Thursday, January 5, 2017

Binge TV

All marathons are not 26.2 miles. There are the TV marathons, that tend to be as long as all the prior episodes in a particular series. In the case of a 'Twilight Zone' marathon, this will be all the episodes ever shown.

In the case of say a 'Homeland' marathon, it will be all the episodes prior to the upcoming season. And since Season 6 is about to start, we have Showtime goosing interest in the show with a full-out marathon of showing all the episodes in the first five seasons, This is 60 I think.

I missed the beginning of  'Homeland' when it started in 2011. When my son-in-law told me it was pretty good, I started to watch the show, starting maybe in Episode 3 or 4. He filled me in on the premise, and I think I stayed with it through the completion of the first season. I was there when Carrie Mathison has her bipolar episode and fades out with electro-shock therapy, mumbling the name Isssa.

I may have started Season 2, but for some reason I grew tired of Sergeant Nicholas Brody's face. He always looked like he was eating lemons. He had this puss I didn't like, plus he was a bad guy. I stopped watching the show. I may have picked it up in Season 5 when I was told that Brody had met a terminal fate. I remember I didn't know how this guy Peter Quinn got there, or station chief Allison, or how Carrie had had a baby, and how Dar Adal and Saul Berenson seemed to have taken over running the CIA for Israel. I lost interest again.

But then the 'Homeland' marathon starting adding shows to my DVR scheduled shows. List one of those series to be recorded and the DVR doesn't forget. You start getting the repeats, and unless you act fast, your DVR will fill up.

Given the marathon, I decided to keep the shows that were showing up hourly. I expanded the retention on the series and set it to record all. I had been watching Damien Lewis who played Brody, play the hedge fund billionaire, Bobby Axelrod in 'Billions' and started to relax my attitude toward his puss.

I will report I'm up to date on 'Billions,' and don't need a marathon to get me up to speed for the upcoming new season. As for the 'Homeland' marathon shows, I've now got them all and have been picking them off, usually about three a day. There are still over 40 shows to go, so I've got a nice winter planned. Used to be if you holed up in a cabin and waited out the snow in the wilderness you loaded in enough food and firewood to get you through the winter without having to leave your snowbound cabin. We stock different supplies now, but with the same objective of getting through the winter.

It has occurred to me that when I finish watching all the 'Homeland' episodes, perhaps by the middle of this month, I will have traveled over five TV years. It is thoroughly possible I'll notice how some of the actors have changed. Certainly those playing the children. You see this on 'The Americans,' (also up to date) how Paige, Henry, and Matthew have grown.

Visible aging or not, the actors playing these parts have grown 5-6 years older since the first episode. I haven't. I've added perhaps three weeks to my age since I've started watching Episode 1 in the marathon.

Einstein's theory of relativity seems to apply to binge watching. As you travel though the five years' worth of episodes in a few weeks, you are moving faster than the five years it took to produce the shows. Given the very little I've been able to refresh my memory about Einstein's theory, the faster you go away from the earth the slower time goes: seconds take longer, a phenomena known as time dilation.

A Google link offers this as an example:

The implications of Einstein's most famous theory are profound. If the speed of light is always the same, it means that an astronaut going very fast relative to the Earth will measure the seconds ticking by slower than an Earthbound observer will — time essentially slows down for the astronaut, a phenomenon called time dilation

I take this to mean that the astronaut is not adding elapsed time to his life as fast as those on earth. Thus, I'm not aging as fast as the characters in the series.

No wonder I still have nearly all my hair.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

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