The finale of this first season — SyFy has already ordered a second season — aired on Monday and it delivered on the promise of so many previous superhero shows with a finale that is explosive not for its action but for its words. Leigh Rosen, played by an inexplicable David Strathairn¹, ends the season with a dramatic action that will spin the story off into exciting and unknown territory that I trust the writers can follow through on. My one fear with the show’s direction is that it might hew to the path of The 4400, whose creator is working in the writer’s room on Alphas, because that show had similar stories to tell, but I think the creative team here is smart enough to resonate with that world without echoing it.

The second thought I wanted to get across here is that the existence of Alphas proves just how ridiculous the people who mock SyFy, or refuse to pronounce the name the way they want, or say the channel’s more interested in putting wrestling on the air than putting out good sci-fi are. This is the sort of show they want to make — technically they want to make this show and have it be a wildly popular and critical hit but let’s not split hairs in this moment of triumph — and when there are people out there who explicitly refuse to watch a show simply because it’s on SyFy, it infuriates me. It infuriated me even before this show was put on the air, but it’s now obviously a stubbornly ignorant position.

Footnotes

1. I’m so glad he’s doing this show, and I hope that the events of this finale aren’t a way of writing him out of the series barring the occasional guest appearance, but I never would’ve guessed his next move to be a jump to a SyFy series.

With that out of the way, I guess it’s time to talk about Pan Am, the new period drama about a flight crew aboard a Pan Am plane in the 60′s. I’ll be talking obliquely about certain plot points that aren’t obvious based on the short description above, so if you’re wary of spoilers and have yet to watch the premiere, this is where you stop reading.

I really enjoyed the pilot, a lot more than I ever expected to, even when early summaries started talking about the spy subplots, something that would normally guarantee a positive reaction from me². The flashbacks were a clever way of moving the action outside the frame of the plane, and continue to prove that flashbacks are awesome sauce. All the characters felt unique in a way that often doesn’t happen this early in a series run.

And from a purely aesthetic perspective, I loved the look of it. Even if Mad Men weren’t well written, acted, and directed the look and feel of the 60′s would make the show enjoyable, and that is if anything more true of Pan Am. The old school stewardess look is fantastic³, and the sheer pleasure the show exudes when showing a plane boarding is escapism in its own right given the current depressing state of air flight. This was a time when flight was a fancy, and the show excels when it’s selling you on the glamour of it all.

Of course, everything is glamourous at this point. The show is selling itself, so its best foot has been put forward. You’ve got sexy women wearing a fetishistic uniform, the intrigue of cold war espionage, and the hints of intrigue in the characters’ pasts. It all comes together to make a show that is incredibly enjoyable. The question that remains is whether or not the show will follow through on its promise, which is what next week will be all about. I know I’ll be there.

Footnotes

1. A related reason is that posting those smaller thoughts on this blog wouldn’t look right in its current incarnation, something I’m looking into fixing but it ultimately a fair way away
2. To be fair, when I did ultimately get to those parts of the story, they were immensely exciting to me.
3. Maybe it’s for the best that flight attendants can be of any gender, and they no longer have to wear girdles and fit into specific weight to height ratios, but it made for a very pleasant flight.

But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make.
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed.
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now.
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see.
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond.
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like.
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t.

I think I’m one of the few people who has never been bothered by commercials, which means they will not survive as they currently exist, so another method of getting money from the audience needs to be sussed out. And unless people are willing to start paying — and we’re not talking about $0.99 an episode, it would depend on the type of show because one hour dramas and period pieces and sci-fi stuff is more expensive, but given that the biggest shows nowadays pull around 10 million passive viewers, it would probably have to cost somewhere between $5 and $20 per episode to be able to exist from viewer pre-orders — for episodes of a TV show months in advance, with nothing filmed to sell the product even, I don’t see any alternative that will really work.

Buying episodes as they are released is a possible solution, but there are a lot of problems with it. First of all, networks get a lot of the money they need to produce shows from preselling ad time — the reason networks have upfronts is to give the advertisers a sneak peek at what they have airing next year, hoping that the more impressive projects will garner higher ad rates, all of this of course using the previous year’s ratings for any given time slot as the baseline for ad rates — and if we move to a world where the only revenue is from individual episode purchases that revenue stream disappears; second, if the only revenue stream comes from episode purchases/rentals, profits from that would logically be invested into future seasons of those shows, so it’s not at all clear where the money for pilots comes from, and fans of a show would probably complain if their show that “they pay for” suffers budget cuts because nobody watched some other show, which already happens right now, but people don’t connect it as readily; there are other problems related to this, and they’re not that hard to discover if you think about it for a few minutes.

When we talk about adapting to a new online purchasing paradigm, we talk about the music industry and the books industry. Books adapted fairly readily but books have considerably smaller start up costs. I can write a novel in my spare time on a $200 computer. A TV show requires orders of magnitude more capital to put together. An album of music does have a decent investment requirement, though still not anything near what a typical show requires, and the shift to online purchases has effectively killed the album as a piece of art. Musicians still put out albums, but album sales have absolutely plummeted just as singles purchases have skyrocketed, and that’s going to be the unit of work for a musician soon enough. Bands won’t put out albums anymore, they’ll put out songs. They can make money on this I think, but it means a lot of the artistry of putting together an album of music that comes together as a piece greater than its parts will soon be an even more endangered species. This isn’t really possible with television. Some shows can operate without continuity and simply put out episodes as a unit of work, but most shows today offer up some semblance of continuity over the course of a season and throughout the series. If we try to chop up shows into smaller bits in a rush to get people to buy those bits, we will lose one of the strongest aspects of television, the one that I think makes it an incredible medium to work in.

I’m not totally pessimistic. I think we’ll figure out a way to make money off of the type of content television puts out even if the television itself doesn’t survive as is. But I think it’s going to be a rough transition, and too few people really understand the unique complications of the television industry. Put simply, you probably haven’t really thought about this enough, and it’s not as easy as you think it would be.

