Pilot

Jason plays Peter, an FBI agent who investigates the murder of an archaeologist in Jerusalem. While doing this, he uncovers a 2000 year old conspiracy. The event series was filmed on location in Jerusalem, before the production had to move to Croatia and New Mexico.

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thunder
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Re: Pilot

Post by thunder » Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:53 pm

Yes, that was probably not the best move. But at least Mugglenet and other HP sites are posting about it, so the HP fans should know...

Edit:

I came to post about the bathing scene, and totally forgot. Knowing about the scene from trailers and interviews, I was a bit concerned, and was kind of expecting to be repulsed by it when it happened.
But then I saw the episode: When he first sees her, she reminds him of his daughter, and later when he sees her again. But after they start talking, I think he starts to see Emma more as Emma, and not his daughter. So I don't think he thought he was going to do "something" with his daughter in that pond. but that it felt strange for him that she reminded him of his daughter, and was much younger, they had just met, maybe they shouldn't be doing it for many reasons... I don't know if I make any sense at all. But I think he sees Emma as Emma in that situation, and not his daughter. It was still a bit strange, though, but I can understand why, and I don't read it as incest.

Anyway, when I watched it, it didn't put me off, that much.
And Char, I think a lot of the reactions are a bit "find something negative and rant about it"...

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LadySekhmet
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Re: Pilot

Post by LadySekhmet » Sat Mar 07, 2015 4:28 pm

I totally agree with Thunder. Once he engaged her, he moved past her reminding him of his daughter. Plus, she was of age - she had to be at least 22/23 to be a grad student- young, but not illegal! She was very different and I think that he was surprised at that, but I figured he drew back in the water because he felt guilty about her seducing him because he was still married and she was way more dangerous to his emotional psyche (i.e., she was an emotional entanglement waiting to happen) than that weird thing with Anne Heche's character (that has no emotional entanglement). And she was seducing him - it was not the other way around! (I have to admit - if a hottie FBI agent who looked like Peter chatted me up while walking around Naplio, yeah, I might want to kiss him in the glow of the moon by the harbor! lol)

No, Emma should not have been scratching her name on the walls, and when I saw her initials I thought: "bad archaeologist, bad!"

Oh, boy, this is going to be a long post - please be patient with me!

As far as things left out overnight, well, archaeological storerooms are often (not always) separate from the and secured at night. So the team that works at the storeroom will be doing their work during the day while the team at the site excavates. The site team will bring back the tools, supplies, and any excavated objects from site to the storeroom.

If the storeroom is separate from the living spaces, then when the storeroom team ends their work for the day, the storeroom will be locked up and secured. This can mean locks and padlocks, or all of that and an actual alarm system (this depends entirely on the how much $$$ the excavation gets from their funders. Archaeology projects often cobble together their funding from many sources and often do not have much to begin with so they always do the best that they can with the $$ they can- and expenses range from room/board/feeding of the team to paying the workmen's salaries to renting or paying mortgage for the storerooms, etc.) People will use the time before dinner to work on their notebooks and to record any additional things re that day's work.

If the team is living at the storeroom site, which often happens in Egypt, then it's a little different- because we are actually living on site and people tend to work at night (after dinner) if they don't want to take that time to relax. It's not unusual to see a light on and find the dig director, beer in hand, staring at a map or working on something late into the night. Obviously, doors are shut and locked until the next morning. But the broken pottery is left out in the sherd yard or on the sorting tables, as it is not valuable to anyone except us (any fabulous would be locked - obviously).

Also the work day is split - or at least for many of the digs I've worked on. In Egypt, we start very early- usually at dawn (literally and it's gorgeous watching the sun rise over the western desert), then we work until lunch-time-ish. Since it's the desert, and if it's late spring or summer, the heat by lunch-time is brutal (one time it hit 125 F degrees while I was there) We pack our stuff up, send the pottery (it's mostly broken pottery that we find on a daily basis - so not very exciting to anyone but us) in the truck, and hop back into the taxis to get back to the house/storeroom. We have our lunch, then work on our notebooks, sort pottery, and see what the house folks did during the day (which generally includes registering any objects that are not pottery, photographing them, drawing them, recording them, some basic conservation if it is needed, sorting/recording the pottery that was sorted by the individual excavator the day before - all of which also happens in storerooms at other digs around the world).

In Egypt, there are tons (literally TONS) of broken ceramics that have to be sorted into keep or discard piles. We have a pottery dump and we records the pieces (still in the hundreds) that are "diagnostic" - the bases, lips of vessels, handles, anything painted, any pieces that we can join to form full profiles of pottery shapes. Digs very rarely have gold or fabulous objects that are shown in Hollywood digs- it's not to say digs don't find those things, it's just 1. we don't find them everyday (some digs never do), and 2. once those types of high-profile objects are studied and recorded, they are trundled off to the government storage magazine or sometimes to a museum (depending in what country your dig is). To be honest, no excavator in his right mind would want the headache of dealing with them long-term.

