Day One Hundred and Twenty - Kingdom: Series 1, Episodes 3 & 4, "A bit more to sink one's teeth into here."

It has been a while since I've digested anything that Stephen Fry was in, seeing as how I've yet to come upon him in Bones and have managed to cleanse my palette of his horrible "100 Greatest Gadgets" by not finishing out the second half of the program, so I decided to revisit Kingdom in the hope that it was better than I'd remembered.

Oddly, it really isn't... but I'm okay with that considering the terrible beating I've been taking not seeing him in Bones and being terribly disappointed with his gadgets. It isn't any better than I remember, but it's strangely more consumable in comparison to the alternatives.

These episodes deal with a possibly sabotaged fishing trawler and a definitely sabotaged college enrollment, but the best of it for both episodes centers on Peter Kingdom and his repressed distaste for sister Beatrice's new beau, a rather bawdy artist.

I, personally, found it great to see him in a scrape. I could swear he was chittering like an angry badger there for a moment, but it's hard to tell.

Sadly, the latter of the two episodes features the return of Beatrice's outbursts, but, while she was happily content in her lover's arms, it was nice to see her sedate instead of impractically wacky or raging. If there's one thing that annoys me the most with this series, it's her forced zaniness and the lengths everyone around goes to humor her.

The boat drama was meh, but episode 5's family issue, where a brilliant young girl goes along with her mother's insistence on suing Cambridge (where we get a nice cameo from Richard Wilson) despite the fact that she threw her own admissions interview so she could help her illiterate father, is actually quite intriguing.

Add to that a bit of bonding time for Beatrice and Gloria over their individual love woes and you've got a halfway decent personal drama, that is certainly helped by Fry's ever present charm, which had previously been the only thing holding up the series... and not well, at that.

I find that, as the series progresses and the actors settle into their roles, I'm enjoying Kingdom more and more. I still find Snell a cartoon that is completely out of place and Lyle an utterly irredeemable tool, but nothing is ever perfect (at least until Hyouka is licensed).

Overall, I find myself actually looking forward to watching more episodes of Kingdom, which is something that I never expected after the first few. I suppose that's a good thing? Maybe that feeling will rub off on Dr.Who... but the wound there is still too tender, so that won't be for a while yet.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~