In truth, the two big shows he seems to have a problem with are The Killing and Game of Thrones. The Killing is definitely too serious for its own good, and if it doesn’t improve I’m going to find it hard to return for a second season, but Game of Thrones, while telling a very dark story, still manages moments of levity, at least as many as Rubicon, a show he offers lenience to for its attempts.

But the odd thing is that he’s taking criticism with a specific set of shows and attributing it to the whole of television. What seems to be happening here is that television writers are being afforded the opportunity to tell stories that the old guard of television wouldn’t have allowed. Funny dramas aren’t being replaced, at least not entirely, but there is greater variety now, both in content and tone. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Not long ago, two people I follow on Twitter were talking about Star Trek.

The first was, based on my knowledge of the tweeter and the context of the here and now, I see as (most likely) a comical remark about the nature of our current culture of politics and how distrustful we are of foreign powers¹. The reply was less clear. It seems pretty obvious that, in the context of the Star Trek universe, the Federation is a peaceful organization. The only wars we’ve seen them take part in have been defensive, and they establish political and economic ties with neighbouring civilizations, including former enemies.

The only two rationales I can see for that second tweet are 1) that he agrees with Matt Yglesias that the Federation is not to be trusted and he misspoke intending to say it is absurd that they insist on claiming to be a peaceful organization; 2) he believes that an organization as large and powerful as the Federation should be a non-peaceful organization, perhaps expanding and annexing nearby planets and civilizations by force. The former is ridiculous when you look at the canon of Star Trek, which clearly shows the Federation as a benevolent force. The latter is ridiculous for a few different reasons.

Arguing for any nation/organization to be aggressive and possessive toward non-members is very odd to me. I’d thought the days of moral superiority, Manifest Destiny, or American Exceptionalism — all the sorts of ideas that lead to thinking a people are above another in some fundamental way — were gone but I can reluctantly accept that some people still linger on some of those thoughts. The even odder thing is that we’re applying 20th century precepts to a fictional 24th century organization, created by a man trying to construct a futuristic utopia. The political realities of today probably won’t apply three hundred years from now, and they definitely won’t apply to the fictional, preconceived-as-peaceful, time of Star Trek.

Footnotes

1. It’s entirely possible he is genuinely positing that the Federation doesn’t deserve to be trusted, but if that’s the case, this post remains relevant.

Drew McWeeny wrote an excellent piece today, after a long increasingly aggressive twitter argument with Harry Knowles, head of Ain’t It Cool News, describing why we can’t simply throw all the blame on the studios for the increasingly derivative and lazy film marketplace we find ourselves in. One of the problems, he notes, is that targeting a nerd audience doesn’t seem to work.

There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the “sure things” that have been greenlit specifically for them.

This is one of the reasons I find myself unable to visit Ain’t It Cool News anymore. As much as I like nerd-focused films, it seems like they’re never good enough for the online bastions of nerdery. The problem of course being that there is no such thing as ‘nerd-focused films’ because every nerd has their own idiosyncratic and extreme stance on what should happen to their film. Nerds, like too much of society today, are too self-centred to realize or appreciate the amazing things that happen on their behalf².

When a Captain America movie comes out, they trash it because his helmet doesn’t have wings, or when a Thor movie comes out they trash it because one of the characters is played by a Black man. They ignore the quality of the film, the writing, the directing, the performances, in order to feed their pointless minutiae-driven rants.

There’s no real solution to this. There’s a chance we’ll hit some critical mass and nerds will grow up a little bit and the world of film and television will be able to get back to creating good television regardless of nerd-based fan-service, works that can broaden the minds of all viewers not just satisfy the narrow expectations of the “fans.”

Footnotes

1. Another perspective here is that it’s amazing how bad some things are.
2. That doesn’t mean that things can’t improve; they undoubtedly can in almost every aspect of life, but that doesn’t mean things are bad.

The show broke the fourth wall at every opportunity and shattered virtually every convention of traditional sitcoms, it set a bizarre precedent and its influence on sitcoms can still be felt today. In short, it was one of those gloriously weird ahead-of-its-time shows whose existence we tend to mourn after a pitifully short life in recent years. But It’s Garry Shandling’s Show lasted for four years, first on Showtime and eventually being rebroadcast on a prime time network. I don’t know if it got cancelled at that point or he chose to end it so he could go do something else, but either way four years is a respectable run for a show as strange as this one.

In today’s market there are so many more channels, offering such a wide variety of niche entertainment; weird shows that used to survive by virtue of a lack of competition are now being supplanted by stuff people want to watch. The truth is that most of the time, weird experimental shows have an audience of a few million at the most. A few million is the very peak, and anything less than that is rarely considered viable in our current market — even though with more than one channel per million people, having an audience of that size should be considered quite respectable.

I’m not sure I’ve articulated this before, but I think we’re coming to a point in modern time where the increased access to increasingly targeted material aimed at increasingly narrow niches will make most of that content too economically risky to produce, except in low budget fare produced cheaply perhaps on and for the Internet. This isn’t the end of this sort of content, but we might see networks taking fewer risks and producing blander content hoping to reach the greatest common overlap of audiences. Yes, they already do that, but they still experiment with genre shows, and weird meta-driven comedies, and rich character driven serials. All of that could be shunted away from television to the internet, where everything is cheaper to make.

And make no mistake, as shows budgets get slashed, their ability to tell large stories, the type of stories people want to see from expansive experimental television, will fall away. Sometimes a limited budget can produce beauteous brevity, see The Twilight Zone, but there are some things that simply can’t be done on a small budget. Lost, for example, could not be made on a small budget. A show that explored similar ideas, maybe even with similar characters, could be made but too much of the scale would be lost — the dangers would feel smaller, the climaxes less earned — the show would no longer be Lost.

(It’s possible with the recent success of True Blood and The Walking Dead — and one hopes similar success for Game of Thrones — we will see a renewal of interest in interesting genre storytelling from the cable channels, but even premium cable channels have their limits: HBO cancelled Carnivàle, one of the best and potentially expansive¹ shows they’ve ever made, because of ballooning costs due to the fantasy nature along with it being a period piece, which tends to require larger budgets for the props departments. So don’t expect the cable channels to rescue us from network television mediocrity forever.)

