt the show had turned itself around from a lackluster second season with more action, unpredictable character deaths, and utilizing horror genre staples. The third season concluded last Sunday with a double episode to make way for the parent ‘Walking Dead’ show.

  The first five episodes of the season was tight and suspenseful with rising tensions between the Broke Jaw Ranch of survivalist Jeremiah Otto and sons and the Black Hat Reserve and takeover of a Dam and it’s coveted water supply by Costa Rican black ops soldier Daniel Salazar and Lola the water engineer (AKA The Water Queen). The remainder of the first half of the season focused in the ranch and reserve but descended into plot improbability. In order to secure a peace between the ranch and reserve, one of Otto’s children (Jake) arranges an exchange of ‘hostages’ with Walker, the reserve leader. Coincidentally, the exchange is for two series regulars with Ofelia (Salazar’s daughter who was shown in flashback fashion to be rescued in the desert by Walker) heading to the ranch and post-apocalypse first family daughter Alicia heading to the reserve. Meanwhile Otto’s other son, Troy, murders a ranch family that wants no part of the conflict and tries to leave the area. Troy’s murder is covered up by post-apocalypse matriarch Madison who pins the blame on the Indian tribe in order to keep the ranch united against the reserve.

  As if covering for a murderer wasn’t enough, Madison and Troy then break the peace by leading a raid on the Reserve in order to get Alicia. The raid succeeds despite the Reserve having shown themselves to be strategically superior to the ranch in every way up to this show. In order to preserve the peace, Jake returns Ofelia who is dumped back to the ranch. The ranchers and Indian tribe seem to really hate each other but the ranch allows Ofelia to work in the camp kitchen whereupon she immediately poisons the entire ranch militia with anthrax! This leads to Madison leading yet another raid against the Indian reservation. The raid is once again successful this time leading to the theft if an entire tractor trailer full of Indian artifacts. The Indian tribe then circle the ranch for the first half of the season finale. I was expecting a battle but instead after having led two successful raids against the Indian camp, Madison decides to kill Jeremiah Otto as part of a peace deal with Walker’s tribe.

  Madison doesn’t actually kill Otto, her son Nick does as the final scene in an odd ending to the half season that started with great promise. How many silly plot devices were there? Need to have the militia poisoned? Have the girlfriend of the enemy leader show up and put her in charge of making coffee. Need to get the superior enemy to show up at your doorstep? Have a couple of raids that take an entire Indian tribe by surprise. Need a reason to kill the founder of the ranch? Just kill him to keep some sort of nebulous piece with the man who sent his girlfriend to poison the militia!

  The second half of the season continued with more inane plot twists designed to put our main characters in ever increasing jeopardy. To start the season the Indians and ranchers are all of a sudden sharing the ranch and living together in an uneasy truce but minutes later Madison realizes from some old maps she just happens to find that the ranch’s wells are going dry. To make matters worse Troy gets into a shootout with some of the Indian tribe and is banished. Madison and one of the tribe takes Troy to be exiled but Troy kills the tribesman. At this point Madison has a gun pointed at Troy but inexplicably lets him go to wander in his exile instead of killing him.

  There is a good side to inane plot twists and the middle part of the half season brings it all together at the ‘bizarre bazaar’ which is sort of a swap meet in a soccer stadium. Madison and Walker leave the ranch and bargain for a tanker of water using the Indian reserve of gold when Madison sees Strand the con-man. Strand has been missing in action for a few episodes and is working off his debt to the mysterious bazaar bosses ‘The Proctors’ by being chained to a fence killing walkers. So what does Madison do? She steals Walker’s gold to buy Strand’s freedom and then Strand, Walker, and Madison head to the dam to bargain for the same kind of water that had just been bargained for. At the dam, more plot twists ensue as Daniel finds out his daughter is alive and cooks up a plan with Strand (whom he despises) to bomb the dam’s water trucks to convince Lola (the Water Queen) to trade water for the guns at the ranch in order to fortify the dam.

Trapped in a airtight pantry with dozens of fresh zombies? Not a problem!

  This sequence led to the set piece of the ‘zombie horde’ and ‘panic in the pantry’ where Troy (the same Troy that Madison let free and the same Troy that murdered the ranchers that wanted to leave the ranch) leads thousands of zombies to the ranch. Nick and Troy’s brother Jake head out to stop the horde and when Jake is choking the life out of Troy what does Nick do? He clocks Jake with a shovel to save Troy! Jake gets bitten by a zombie and dies while the zombies overrun the ranch leaving the surviving ranchers and Indians to hide in the pantry.