We lived out in the desert, so we were very rural. We had military police with us on site every day and who protected our excavation house/storeroom. There were military police at the house 24/7. We even had MPs that came with us in the taxis. I've had secret police (or, as I call them, the not-so-secret-secret) set handguns down on the table in front of me (in displays of maschismo & I'll never forget the heavy "clunk" as the gun hit the table and interrupted our dominoes game) and been told "go ahead, hold it." (yikes! I declined, and our Egyptian foreman chastised the police man for doing that - our foreman is a wonderful man!). The house also has armored personnel carriers watching over it, so if we leave a door unlocked, it's not like anyone is going to creep into the courtyard.

Sometimes, there are storerooms at the site. Since the storerooms act as workspaces as well as storage, people would be working in them during the day. But they'd be locked when the final person leaves for the day.

We also have to map the site, so many times the excavators have to take time to map. It's easiest to do if none of the workmen are there, so excavators might return after lunch to map their trenches. This means that you are standing in your trench during the hottest, most miserable part of the day, sweating away any of the feeling of clean from your lunch-time shower! (And- just to be clear-you are the dirtiest that you will ever be at the end of every excavation day - especially if there was a sandstorm that day. I have some pix of me where I look fabulously and gloriously disgustingly dirty and sweaty. Very sexy.)

Excavating in western Europe is entirely different. Because Europe is a non-military state, you don't have the same levels of ...erm..."military protection." It's not as stifling to work in Europe as it can be in the Middle East, and you don't feel such a loss in personal freedoms. In Greece, due to the much different preservation of things underground (temperate soil vs desert sand), the way of excavation and how one interacts with the archaeological authorities is much, much different. Plus, it's more expensive to excavate in Europe than in many places in the Middle East. The USD or Euro simply goes farther in Egypt or Syria than it does in Greece or Italy. Plus, it's just different in so many ways (how mang times can I say "different" in this paragraph? lol)

I am unfamiliar with how Israel handles foreigns digs. While I have friends and collegues who work in Israel, I've never worked and there. And any convos over drinks are usually 1. gossip, and 2. about the site itself. lol. I do have a sense that many digs in Israel are handled differently than in Egypt and in Italy/Greece (I keep saying Italy/Greece, because I've also excavated in Italy and Greece- actually I've been on more seasons in Greece than in Egypt).

So... presumably, Emily had the key to the gates of the worksite/storeroom. I assumed there were doors or gates that we didn't see them pass through on their way to the site. So, yes, if there were gates for the entrance of the worksite than the fact that things were out while they were in there, wasn't such a big deal. The day shot of them walking past tables of broken pottery on the way out of the site was pretty accurate.

If there were people in the actual excavation site, then that was an issue, because it meant that someone had a key that shouldn't have (or perhaps were associated with the dig). If voices were simply bouncing off walls and down tunnels from other tunnels that weren't associated with the dig, then perhaps that's why she wasn't so worried about them being down there. I've never done cave archaeology, so I don't know how sound travels. I've been in touristy caves in Greece, and I know that those can be quite echo-y. But if she wasn't supposed to be on-site, per the list of dos and don'ts that was given out to the team on Day 1, yeah, she could've been in trouble for bringing someone into the site at nite for a secret tryst. Although I'm sure (in the Dig universe) she and Peter were not the first to sneak in and skinny dip. Sometimes temptation is just too great - big, cold pool of water, hot night, chance to romance up your fellow excavator... yeah...she wasn't the first. lol. Romance and excavations go hand in hand - many a marriage has resulted (and also many a broken heart). And if Grant's dig was a popular dig then she could have lost her spot on the dig and been sent home. But since she was a grad student, she would have returned to Penn anyway at the end of the season. Most excavations do NOT run year round - except if they are home country government digs. Any university funded or Nat Geo funded or NHS grant funded digs will have a shelf life of about 6 wks (generally in Europe 6-8 weeks - too $$ to do more) to three months (like in Egypt), and then the professors and their students return to their universities to go back to classes. US professors tend to excavate during the long breaks from school, which is why so many US digs in the Middle East are during the hottest and most miserable part of the year ---> summer. Not every expedition actually digs every season, some seasons are "study seasons," which is when digs take the time (sometimes several seasons) to study their finds: pottery, small objects, floral/fauna, forensics (for human skeletal finds), metal, etc., and get them ready to publish.