But if the market speaks, there’s not much we can do about it. People will watch what they want to watch. Enjoy the good times while they’re still here. Watch Fringe maybe?

Footnotes

1. The show was cancelled before the scope of its story was fully widened, but from the rough sketches of the future of the show made available to fans, the story was headed to big places.

A guest-blogger over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog wrote about Rubicon echoing the common complaint, that the show is too slow. My issues lie not with her distaste for the pace, but with a tack-on statement that feels very wrong to me:

Rubicon needs some adjustments if it’s going to attract and keep viewers.

I think it’s true that Rubicon will likely draw a meager audience — though the inherent sexiness of conspiracy theories will probably entice a few people who would not otherwise watch a show of its caliber — but I think a better question is, “Is it any good?”

I understand that ratings are what keep shows alive, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect criticism of a show to be based on the merits of the show. Any related punditry about the politics of television renewal is similarly valuable — TV by the Numbers is one of my favourite television blogs — but they are two wholly separate endeavours.

There are certain shows and types of shows that will simply never be a huge success¹. Rubicon is not a common denominator show, and probably wouldn’t get big ratings even if it were the best conspiracy theory show ever made. Critics should be judging it from within that rubric, not aiming to nudge it into another. Movie critics don’t argue that slow cerebral thrillers should have more action sequences, why should television critics?

If you don’t like a certain genre or style or aesthetic, that’s fine. Make that preference clear. If you think a show is moving slowly, say so. Explain how your suggestions would improve the show’s quality. But don’t argue it needs to change in order to increase its ratings.

Footnotes

1. Exceptions like Lost and The Big Bang Theory, both shows that seem targeted at niches small enough that they have no right to be so successful, are obviously exceptions to the rule.

I’m Canadian so I get Space not SyFy; because of that, I haven’t experienced the tonal shift that SyFy is attempting, but when you read news about the channel picking up broadcast rights for WWE events and creating reality TV shows it’s easy to understand the audience frustration. But I don’t think a new channel will do anything but delay the inevitable. Capitalism being what it is, Mission Creep is always going to happen with niche television stations. It’s better to accept the changes while fighting for your particular interests to still be considered rather than run off and start your own channel. Maybe it’s the issues I have with The Tea Party and its cultural warriors — creating their own party because their already backwards party wasn’t backwards enough — but I think this sort of fragmentation is a bad thing.

I hate to reference the discussion among sane(r) conservatives regarding epistemic closure² but it has a certain relevance to the discussion; granted, a large group of people getting their political news from a single biased source isn’t quite the same as nerds wanting a genre-focused television channel, but that doesn’t change the broader implications embedded in that isolation.

One of the biggest problems inherent in niche television channels is ghettoification. By creating a channel dedicated to generating science fiction, you make it that much easier for larger networks to give up on science fiction for good, leaving that sort of content in the closed off ghetto of niche television. Television viewers will think less of content that can’t survive the ‘free market’ of network television, where broad appeal supposedly determines success.

I think there’s precedent for this in novels; no one thought less of HG Wells for writing science fiction, because the genre didn’t really exist, yet now when prominent authors write novels that are obviously science fiction they as work as hard as they can to deny it³.

When you look at the history of science fiction on television, there were a lot of fantastic shows that made their way through the traditional network model. And they had budgets that expressed that. The Syzygy Network is already stating they cannot produce any original content for the first five years of operation, and after that any original content they produce will doubtless be made with as frugal a budget as possible, something of a detriment in a genre dedicated to exploring the edges of possibility⁴.

I might simply be tilting at windmills here. General practitioners are becoming less common, replaced by specialists dedicating their lives to one particular subject. As Matt Ridley explains in his brilliant TED Talk, no one person knows how to make most of the products we rely on every day. The global scale is expanding faster than ever, but the individual remains mostly locked into a much narrower scope. The more there is to know, the more individuals must focus on a single field; the more there is to watch, the more people must make active decisions about the content they consume.

Footnotes

1. One of my first thoughts upon reading the name was to jump right to famously horrific train wreck of a film, Zyzzyx Rd, known for having one of the smallest box offices ever: a grand total of $20.
2. The number of times that phrase was repeated in political blogs was maddening.
3. I myself am guilty of this thinking on occasion. When I talk about Infinite Jest, I tend not to describe it as a science fiction novel, despite it carrying many of the fundamental attributes of science fiction, because it feels like it’s more than “just” a science fiction novel.
4. I’m not saying science fiction requires astronomical budgets, but certain types of science fiction are vastly aided by them.

As Lost was winding toward its conclusion and it became more and more apparent that not all of the series’ big questions were going to be answered, it touched off a bit of fan discussion about just how much needs to be tied up to make a satisfying ending. I realize that my position on these things is a bit unlike most other people who watch this sort of stuff for fun or a living, but, officially, I don’t care. If the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more nebulous, fine. Pile mysteries on top of mysteries until the groaning weight of the artifice topples in on itself. So long as the character stuff and the plotting are generally tight on an episode-by-episode level, I kind of LIKE it when things get so big that they seem to encompass all of human existence.

Exactly.

Footnotes

1. New job, new projects, blah blah blah, I need to stop being lazy.
2. Well, as I’ve said before, I think Lost gave us a lot more answers than most of the fans give it credit for, but the sentiment of this quote is dead on.

I won’t list all the “unanswered” questions I’ve read over the last week or so, but I haven’t found one that wasn’t already answered by the show or completely ridiculous and not worth answering.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer¹, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers², or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways³. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

Footnotes

1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent.
2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series.
3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker.

Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an actor who gave up on his career after giving it his all for as long as he thought he could last. Each episode centers around a party or event being catered by Henry’s new employer, a catering company whose employees are mostly people struggling for their first big break in Hollywood.

Along with Henry¹ are: Casey, a potential up-and-coming comic; Roman, a hard science fiction writer who feels above anyone and everyone; and Kyle, a pretty-boy actor. In the first season Henry is portrayed as the end result of Hollywood, someone who’s given up on their dreams. But despite this seemingly grim theme, season one is about Henry finding a place for himself without that all-encompassing passion. He finds someone to care for with Casey and finds himself more and more comfortable with being a caterer for the rest of his life, so long as there’s someone there to share it with.

