Catching Up

A loooong weekend away from home. I caught a couple shows... Painkiller Jane was as bad as I'd heard it was. And SNL with Shia LaBeouf was pretty dull, except for the digital short (Dear Sister, featuring Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek"), and Sofa King. Also, I'm twice the age and half the X-chromosomes of Avril Lavigne's target demographic, so that didn't do much for me. The big thing I missed out on was the three hours over two nights premiere of Drive.

Spoilers for that after the jump:

Drive: A cross-country race run by a mysterious organization that took extreme measures to coax people into the race, I knew about. Clues about each stop on the way, sinister penalties for finishing last, I did not know. Three hours in, we've got plenty of mystery, and relatively exciting car chases and things. The effects aren't movie-quality, but they're passable. It doesn't seem as well-written as Tim Minnear's earlier efforts, but I think this is meant for a broader audience. Still, it's well above the Fast and the Furious-type dialogue that is normally associated with car stories.


So far we've met seven people (above), as far as we know, that work for the race officials, and we're familiar with several teams:


Nathan Fillion and Kristin Lehman play Alex and Corrina. Corrina was kidnapped 27 years ago for the race, and her parents died just shy of the finish line trying to win her back. Former semi-pro auto racer Alex is in it to win back his wife (Angel's Amy Acker) who was kidnapped by the powers that be. A cop (Law & Order's Richard Brooks) and Alex's sister (Katie Finneran from The Inside and Wonderfalls) are back in Nebraska looking into the disappearance of his wife and subsequent disappearance of him.

They have a leg up on the competition, since Corrina seems to know more about the race than anyone else, and has a USB drive with apparently info on the other racers. But the leg up isn't much help, since Alex apparently was the wheelman on a number of bank robberies and on the hook for some murders, and it looked like he was getting arrested, but it was just an excuse to get him out of his crappy truck and into his old racing car.


Wendy Patrakas (Melanie Lynskey) just had a baby, who the race people took. It sounds like her husband is crazy, jeolous, a workaholic, and abusive. She kinda sucks at the whole racing thing, but she's obviously motivated. She ended up coming in last in the first leg, which earned her a gun and the assignment to "eliminate" Ivy (Taryn Manning). We don't know much about Ivy at this point, except that she was in New Orleans during Katrina, and apparently has no money. Wendy gets around her elimination task on a technicality by getting Ivy to join up with her.


Winston Salazar (Kevin Alejandro) just got out of jail. We have no idea what he did (or didn't do). His rich father abandoned his family when Winston was seven. After getting invited to the race, he goes to pick up some pocket money by stealing from his dad. But instead he finds his half brother, Sean, who didn't even know Winston existed. They team up, but Winston is on parole, so a bounty hunter is after him. He gets picked up, but Sean calls in his father's yes man and gets him out.


Elle and Rob Laird (Mircea Monroe and Riley Smith) are our only husband and wife team. He's in the Army, she wants him out. So she grabs his cell phone and deletes the message letting him know that his unit's being redeployed to Iraq. Which I guess makes him AWOL. They've probably gotten the least development so far, with a lot of the scenes featuring them focusing on showing off Elle's body, which I am all for.


John Trimble ("That Guy" Dylan Baker) is an Astrophysicist who's dying. The only thing keeping him alive are his meds, and he doesn't have enough to last the whole race, apparently. He's driving along with his daughter Violet (Emma Stone), who... is a teenager, but otherwise isn't remarkable in any way. But she and her father have a nice relationship, and it looks like Sean Salazar is hot for her, so I'm sure that'll show up later.

We leave off at a cliffhanger, where everyone (including us, we hope) is about to learn a lot about the race. I, for one, am excited.