  No matter how contrived the circumstances, the zombie horde and pantry episodes were the best of the entire season. There is plenty of food in the pantry but the air duct is blocked. While cast regulars Ofelia and Crazy Bear head off to clear the duct, Alicia gets the task of conserving the remaining air by euthanizing the survivors that have been bitten by zombies. That was grisly enough but as the survivors start to suffocate they turn into zombies and eat the other survivors that have passed out from lack of air. Somehow Alicia survives until the rest of the group returns from the dam but everyone at the ranch except Alicia, Ofelia, and Crazy Bear are all dead. The ranchers were redshirts without even knowing it.

  The penultimate episode brings our now small group of 7 survivors back to the bazaar to reunite Daniel with his daughter. The problem is that Ofelia was bitten by a zombie while clearing the air vent. Madison brings Ofelia to meet her father but Strand thinks that Daniel will be less than pleased and makes a deal with the leader of the bazaar (Proctor John) to sabotage the dam to allow the Proctors to take it over. Alicia has struck out on her own but is taken prisoner by the proctors and becomes the head nurse to Proctor John’s back operation which coincidentally goes well enough for Alicia to be Proctor John’s good luck charm.

  In the final episode of the season the group girds for the battle with the Proctors which doesn’t go very well, thanks to Strands sabotage. Madison finally comes to her senses and beats Troy (the last surviving member of the ranch) to death with a hammer although I think Troy may survive even this incident given his charmed life so far. The Water Queen and all the followers that work in the dam are killed. It seems that the entire population of the dam were also redshirts. There is a final battle at the top of the dam and a standoff with Nick holding a detonator that is wired to blow up the dam in order to give the rest of his family time to escape from Proctor John and his army of biker refugees. Nick explodes the dam and the only survivors we can be certain of are Walker and Crazy Bear (who pick off some of the proctors at the top of the dam with a sniper rifle far from the action) and Madison who washes up on a riverbank in the last scene of the season. I don’t know if Madison really survived since the episode was full of her dream sequences of Christmas at the ranch with everyone having a great time and the main course being Jeremiah Otto’s head under a silver platter.

  The second half of this season had unbelievable contrived sequences and coincidences to move the plot to the predetermined showdown at the dam. But I didn’t mind since the payoffs of the epic zombie horde overrunning the ranch, the episode of underground terror with the air running out and people turning into zombies, and dam explosions were well worth the unbelievable twists and turns to get our characters in the right places at the right time. Our merry cast of West Coast zombie apocalypse survivors have seen the west coast, the Abigail farm, the Black Hat Reserve, the Broke Jaw Ranch, and now a massive dam crash and burn with almost no survivors. Where it takes the parent Walking Dead show seasons to destroy nascent post-apocalypse civilizations, Fear The Walking Dead destroys multiple civilizations In weeks thanks to the freedom of not being tethered to a comic book plot written years before. This show remains one of my favorites and the third season was the best of the bunch.

In Fear The Walking Dead destruction is the name of the game...

  The show has been renewed for a fourth season with Scott Gimple as the new showrunner, likely as an answer to second straight year of declining ratings. Gimple has been the showrunner for the parent show for the past four seasons and has shown a penchant for splitting up the cast and bringing them together as the thread to hold seasons together. With our cast split to the four winds and only Madison having proven to possibly survive the finale there is no way of knowing which of our characters will make the cut and there is the possibility of at the next season will hold. I find all the remaining characters are interesting enough to be carried over and especially hope that Walker and Crazy Dog continue as series regulars but with a new show runner all options are on the table.

Move Review - The Foreigner

'The Foreigner' shows Jackie Chan in a more serious side...

  I went to see ‘The Foreigner’ starring Jackie Chan on Saturday afternoon with Kathy at the local Marshalltown theater where we were joined by five other patrons. I hadn’t seen any television ads for this film but there seemed to be ads for it before every YouTube video I watched over the last month. While I like watching Jackie Chan in action I’ve never cared for his movies which paint him as either the straight man in buddy movies like the ‘Rush Hour’ series or in ridiculous situations like ‘The Tuxedo’ or 'Legend of The Drunken Master’ that paint him as a martial arts idiot savant. The YouTube ads played up the notion of Jackie Chan as a man in pain out for vengeance with what looked like a lot of action without inane situations. Pierce Brosnan was shown to be the heavy of the piece as former IRA terrorist turned Irish politician Liam Hennessy that is the target of Chan’s quest to find his daughter’s murderers.