But season one ended with Casey leaving him to follow her dream, to look for that big break somewhere else, him being promoted to manager of a team of caterers, and essentially no passion left in him. It was funny to see, but also tragic. We all look for some meaning in our life, and just as Henry had adjusted to a new meaning, it left to be a stand-up comic on a six-month long Alaskan cruise.

Season two brings us back around six months later and Henry is still recovering from the hurt Casey gave him and the sadness of his humdrum existence. In this episode, Steve “The Gute” Guttenberg happens to have a movie in his DVD collection that Henry had a small role in, which perks Casey’s curiosity. At the same time, The Gute encourages the crew to perform a reading of Roman’s recently rejected script, in the hopes of giving Roman ideas for improvement. These two plots manage to pack in a lot of really great themes and character growth into a few short scenes.

By Casey sneaking off to see Henry’s early work as an actor she realizes that he’s actually a really great actor, one who probably shouldn’t have given up on his dream. Casey’s desire to see Henry follow that dream is probably related to her recent success via a small role in an Apatow movie, but it nonetheless points to that larger idea.

And when Henry performs the improved version of Roman’s script — earnestly performing the material due to Casey goading him into it in order to, in my opinion, see if he can still act as well as he once did — we also learn that he’s actually a great actor. More than that, we see that he obviously misses it.

The question you have to ask now — well, this is a half-hour comedy so I guess you don’t have to do any of this analysis but this is what I live for — is what it is that gives us meaning. In the first season, Henry was looking for it in the people around him, and in love. Now, it’s not so clear that that’s enough.

I know that Adam Scott will have, at best, a limited role in any potential third season of the show, which has probably driven some of my thoughts and speculation about the direction of the season, but it seems to me that a really smart way to end this season would be to have Henry reaffirm his desire to be an actor and go off to pursue that dream. Or if they push that earlier in the season, maybe ending the season with his new big break, the one that will catapult him to real fame (and maybe next season he’ll host a few parties so he can hang with his old catering buddies). But whatever they do, I hope the show continues to explore these sorts of interesting themes in a new season, even without Henry there — though, at the moment, I can’t imagine the show being anywhere near as compelling without him there.

Party Down is a light-comedy centred around real characters and that juxtaposition makes it, like Parks and Recreation, one of those subdued comedies that manages to make you laugh at the same time as they explore romance and life in really important ways.

Footnotes

1. There are other regular cast members but these particular characters exemplify the themes I’m exploring in this post.

What you can’t do is whine like a petulant child when something you don’t like happens.

Tonight’s episode was absolutely amazing. The story raced along, the characters were all playing in their wheelhouse and their emotions felt true. Nobody behaved out of character². What happened tonight is what had to happen, even if it’s not what you think should have happened or what you would’ve liked to happen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry for a while.

Footnotes

1. I didn’t say your criticisms were correct.
2. I want to talk more about why the particular actions that occurred make sense for the characters, but I won’t do that tonight; this post is mostly about venting over the vitriolic hatred some Lost fans are spewing about this episode.

A recent addition to this group of series is Doctor Who. Two of the last three companions have had romantic feelings toward The Doctor¹ and the most recent companion, Amy Pond, has continued the trend with gusto. Which is where the angry fans get involved.

Many² fans are angry that every companion since Russell T Davies rebooted the show has been a potential paramour; I think it’s probably less than ideal if every companion is like this, but at the same time I’m much more interested in how it works for each individual case and I think the way they’ve handled Amy Pond’s infatuation with The Doctor has so far been pitch perfect.

But going a step farther, I think the new dynamic that has been established since the show returned is a more realistic one. A brilliant, intelligent man brings you around through time on fantastic adventures; do you expect anyone to not fall in love with the guy?

Footnotes

1. Some people claim that even Donna Noble had romantic tension with The Doctor; maybe I just hate Donna Noble too much to see that.
2. I know that’s a weasel word, and I’m not linking to any specific critiques, but I don’t feel like looking them up; they’re out there.

So far, at least, the show seems quite content to let Chuck and Sarah just be happy while being spies. And rightly so! It seems odd to me that no show that I can recall aside from the American version of The Office has had the long-term romance solidify and continue telling stories. Emotional connections are perhaps harder to establish with fictional characters when a romance isn’t one of the balls in the air, but conversely, storytelling is not merely the act of introducing sadness to people’s lives.

This isn’t to say that they need to be a perfect couple forever from here on out, but at the very least they have avoided for the time being the trap of the quick and implausible relationship collapse. I can’t wait to see how the rest of this season plays out¹.

Footnotes

1. Oh, also, the season’s winding down, the ratings are still unremarkable, and the show continues to be one of the best shows on right now. In conclusion… Start Watching Chuck, Dammit!

But I think it’s safe to say that Spartacus snuck up on people with its quality; it’s left me interested in the second season, and pondering where the characters will go before their preordained end. On a related note, it seems as though the show’s name has been retconned as Spartacus, with a season subtitle of Blood and Sand, to allow for the second season to shift out of the gladiatorial ring with the new subtitle Vengeance. So I look forward to Spartacus: Vengeance, though I do hope the show is more willing to forgo the over-the-top violence and sexuality¹ now that it’s found strong characters to base the show around.

Footnotes

1. The more recent episodes have come with a disclaimer telling viewers the violence and sexuality is there to portray a realistic representation of Ancient Rome, but HBO’s Rome didn’t whitewash the dingier parts of Ancient Rome without having such profuse and omnipresent nudity and violence, so some of it is clearly there for the sake of grabbing attention, and it’s that aspect of the show that I think could go away fairly easily.

There are a few ways this plays out but here’s the most likely: the show will continue to introduce arbitrary conflicts for their relationship, despite having concretely established their long-simmering love, which results in them defaulting to their on-again/off-again status.

The major conflict they put up for Chuck and Sarah’s love the last few episodes was that Chuck was now a killer and not the man she fell in love with which, admittedly, is a somewhat reasonable conflict¹ but that’s over with now. I’m not saying a different and compelling reason for them to fall out of love couldn’t be concocted by the writers, but I think any long-term relationship drama at this point would be laziness on the part of the writers.

