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If you listen to the Internet, Idris Elba deserves a better role in comicbook moviedom than being Thor’s doorman. (Alas, DC corporate looks like they opted for 80’s throwback Cyborg as the token leaguer.) And since I watched Pacific Rim on a plane with no sound, never got into The Wire, and gave up on the Office before he became a recurring character, I didn’t quite see it until now. Needless to say, this series shits all over Sherlock and SVU. DCI Luther’s no less a superhero than anyone on those shows, but I suppose he has to be one, in order to survive all his loved ones and grow out of his temper tantrums.

At least, this was my version of it. Somehow we were taken 50 years into the future to downtown Los Angeles, where empty stone buildings were warm to the touch and the snow felt like that fake sand at Brookstone. I guessed that it was radiation, and that we were already doomed from our exposure to it. Our phones had no service, as one might expect, and things were too alien for any hope of contacting relatives. There were cloaked strangers around, who seemed not to understand us too well; when we asked one local representative how to reach our families in this time, he said nobody was left, without explanation. Maybe a nuclear holocaust had wiped them all out? A mutant with two heads talked to me next, supporting that theory. The girls in the bar responded to my Japanese, but had little in the way of faces under their hair. And Marcelo managed to find a Mandarin-speaking fellow who brought in some ancient equipment for our iPhones, but they were only chargers. We then traveled out of the city, into more green than I remember, but the only landmark I had to indicate our general direction was a long-lasting Chinese restaurant.

I’ve just seen the latest Christopher Nolan epic, but alas, even as cosmic a journey as that requires a return home, where relativity really kicks in and I am instead draped on a metal folding chair in front of all 22 episodes of SciFi’s turn-of-the-century response to Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The series apparently pioneered hi-def, though you couldn’t tell from these recordings, so I’m left to appreciate it mainly for the ass-kicking Rebecca Fogg character, who probably owes more to Emma Peel than Lara Croft, but nevertheless is deplorably left off most lists of peers. I like the theme, too. Haven’t heard one like it since.