  The film doesn’t waste much of its two hours setting up the plot as it starts with Quan Ngoc Minh (Chan) picking up his daughter Fan from her London school and rushing across town to the store where all the ‘cool’ kids shop to get a dress for an upcoming dance. There is a big hurry because Fan is wired to the internet and knows that there are only two of the prized dresses left in her size. It’s a shame that Fan couldn’t have used her ‘dress app’ to reserve the dress since as soon as she enters the shop a bomb explodes, killing her along with dozens of others.

  A variant of the IRA claims credit for the bombing and there is political pressure on Brosnan to give up the bombers which he deflects by blaming a rogue element while bargaining for some IRA terrorist pardons in return for his cooperation. Quan is devastated and continually calls and visits the British agency investigating the bombing. Even though this agency has cameras everywhere and instant access to all sorts of information no one bothers to find out that Quan was a special forces operative who lost his wife and other two daughters escaping from Thailand. We don’t find this out until much later but we already knew that Quan had some training because after all this is Jackie Chan.

  Quan quickly traces down Hennessy as the man most likely to give him the names of his daughter’s killers and heads to Belfast to talk to him. Hennessy’s office also fails to check on Quan’s identity until after he plants a bomb in Hennessy’s office building even though he call has called and visited repeatedly . This leads to the meat of Chan’s action scenes. There is a battle in his rooming house that carries over to the neighboring rooftops and streets which lets Chan display some of his acrobatic moves but without the silliness of his other movies. After that Chan lays siege to Hennessy’s county house with a hunt in the woods reminiscent of the classic mountain scene in ‘First Blood’ from the Rambo series. Then there is a fight with Hennessy’s special forces nephew and the climactic battle in London with the murderers.

  There wasn’t the amount of action one would expect from an action movie but the action was intense in its bursts. Luckily the movie wasn’t just an action film but had the elements of a spy movie as Hennessy’s perfect little diplomatic life slowly unravels. He finds out that his wife is sleeping with his nephew and she betrayed his plans to trade the bombers for British pardons to the same IRA lieutenant that was working with Hennessy to plan the bombings in the first place. This lieutenant is responsible for subverting the targets from banks to civilians. And to add insult to injury the girl that Hennessy is cheating on his wife with is part of the terrorist cell that has been perpetrating the bombings.

  In addition to the action and spy movie elements ‘The Foreigner’ has some Big Brother\police drama themes as well. The London unit assigned to catch the terrorists does most of their work by cross referencing the all-encompassing camera shots with facial recognition software to come up with the name of one of the terrorists who lapses for a second and lets his face be seen by a camera when he drops his keys. The unit arrives at the terrorists flat en masse with swat teams, snipers, and a camera snaked through the air vent to see inside the apartment. At that point however, this supposedly elite unit falls on their face as Chan gains entry to the apartment as gas leak repairman without being seen visually or on camera. Then the swat team manages to arrive only after the climactic battle which allows them to torture one of the terrorists into giving up the location of a bomb that is meant to be planted on an airplane.

  Aside from the police turning from elite unit to keystone cops to elite unit as needed, ‘The Foreigner’ was a tight and entertaining film. Switching from action movie to spy movie to police work is hard to pull off but the film managed to seamlessly integrate all three genres. Chan gave a great performance as the tortured Quan. Chan could show pain at losing his family without descending into pointless angst but was also able to be an action star without turning into a joker or mindless killing machine. Brosnan was workmanlike as the part terrorist part con-man Hennessy. Brosnan was most effective showing the ruthless aspects of the character and seemed to struggle showing the inherent weakness of the character as he spirals downward. The best of the supporting characters was Hennessy’s wife Mary (Orla Brady) and right hand man McGrath (Dermot Crowley) who are the major actors in plotting his demise.

  This was a fine movie and gave me a whole new slant on Jackie Chan as a serious actor. The film was also a financial success despite only 7 people attending the Saturday matinee in Marshalltown with $12 million in the opening US weekend and over $100 million overall for a $35 million budget. Hopefully Chan will spend his twilight years with this sort of film instead of Rush Hour sequels.

TV Review - The Last Ship Season 4 (Second Half)

   WARNING : THE LAST SHIP SEASON 4 SPOILERS BELOW!!!