It’s easy for the show to return to its status quo, because that’s what the writers have been doing for years; it’s much harder to take their relationship as a given and move on. I hope this is the path the show follows for the six episode run it has coming up and for the next season if it gets renewed². Will that happen? Probably not, but a man can dream can’t he?

Footnotes

1. Though not nearly as much as the show would have you believe, seeing as Sarah was supposedly falling for Shaw as her love for Chuck wavered and Shaw is a ruthless killer when he needs to be; he even shot himself!
2. fingers crossed

I’m currently in the process of watching Quantum Leap — a show that desperately needs a modern more serialized remake, which I totally want to write — but once that’s done, I think I’m going to take a break from these sorts of marathon viewings of television shows. I need to invest in some non-televisual thoughts.

Of course, in the meantime, all these episodes of Quantum Leap are still going to have to be watched, and I’ll probably have to write about at least a few of them before everything is said and done.

How to Make it in America sort of stumbles through its first episode, meekly establishing character relationships and not doing much in terms of plot. Another recent HBO show to behave this way for the first half of its season was Bored to Death, which eventually made its way toward an interesting story, so I don’t doubt that How to Make it in America could become interesting before the season is out, but the problem is that these shows aren’t using the guaranteed full season to heighten the drama, but instead as an excuse to not start strong.

Network television has many flaws, but pilot episodes are not among them. Grabbing the audience quickly was never the problem, it was maintaining that audience, and the show’s quality, as the season progressed.

Now, obviously, not every story leaps from the gate, but I also think it’s reasonable to expect a television show to produce compelling episodes that service the overall arc while retaining value when viewed independently. I guess what I’m trying to get across here is that there’s a difference between a slow burn and wasting time, and an increasing number of shows on HBO and its ilk are relying on the confusion between the two to evade tight storytelling.

30 Rock was the weakest half-hour of NBC’s two hour comedy block. That’s less a knock on 30 Rock than it is praising the other shows. In fact, this was also one of the best episodes of 30 Rock this year, which also means it’s one of the best of the last two years.

The addition of Elizabeth Banks went over much better than the addition of Julianne Moore. The fact that she didn’t have to do a bad Boston accent helped with that, but Banks seems a better fit to the show, with a stronger history in comedy. I hope she’s back for a few more episodes before the inevitably send her packing.

Jenna’s subplot is slightly more entertaining than usual, but only slightly. It’s surprisingly hard to lampoon an absurd celebrity self-centered actor without it getting dull and repetitive fairly quickly.

Liz’s search for someone to pick her up from oral surgery was a fun way of exploring Valentine’s Day, though they went a little too on the nose with the multiple explicit comparisons to the search for a Valentine’s Day date.

But I’m willing to ignore any and all issues I have with that particular plot because of the closing scene with all of Liz’s ex-boyfriends as Jamaican nurses. I think I could watch that forever.

Good cap to the night, and a sign that maybe the writer’s have found their groove again.

Some nice things in this episode:

• Despite their overuse of the card, Liz’s complete obliviousness to existence of front clasp bras was pretty great.
• ‘My stepson is my cyber-husband’
• What was up with that weird pause over the Julia Roberts line? Was that a jab at side-swipe comedy?
• http://jdlutz.com/karen/proof/
• ‘Prime Minister Wen wants a weak Yuan, do we?’
• ‘We’ll be right back after this ad aimed at the elderly.’
• ‘It’s one of those kids from Glee isn’t it?!’
• ‘One time, I ran over an old lady in Arizona and just kept driving!’
• ‘She was on Maxim’s ‘I’d Rape That’ 100′
• ‘Otherwise known as Jane Sadwoman.’
• ‘Don Cheadle on a bed of rice!’

As I just said in my post about tonight’s episode of Parks and Recreation, The Office lives through the eccentricities of their characters. They keep the characters well-grounded but everyone’s a little… more than you’d expect in real life.

Tonight’s episode was more grounded than usual in that its main plot was about a real world eventuality of acquisitions like the one the office experienced recently. Specifically, the redundancy that is the co-manager position. Basically, one of them needs to go back to Sales. Luckily for whoever that is, Sabre has no cap on commissions. Jim and Michael are both famously good salesmen either of whom could make more money in Sales so we end up with a fun situation where they’re both fighting to be demoted.

It’s great though how quickly Michael falls out of love with the idea of doing the actual work of becoming a salesman again. It took less than a day without an assistant and a big desk and the snacks for Michael to stop caring about the boost in his paycheque.

That storyline is fun, but most of the comedy actually comes from the more extreme absurdities of the office’s staff. And really, that mostly comes down to Erin and Andy, both of whom are so strange that you a) can’t wait to see them as a couple and b) can’t help but think they’re more real than any of the other people on the show. That said, as bizarre as those two are, I can’t help but root for them.

The Office is past its prime, but thanks to the time the writers invested into the characters early on it’s still one of the best comedies on television right now.

Some nice things in this episode:

• The Olympics cold-open was great.
• Words to live by: ‘I have this thing about men cutting or threatening to cut my throat. Don’t try to cut my throat.’
• Erin and Andy’s traffic jam riff was an example of one of those great moments the show does that are so much like something you would do but seem so bizarre when someone else does it.
• Dwight and Ryan’s evil cabal is great. As are the Lord of the Rings references.
• I was almost certain that Dwight hadn’t actually seen Saw until he mentioned legs getting cut off.
• Erin’s smile of pride over Andy’s crotch getting thoroughly sniffed by those massive dogs.
• Erin doesn’t know Peanuts? Again, so weird it has to be real.
• ‘I can’t even go near a cigarette now without thinking of a penis. And vice versa.’
• Oscar’s reading an old issue of The Atlantic, I think the December issue.
• Apparently, The Office has an unspoken rule of not casting known faces for guest spots until this Kathy Bates guest spot, but I think it works since she’s playing a larger than life character.
• ‘It’s not because of the smell, I’m just expecting a nosebleed.’
• I feel like Pam’s reaction to Andy saying his office-mates are his closest friends, is a little much. It’s not like she’s got a bustling social life outside of the office.

