Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Episode 764: In Praise Of ReGenesis

Was trying to read more of The Atrocity Exhibition earlier, but I've given up now. I did really enjoy the short story appended to this Harper Perennial edition though. 'The Smile' is downright eerie. I've more or less decided that since I didn't buy a jacket from Superdry on Monday, I'll get all of J. G. Ballard's books instead. Am just waiting for the refund to come through on the Topman jacket. The repeated transactions from when I was buying train tickets over the weekend still haven't been reversed, which is mildly annoying so I've sent an e-mail to Chiltern Railways. Anyway, lately I've been getting back into ReGenesis. Am staying up to finish Season 1, and for the life of me I can't understand why I ever stopped midway in the first place because it's a brilliant show. Main protagonist Dr David Sandström is cast from a similar mould as House/Lightman, which unsurprisingly makes for highly entertaining interactions with the other characters. The brilliance of the show, however, rests in the extraordinary level of empathy the scientists have for human life, which seems rare to me in TV. In fact, I think all four seasons of ReGenesis should be made compulsory viewing for anyone who works in the biological sciences, in whatever capacity, as an empathy-building exercise. I reckon it would be very beneficial. Plus the way it's filmed is quite unusual. Every so often, the action rewinds and starts again, but tracking the story from a different character's perspective, so it's like putting pieces of a puzzle together.

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