  When I wrote my last review of TNT’s Sunday night post-apocalyptic drama ‘The Last Ship’ I expressed my disappointment at the transformation of an action-oriented show to a melodrama centered on the angst of the main characters. The show had deteriorated so much that I had been opting to spend my Sunday night post-apocalyptic television viewing time watching AMC’s ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ and catching up with ‘The Last Ship’ from the TNT website Monday nights. The fifth episode of the ten episode season was a low point in the series with the primary plot point Captain Tom Chandler’s angst over retaking his oath to join the Navy and take command of his ship and the rest of the crew’s angst over his upcoming decision.

  I had high hopes for the second half of the season with the promise of a confrontation between the USS Nathan James and the Greek warships commanded by mad scientist Dr. Vellek in a massive Mediterranean storm and I was not disappointed. Starting with this episode the show did an about-face and gone from the most disappointing show of the year to the most compelling.

  Having Capt. Chandler resume his command allowed the writers to put away the angst plotlines and put the show back on an action-oriented pace. ‘Tempest’ featured the chase through a massive storm with the Nathan James breaking through a blockade by the warships by heading past them directly into the storm knowing that the enemy would not engage in battle because the Nathan James was in possession of the seeds from the only plant that is naturally resistant to the ‘Red Rust’ plague wiping out all the food on the planet. The way the ship eludes their enemies was reminiscent of the Millennium Falcon heading into the asteroid shower to escape a horde of tie-fighters in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. The seafaring action was accompanied by the side plot of the British spy planted in a group of refugees that were rescued in a prior episode stealing the seeds that have been the focus of the season and passing them to Fletcher (the British liaison to the Nathan James). Fletcher has been instructed to betray the alliance and bring the seeds to Dr. Vellek in return for the assurance that Britain will receive the rust resistant crops that Vellek will be creating with the seeds.

The second half of 'The Last Ship' season four displayed excellent writing like this bit of naval trickery...

  Episodes seven and eight are focused on away missions to determine Vellek’s location. ‘Feast’ brings Chandler and company to Vellek’s island that was used as a fighting arena where they hope to get their hands on Vellek’s communication equipment. When they arrive they see Vellek’s older son Giorgio throwing a party so they change their plan and kidnap Giorgio while they transmit the information to the ship. The plan changes yet again when a group of Middle Eastern terrorists that were betrayed by Giorgio earlier in the season invade the island. A firefight ensues with Giorgio escaping in the confusion, heading back to Vellek’s base which we later find out is one of the Greek warships. The crew of the Nathan James finds out that Vellek is experimenting with drugs to prevent aggression. Meanwhile we find from Fletcher and Vellek that the good doctor is adding his docility drug to the ‘Red Rust’ resistant crops he is creating. We see the experiment come to fruition on the former Greek Admiral who is drugged and is only able to meekly obey Vellek’s orders to take off his medals, eat more of his drugged food, and go to his room.

  Another away team mission is on the docket in episode 8’s ‘Lazaretto’ as the team sneaks onto another island in order to bug a satellite and obtain Vellek’s real time location and communications. The fly in this ointment is that the island is the prison home to Vellek’s mind-controlled fighters who for some reason are guarded by a large number of heavily armed thugs even though the prisoners are drugged and completely docile, unable to summon the will to fight or their captors or even disobey their orders. Our crew sneaks in and pretend to be mind–controlled as well until the mission is completed. This was pretty much a repeat of the previous episode but was only the prelude to the most inventive plot twist I’ve seen in years. During the previous episodes we have seen Vellek collaborate with his youngest son Kristos (also a brilliant scientist) to bind the cure and drug to the crops that will be spread across the world. Kristos is clearly Vellek’s favorite and he continually rubs that in the nose of his older son Giorgio. Fletcher catches on to this and once he figures out Vellek’s mind control scheme tries to split Giorgio from his father. Giorgio doesn’t bite and turns Fletcher in to his father moments after Fletcher manages to get a message to the Nathan James. Giorgio then shoots Fletcher in the head. I was wondering about Giorgio’s blind loyalty to his father and expected him to turn at some point until it is revealed that Kristos died in a mugging years ago and Vellek is only imagining him via the use of the same mutated hallucinogenic drug that was seen in an earlier episode. This explains Giorgio’s blind loyalty and Vellek’s desire to use the crop cure to prevent all aggression, and set up the show for Sunday’s epic double episode season finale.

The 'Kristos' revelation was reminiscent of 'The Sixth Sense' and an equally stunning plot twist!