Parks and Recreation has been so much better this year on every level that it’s not surprising it’s not a rating winner, but if this season gets any word of mouth at all, those ratings should start shooting up.

Since this episode was all about Valentine’s Day, it makes sense that it was all about romances.

Ann and Mark’s relationship was a bit of a shock at first but it’s grown on me, primarily because it’s never been the main story of any episode. And it makes it a lot easier to like Mark, who was a bit of a cad and a bunch of a douche last season. It doesn’t seem like this relationship is destined to be long-lived, though. Ann’s comments during her talking head scene sharply demonstrated that a really normal relationship can also mean a really uninteresting relationship. Nonetheless, this little relationship has done quite a bit of heavy lifting by making Mark more likable and by bringing Ann closer to the office environment.

Leslie and Justin’s relationship had a great path and the way it ended, while keeping Justin totally likable, was kind of scary for its intelligence. From the first time we saw Justin he’d been a storyteller, and making that the key thing that makes Leslie realize they’re not right for each other is one of those story touches that less capable shows would screw up.

Tom’s awkward attempts to woo his ex-wife are sweet and very fitting a person as bizarre as Tom Haverford. They didn’t end well, but they continued the work of making Tom empathetic after a season of him mostly being the weirdo. What makes this show interesting is that they’re putting the work in to make all their characters relatable and realistic. Not that The Office is a grab-bag of slapstick tomfoolery but its main comic sources are drawn a bit broader than real life; Parks and Recreation hopes to mine the world of humour and pathos that exists on the other edge of the line, skirting realism in a way that you would think would make the comedy harder to come by, but this show makes it look easy.

One of the most impressive developments of this season is the stealth romance of April and Andy. The undefined age difference aside, their flirtations — and Andy’s obliviousness to it all — are one of the more romantic story lines they’ve weaved into this season while still remaining wildly funny. And of course, it’s led to whole new avenues for April. She’s still basically that deadpan sardonic ironic apathetic chick, but the glimmer in her eye when she dotes on Andy is opening her up to the world beyond the ’15 layers of irony’ her boyfriend (and his boyfriend) revel in.

Some nice things in this episode:

• ‘It makes The Notebook look like Saw 5.’
• ‘I’m gonna call him poo-pa.’
• Leslie: ‘Think of it this way: these songs are exactly like the songs you usually except instead of modern rock, they’re old jazzy standards from the 40′s.’
  Andy: ‘OK, yeah, you got a point.’
• ‘I never had a chance to get a girl a cliched Valentine’s Day gift before so… I got you all of them.’
• Mark in a tuxedo and red bow tie. Adorbs.
• A timely joke: ‘Stay away from John Mayer.’
• ‘I’m gonna throw up real quick and then we can leave!’
• The people on the show seem to be acknowledging the camera a little more in the recent episodes, I like it so far I just hope they don’t over-do it.
• ‘Uhh… I mean, that sucked, didn’t it?’
• Guitarist: ‘Maybe if you sang it like Louis Armstrong.’
  Andy: ‘Maybe yeah, I mean here’s the thing though… who is that?’
• ‘If I’m not mistaken, that was the old lady version of flashing.’
• Andy is too quotable.

Community explored the politics of the drunk dial tonight. Britta’s slick veneer of disinterest in Jeff was shattered by the power of alcohol. As easy as it would be for the show to use a moment like this to ruin Jeff’s existing relationship, with his hot former statistics professor¹, while advancing the Will-They-Won’t-They narrative, maybe even getting another kiss out of the potential couple, Community doesn’t hit those sorts of lobs.

Community has shown itself to be a shrewd observer of the classic tropes of television. Even when it follows these tropes, it subverts them as it did expertly in this episode. With some sharp writing, it managed to strengthen Jeff’s current relationship and deepen Jeff and Britta’s friendship while keeping the door open for a genuine romance further down the road. Also, they got Britta into this dress.

Chevy Chase in a pantsuit was nice too I guess.

So far this year, Community’s been remarkably consistent for a new series. I can’t think of a demonstrably weak episode and none of the characters feel like the unwanted step-children of the writers. Earlier this week Dan Harmon, creator of Community, tweeted:

I’d start phoning it in if it weren’t for the fear that nobody would know the difference.

To which I say, if he were phoning it in we’d know. Oh, how we’d know.

Some nice things in this episode:

• Annie clapping along with Senor Chang’s Spanish chicken dance.
• Abed’s inability to recall television minutiae while hungover.
• Britta in that dress. I mean, wow.
• ‘Wassup’
• BCI
• ‘I’m Abed, I never watch TV.’
• Cupid Being. Not only blind, but dizzy and belligerent.
• ‘He’s a young The Asian Guy from Lost’
• ‘One Papa John’s commercial, and he thinks he’s Christian Bale.’
• The Breakfast Club montage homage would have gone completely over my head if I hadn’t watch this video earlier this week.
• Troy’s got mad Booty Quake skills.

Footnotes

1. It has to be said that the women on this show are, quite possibly, too hot.

Heroes is without a doubt the worst show I watch right now. I say that as a regular watcher of Smallville, a show that should have been thrown off the air a few years ago. This season started with some promise, but it quickly evapourated; characters returned to their most annoying of ways, plots twisted and turned aimlessly and lifelessly, and the desperation of the writers fouled every frame of the season.

NBC has yet to renew Heroes for the new year, and I hope it doesn’t. Some people are talking about giving the writers one more season to wrap up the show, but not only do I have no faith in the writers to actually accomplish that goal, I also think there’s really nothing left for the characters to do, they’ve spent four seasons repeating the same arcs over and over.

The general ineptitude of the writers makes me think they stumbled upon winning characters four years ago and don’t know how to make those characters grow and so they try to duplicate the characteristics that first made them popular with horrible results.

Heroes is a sickening festering wound on television, one that it beyond repair or recovery and it must be excised before it can do more damage.

This was the biggest disappointment I’ve ever experienced I think — OK that’s a little harsh, but it’s definitely a weak ending to a show that was deserving of better. This show had its flaws but throughout its run I managed to find points of enjoyment. I found none of those things in this completely uncompelling hour of television.

