Thumbs up, Hitchhiker
Long before Zooey Deschanel became the talk of the town in New Girl she was Tricia “Trillian” McMillan, space-wandering Earth woman and quirky acquaintance of the hapless Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman) in the delightful 2005 film adaptation of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Hitchhiker’s Guide gets a fresh airing on the small screen and seeing it again, or even seeing it for the first time, is a reminder that gentle, disarming Brit humour can go a long way to make an already pleasant evening that much more pleasant — provided your sense of humour leans toward Monty Python, Terry Gilliam and the early, funny Doctor Who.
The plot is a deliberately goofy and whimsical flight of fancy despite its themes of alien invasion and visions of a post-apocalyptic doom. Mildmannered family man Dent (Freeman) wakes up one day to learn that his house is about to be demolished to make way for a road bypass. He tries to stop the bulldozers by lying down in front of them — bad idea — then heads to the pub for “a muscle relaxant” to calm his shattered nerves. There, his friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def) reveals that he’s an alien from another planet, a journalist working on a new edition of an interstellar guidebook called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dent needn’t worry too much about his house being demolished, Prefect tells him, because later that day the Earth is about to be destroyed by a race of space meanies called the Vogons. The Vogons are redeveloping this corner of the galaxy, see, and as anyone familiar with municipal politics knows, what the developers say, goes.
When the invasion comes, the pair barely manage to escape with their lives. They go hurtling into space, Trillian and sidekick Marvin the Paranoid Android (Warwick Davis) in tow, where they try to solve a riddle called the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, using a supercomputer called Deep Thought and their trusty “improbability drive.” (Space — 7 p.m.)
Like-minded sci-fi fans will get a kick out of Serenity, Joss Whedon’s 2005 big-screen followup to his short-lived TV space western Firefly. Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Summer Glau are back for more adventures in 2517. (Space — 9:20 p.m.)
John Travolta followed up his unexpected success in 1994’s Pulp Fiction with Get Shorty, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, in which Travolta plays a loan-shark-with-morals to Dennis Farina’s amoral, sociopathic mob boss. (Bravo — 7 p.m.)
Director F. Gary Gray’s 2005 followup, Be Cool, in which Travolta reprised his Get Shorty role as Chilli Palmer, is not as entertaining, or funny, but it is worth a look on an otherwise slow TV night. (Bravo — 9:15 p.m.)