  The double episode finale was indeed epic with a few blips along the way. The Nathan James heads to Malta to intercept the plants that will give Vellek world domination. The problem is three Greek warships are between the ship and Malta. The US warships and Greek Navy engage in a battle of wits where the Nathan James discerns that Vellek’s ship is not one of the Greek warships and the Greek Navy manages to shake one of their ships loose from the U.S. radar. The Nathan James loses its lone helicopter while managing to blow up one of the Greek warships. Vellek orders his boat to speed to Malta which gives its location away to the Nathan James, who use the new information to discern where the remaining warships will head to protect Vellek and manage to blow them out of the water also, killing Giorgio in the process.

The end of the season is the time to say farewell to some familiar faces. So long Sunshine and Giorgio....

  The season finale leads the crew of the James to Malta where Dr. Vellek has loaded three planes with the mind-controlling cure. After the epic sea battle of the previous episode the finale seemed rushed. The five member away team gets pinned down on an airstrip but manages to outshoot dozens of soldiers and a sniper with two or their number getting shot and even destroys two of the planes, leaving the James to shoot the third plane out of the sky. Chandler and his former romantic partner Sasha head to Vellek’s warship and sabotage it while the Nathan James rams the warship and boards it like some sort of pirate movie.

  Naturally our heroes all survive their encounter with the Greek warship, rescue the remaining seeds, and even get some of Vellek’s cured plants that have not been infected with the mind-control drug. At the climactic confrontation between Chandler and Vellek, Vellek’s daughter Lucia shoots Chandler in the leg before being gunned down by Sasha. I would have been happy to see the season end with Lucia crying ‘Daddy’ as she died but the plot turned maudlin as Vellek and Chandler have to share pontifications about how dark the world is and Chandler’s belief in humanity finding the light in the darkness before Vellek tells Chandler that heaven is ‘out there’ as he points to the horizon and jumps off the ship (presumably to his death).

  The second half of The Last Ship’s fourth season more than made up for a boring angst-filled first half. Peter Weller’s Dr. Vellek was fantastic up till the last episode where he inexplicably was turned from an evil mastermind to a sniveling drug addict searching his lab for one more fix of his hallucinogenic tea. Aside from that one quibble, the last five episodes were tightly written and self contained with each focused on a clear cut objective and was far superior to striving for the ‘epic narrative’ of Capt. Chandler finding himself that seemed to be the focus of the first half.

  Season five of The Last Ship was shot at the same time as season four and will likely be the final season of the show. The ratings have fallen of a cliff this season with not a single season four episode having two million viewers and the season finale ratings well behind ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ and even ‘Fear The Walking Dead’. A Season Five teaser shows a Pearl Harbor type attack with a South American protagonist with mad computer skills which holds promise for travel and action. I don’t think the show would have been picked up for a fifth season but having already been produced should ensure it making the airwaves next summer. I saw enough the second half of this season to make me look forward to the next season. Hopefully the show will be worth my anticipation.

'The Last Ship' will be back in 2018 for a fifth (and final?) season. Here's hoping it will be worth the wait!

To Stop a Tank

  Lost in the recent ‘revelation’ that shoe companies are bribing collegiate coaches to bribe teenage players to attend the universities that are paid millions of dollars to wear the apparel supplied by the shoe companies and the hubbub over whether professional football players are kneeling, standing, or locking arms during the national anthem was the National Basketball Association changing the draft lottery rules in an attempt to prevent teams from losing on purpose in order to get better draft picks.

  The practice of ‘tanking’ or being as bad as possible in order to get a potentially transcendent player is as old as the basketball draft. Up until the early 1980’s the team with the worst records in the eastern and western conferences conducted a coin flip to determine which team would get the top pick and led to celebrations (and championships) when the Milwaukee Bucks and Portland Trailblazers won their respective coin flips and drafted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, respectively. This system worked until the early 1980’s when the Houston Rockets were accused of losing their last few regular season games to get in the coin flip two years in a row, winning both and selecting Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon.

  The new lottery system was designed to give each non-playoff team a one in seven chance at the top draft pick. The first lottery winner was the New York Knicks who drafted Patrick Ewing and earned the league ‘conspiracy theory’ accusations of a rigged lottery to get New York a franchise superstar. The equal chance at the #1 pick lasted only five years and was replaced with the current weighted lottery system where each non-playoff team gets a chance to get one of the top three draft picks with the best of the non-playoff teams having a minuscule chance at a top pick and the team with the worst record in the league a 25% chance at the top pick, a 65% chance at getting a top 3 pick and are assured of no worse than the fourth pick in the draft. These percentages have been in force since 2005 with minor tweaks before that.