Topher saved the world. Well sort of. I mean there’s still a massive gap¹ in the memory of everyone who was imprinted, and the few people who managed to avoid being turned into a dumb-show or a butcher and have struggled through the years unaware of what caused this apocalyptic period to either occur or to cease.

And just like any Whedon show, it needlessly killed off main characters. The problem with Whedon is he always kills these characters off in such a glib manner that it loses any emotional resonance. He tried to make Paul’s death have a greater meaning by using it to make Echo realize that she should have been nicer to him, so she imprints herself with a Paul wedge that was luckily on hand. And they can be together forever. Whatever. Their romantic relationship was always weekly and meekly defined, and ending it in this way only would have worked if the audience cared, which they didn’t.

And Topher killed himself with his de-Dolling bomb. Not really much to say about any of that. Topher was crazy, then I guess he wasn’t, and then he built the magical device that can undo everything in like five minutes. Oh, and then he blew himself up. He has a saddish goodbye with DeWitt who really doesn’t try very hard at all to stop him from his kamikaze mission. And he reminds the audience that he liked Bennett, but aside from that he was pretty much just a mess all episode. The one nice touch was blowing up his mind-bomb in DeWitt’s old office, destroying the “To Remember” collage on the wall as he erased the last ten years² from the world.

Granted, all of this might have been better handled if the post-apocalyptic storyline were spread over several episodes. Some of this might feel more natural, but a lot of it would remain arbitrary and flawed in many ways.

Now that it’s over, I sincerely think anyone looking into Dollhouse as a show shouldn’t even waste their time with the ‘Epitaph’ episodes. They provide very little to the actual substance of the show, a show that was much better at exploring questions of identity than it was at questions about abusing technology.

Goodbye Dollhouse. I’m sorry to see you go. Especially in this way.

Footnotes

1. The timeline’s a little vague on when the apocalypse happened. The earlier implication was that it happened not long after last week’s episode. And this episode bears that out in some ways — Harding has burned through numerous bodies through sloth and gluttony — but it seems unlikely that Felicia Day’s character was in university when the apocalypse started and could still be so youthful a decade later. Or that the small child Caroline inhabited would have been imprinted so recently that she has basically her age’s level of development and intelligence when her original personality is restored.
2. Again, the timeline’s vague, but I’m going from how I see it, and that’s at most one year after the events of Dollhouse’s penultimate episode

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.

I think that some of that is Christian moralizing¹, but there’s something to be said for certain levels of decency and morality keeping a group of people from collapsing into an anarchic wasteland. And when you get to the point that thousands are gathering to watch people murder each other, it’s safe to say your society probably isn’t on the upswing.

So when I sat down to watch the pilot episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the new drama from Starz set in ancient Rome and centred around a Thracian gladiator slave named Spartacus, I was a little confused as to the message it wanted to send.

The show’s battle scenes are filmed in a very stylized manner, with blood spewing everywhere and slow motion used to freeze it in the air. It’s basically the style 300 used but, if at all possible, brought to an even crazier extreme.

As the final battle of the pilot plays out, Spartacus battles four other gladiators, the crowd cheers on his murderous spree practically salivating over the blood spilled on the sand of the battlefield, and I couldn’t help but think this was a commentary on the audience itself, people who sit back and cheer on these sorts of gore-infused battles. But at the same time, I think I’m giving the show too much credit. Maybe the show is just very brazenly targeting a known audience through explicit and extreme ultra-violent television.

I think I’ll give it a few episodes before I make a final decision on that, though. The pilot was written by Steven S DeKnight, a writer whose work is usually smarter than that, so depending on how it plays out in subsequent episodes, the show could be using the violence purely to draw male demographics, or to cast aspersions on society for being drawn to this sort of violence, or maybe even a bit of both.

Footnotes

1. Similar arguments have been cast at atheists for being the cause for the glorification of violence that is seen in modern society. I tend to think that the moral brigade over at the MPAA which blocks many excellent films from a broader audience for the use of bland curse words or exhibiting human romance — tell me how the hell Once got an R rating — but letting what some would call extreme violence make its way into PG and PG-13 films on a regular basis is more of a culprit than the growing secular movement of people who manage to live with a moral code not dictated to them via existential threats of eternal damnation.

Quick plot summary: Boyd drugged Echo/Caroline so she wouldn’t be able to tell everyone that he was Rossum’s founder. Then they went straight to Tucson and got arrested by Rossum goons. Boyd ‘broke out’ with Topher and led him to the lab where they were building the remote imprinting device. It wasn’t working and Topher fixed it, at which point Boyd reveals that as part of his plan and reveals he’s Rossum’s founder. Ballard and Mellie went off to destroy Rossum’s supercomputer and as they were doing it Boyd forced DeWitt to activate Mellie’s sleeper mode. Ballard managed to get Mellie to ignore her assassin orders but not for long so she killed herself. Boyd holds Ballard hostage to stop Echo from killing him, but she shoots Ballard in the leg to get him out of the way. She gets into a tussle with Boyd and when Boyd gets the upper hand, Topher appears from behind and Dollifies Boyd with the remote imprinting device he fixed earlier. Echo tells the Doll Boyd to wear a vest of C4 and carry a grenade into Rossum’s supercomputer and pull the pin. They destroy the supercomputer, Topher has the only working prototype of the remote imprinting device and Rossum’s two founders appear to be dead. The world is saved. Cut to ten years later, the world is in turmoil, Ballard and Echo are fighting their way through the streets of LA, now an apocalyptic battleground.

As all of that was happening, Anthony and Priya headed to Tucson to help out and they did, and Dr Saunders is now a new version of Clyde, wears a suit and is still outrageously hot.

OK, so let’s talk about Boyd’s master vision. Years ago he saw Clyde’s tech, presumably before anyone else since it was pretty wildly revolutionary, and decided that because it existed it would be used, abused, and eventually lead to the downfall of man through weaponized imprinting. So, rather than destroying the technology, he decided to neuter Clyde, take the technology far beyond Clyde’s initial goals, abuse it to become one of the most powerful men in the world so he could find a vaccine for imprinting, use that vaccine on the precious few he wanted to save, and then create the apocalypse himself so that he and his followers could be the few sane people in a world of madmen.