I hope that helped! :D

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wolfsaver
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Re: Pilot

Post by wolfsaver » Sat Mar 07, 2015 5:20 pm

Thank you, LS, for all that information! Really educational. :cool:

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thunder
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Re: Pilot

Post by thunder » Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:05 am

Thanks for the explanation and for taking the time, LadySekhmet.
I think I remember seeing Emma open the door with a key... so it's was probably locked at least.
And that Egyptian policeman clearly doesn't know how to impress women.

:brows "Wanna hold my gun?"

:uhoh

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Re: Pilot

Post by fruitbat » Sun Mar 08, 2015 9:52 am

Thanks for the info LadySek. I love archaeology, or to be honest, the idea of it. I think requires too much painstaking work for me; I'd just clunk a shovel into the ground and, if I didn't find King Tut's little brother's tomb immediately, I'd head for the beach.

Thunder, I think Emma took the key from a ledge just outside the "back entrance: to the tunnels. I did think it wasn't a very good hiding spot for a key.

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Marie
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Re: Pilot

Post by Marie » Sun Mar 08, 2015 4:32 pm

That was a wonderful post. Thank you! I really found it interesting. I've done a few dinosaur digs but nothing big - I learned it a lot more from your post!

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Helen8
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Re: Pilot

Post by Helen8 » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:07 pm

I'm with fruitbat, LadyS. Don't have the requisite patience to be an archaeologist. To squat there, in the blazing sun, wiping away centuries of sand and dirt, with a flipping toothbrush. :loco The men in the white jackets would come to take me away.

However, thank you for the Archaeology 101 class. Knowing that info will help with watching the show.

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LadySekhmet
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Re: Pilot

Post by LadySekhmet » Mon Mar 09, 2015 6:38 pm

haha! You're very welcome. Well, while there is much painstaking work, we aren't always glued to our toothbrushes and dental tools. There is a time and a place for them. I have a hand trowel, but we also use larger tools a lot more. I very rarely used a toothbrush. The Egyptian workmen use their traditional shovels, which look a lot like hoes, to scoop sand into buckets to be sieved. And in Egypt, there is a lot of sand to move so we have to adjust to different way of moving dirt. We also sieve dirt and sand through screens to make sure that we don't accidentally throw anything out. But-again-archaeology in the desert is way different from archaeology in soil. And cave excavation is a whole different ball-game. That cave is pretty clean (hello, Hollywood!) in the shots that we see, but who knows what it looks like where Hollywood hasn't been. And dinosaur excavations, while similiar, I suspect, are very different, as the paleontologists are probably focused on how to approach the issue of how to get Mr. Dino out of the ground. :ninja

We'll see what this week brings! :cool:

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thunder
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Re: Pilot

Post by thunder » Tue Mar 10, 2015 9:11 am

Maybe there's more archaeology in the next episode?

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thunder
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Re: Pilot

Post by thunder » Tue Mar 10, 2015 11:52 am

Chari910 wrote:http://deadline.com/2015/03/dig-ratings ... 201387808/

Ratings of 0.6 for adult 18-49, total of 1.83 million viewers.

It was up against American Crime Drama on ABC and Vikings (my fav too).
This just came up. ratings for all the viewings, and sister channels
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2015/0 ... rs/373361/
USA Network's epic event series, DIG, opened strong, garnering a combined L3 audience of 5.8 MM total viewers, 2.2 MM in 18-49 and 2.6 MM in 25-54 - across a total of 3 airings on March 5.
...
In total, a combined audience of almost 9MM tuned in for the premiere of Dig across USA and its sister networks, including Bravo, E!, Esquire and Oxygen from March 5- March 8.
I don't understand this rating system very much. If you want to explain, feel free. But they say it's good.... :wheee

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Helen8
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Re: Pilot

Post by Helen8 » Tue Mar 10, 2015 12:40 pm

Here's another one with very positive numbers:

http://www.thefutoncritic.com/ratings/2 ... 0310usa01/

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Marie
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Re: Pilot

Post by Marie » Tue Mar 10, 2015 8:06 pm

LOL Thunder - I'm not sure anyone understands the rating system! But Jason did tweet and seemed to be pretty happy with the numbers! I hope they hold up!

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Re: Pilot

Post by marilaine » Thu Mar 12, 2015 1:18 pm

<3 the scene where Peter is playing soccer with a group of local kids. One little boy picks up the ball, Jason picks him up, flips him upside down, shakes the ball out of his hands, and kicks it to another kid.
Bet the little boy was laughing to entire time.
Too cute.

~ML :loco :brows :cool:

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thunder
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Re: Pilot

Post by thunder » Thu Mar 12, 2015 1:26 pm

I thought that was cute too. Added a little light to the character... :D

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Re: Pilot

Post by marilaine » Thu Mar 12, 2015 1:27 pm

Jason with kids is pure magic.

~ML :D

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