  Practice has shown that getting the top pick in a draft with a transcendent player can alter a franchise’s destiny. Tim Duncan transformed the Spurs from a good team to a championship team while Dwight Howard and LeBron James brought their teams to the NBA Finals within five years. Practice has also shown that a poorly run franchise will not make good use of their fortune at getting a top draft pick and remain a lottery team for years. Kwame Brown was Michael Jordan’s choice as the #1 pick for the Wizards in a relatively barren 2001 draft and made no noticeable impact on the team while top picks Greg Oden, Andreas Bargnani, and Andrew Bogut (2007, 2006, and 2005 top picks) were so injury prone that only Bogut of the three was able to help his team make a token playoff appearance.

  Starting with the 2019 Draft, the three worst teams in the league will each have a 14% chance at the top pick in the draft and a 47% chance at getting a top three pick. The beneficiaries are the teams with the seventh through tenth worst records in the league and have doubled or tripled their chances of getting a top three pick. Presumably there will be less incentive to be the worst team in the league since the same draft lottery odds can be obtained by being the third worst team in the league instead.

  This reform is a reaction to the handiwork of former Philadelphia 76er general manager Sam Hinkie. Upon taking over the team in 2012 Hinkie was clear in stating that his process for rebuilding was to stockpile as many top draft picks as possible with the goal of landing enough superstar talent through the draft to have a championship team instead of the low level playoff team he inherited. Hinkie traded every player of value for future draft picks and he continually drafted players that either couldn’t play in their rookie seasons due to injuries (Nerlins Noel, Joel Embiid) or foreign players that were going to play overseas (Dario Saric) which had the effect of an awful team not getting better by virture of their draft picks because the draft picks didn't play for the team. The 76ers were woeful but never had the worst record in the league under Hinkie and never got the number one pick in the draft. They did have the 6th, 3rd, and 3rd picks from 2013 to 2015. During the 2016 season the 76ers hired consultant Jerry Colangelo (head of USA basketball and former owner of the Phoenix Suns) who installed his son Bryan as the president of the team. There is a widespread belief in NBA circles that the change in leadership was pushed on the 76ers by other owners and commissioner Adam Silver in order to improve the ‘optics’ of the 76ers being so blatantly bad for so long in order to accumulate top draft picks. Hinkie resigned shortly thereafter and as fate would have it the 76ers finally got the #1 at the end of the season. Colangelo used the pick to draft consensus top prospect Ben Simmons but in Hinkiean fashion Simmons was injured in training camp and held out for the entire year which gained the 76ers the third pick in this year’s draft which they traded along with another first round pick for the #1 pick in the draft (Markelle Fulz).

  Now the 76ers are the envy of many teams in the league because of all the young talent they have assembled and look like a playoff team for the next few years and if everything breaks right could even be a Finals contender. Other teams have noticed and are also working hard to enhance their draft position. The Phoenix Suns held out all their veteran starters over the last two months of the season and were rewarded with the second worst record in the league which translated to the fourth pick in the draft because of the 76ers and Lakers jumping them in the lottery.

  The copycatting of the 76ers success at assembling talent by being bad is the main reason for the lottery ‘reform’ but it will barely make a dent in tanking in my opinion. A bad team will always have an incentive to be worse to get a better chance to get one of the top picks. The new system removes the incentive to be the WORST team but increases the incentive to be one of the 10 worst teams and there is still a considerable incentive to be one of the three worst teams in the league. The new system sounds great and makes it look like the league is taking tanking seriously but there will be a new system as soon as a big market team like the Knicks, Bulls, or Lakers find themselves continually one of the worst teams in the league but continually lose out on their 42% chance to get a top three pick and wallow in the depths of the standings. This is what happened to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the years before drafting Kevin Garnett with the fifth pick in the 1995 draft and after trading Garnett to the Celtics in 2007. The Wolves were perpetually unlucky in the draft, never getting top draft pick and have never made the playoffs without Garnett on the roster. The Wolves were further beset by awful management. They are favored to make the playoffs this year after trading for #1 draft pick Andrew Wiggins and finally winning the lottery and getting the #1 pick Karl Anthony-Towns in the next season. The NBA had no problem letting the Timberwolves wallow at the bottom of the league but I cannot imagine letting the same fate befall a big market team and will rerig the system to once again reward the worst team with the best chance at a draft pick.