I guess it works, but I think it would have made more sense if Boyd didn’t think he was being the good guy. He’s fomenting an apocalypse, he developed and distributed the technology he’s supposedly trying to stop. He’s not the good guy. Buffy villains always knew they were the villain, it’s what made them interesting. The Mayor of Sunnydale is the best example out there of an affable villain, and that seems like a better mold to make Boyd from. Nonetheless, it worked well enough. The one thing I particularly like about villain-Boyd was his dislike of Ballard, since Boyd and Ballard apparently have the same fundamental belief — that the technology will be abused if it exists — though one of them is obviously thinking bigger and the ways they react to that fundamental belief are diametrically opposed.

The ending was also interesting but at the same time uninteresting. Either the technology got reinvented and the world still ended, someone else took over at Rossum and finished the job, or Boyd and/or Clyde had other copies of themselves, along with the schematics for the remote imprinting device, and continued their work until they brought about the apocalypse. One of those things happened, and it might be fleshed out and explained in the series finale, but there’s a question of it really matters what particular finger pushed the button on the apocalypse. Besides, the promo for the finale made me think the show has something else planned.

And since we’re on the topic, I thought I’d pooh-pooh the finale as it is sold in that promo. It seems like they’re planning on having Topher invent a new magic that can restore people to their original personalities. And I can only assume also make imprinting either impossible or closer to the way Echo experiences it, thus making the tech mostly harmless. The world will still have collapsed into horror for ten years meaning that rebuilding the world as we know it is a long-term project unlikely to be finished in their life time. And it’s also just more magic. I know that the show is sci-fi, but inventing a new technology that fixes everything each time things get worse is not a good system. It’s what Voyager did for years and we all know how I feel about Voyager.

Still, I hold out hope that the finale will be better than that. And I guess we’ll know for sure in a couple weeks.

The best part about this episode to me, though, wasn’t the big reveal, which I’ll get to in a minute, at the end but the way the story was told. Using flashbacks to Caroline’s past life that were tied thematically and emotionally to the modern day events was a great way of telling this story; the flashbacks let you give some emotional resonance and depth to the characters by tying current events to the character’s past, while also revealing long-standing mysteries, and to top it all off you can let the main storyline barrel forward without getting bogged down in explicit character building. It’s one of the smartest storytelling techniques out there for long-term serialized shows, and I think was one of the reasons Lost was such a hit right out of the gate. Granted, Dollhouse isn’t telling a story that’s particularly well-suited to this device most of the time but the improvements in the dramatic thrust of the episode brought by it are obvious and substantial.

On to the story. Caroline three years ago broke into the Dollhouse and found out about Bennett so she befriended her, ultimately giving up on using her because they grow close. But Bennett wants to help her so they go through with her plan to bomb Rossum. But things go awry and to make things worse DeWitt is headed there and so they’re screwed. So the memories of Caroline that Echo received from Bennett a few episodes ago aren’t exactly how it played out; rather than Caroline abandoning her to evade capture, she was running away so no one would suspect Bennett of helping her when she was captured. At which point she is brought to meet the top guy, the man behind the curtain as it were. And it’s…. well, like I said, I’ll get to that in a minute.

Meanwhile, in the present day, they’re trying to imprint Echo with Caroline so they can discover who is running Rossum but her wedge — the harddrive containing her personality to everyone else — is missing, luckily Topher kept the backup that Alpha destroyed last year in the hopes of restoring it and it just so happens that Bennett has previously restored a damaged wedge. So, while DeWitt clears out the Dollhouse telling all the Dolls their contracts are up, Topher and Ballard kidnap Bennett to help them restore Caroline. As all of this is happening, Boyd brings Dr Saunders, who he’s been banging and sexting on a regular basis ever since she disappeared, back into the Dollhouse.

Dominic finds his way out of the Attic, DeWitt is ordered to relinquish command of the Dollhouse by Rossum for letting people get out of the Attic, and Boyd killed all the Rossum minions sent to take over the Dollhouse, getting shot in the process. To avoid drawing attention, she said Boyd was behind it all and sent him on the run so the Dollhouse had more time to get ready.

Topher and Bennett work to repair the wedge — Bennett also stops working on it for a while because she hates Caroline, but eventually Echo promises to let Bennett do whatever she wants to Caroline afterward, and because of what happened next it’s a pretty pointless diversion so I really probably shouldn’t have included it all but there you go — all the while flirting voraciously. Because they are so adorable together, and in fact they share a few smooches, and because of that I knew that something would go wrong. Which is why when Dr Saunders started talking to Bennett about how much Topher loves her my heart didn’t go pitter-patter so much as my brain started saying goodbye to Bennett. And, right on cue, a bullet races through Bennett’s skull.

As a sidebar, I’m getting really tired of Joss Whedon’s relentless nihilism with respect to healthy relationships. Not only is it lazy — it’s much easier to write the beginnings of a relationship than it is to keep a healthy relationship going long-term — but it’s also really boring and it detracts from pretty much any long-term character involvement. I mean, I loved the Topher-Bennett pairing, it made me squee in delight, but the second it was consummated it’s like my brain flipped a switch and I stopped caring. Precisely because I know that Joss Whedon will end these things. Always.

So Bennett is dead but Topher continues the work and repairs the wedge. Rossum soldiers storm the Dollhouse just as Topher begins to imprint Echo. A soldier approaches Echo mid-imprint but before he can do anything his neck is snapped from behind by a returned Boyd. Yay Boyd! Except that whole thing about Caroline meeting the man behind Rossum? It was Boyd. And he had plans for her. Um…. WTF?

OK, so the elephant in the room is Boyd. I think it’s a great twist, and if the reveal was properly scheduled — I think it probably wouldn’t have happened until maybe season three or four, maybe a cliffhanger twist at the end of season two, if the show were a success and Whedon could play out his plan over the full five years he originally envisioned — it would have been one of those epic moments in television that would be talked about for years.

That said, it’s still potentially great. I’m not going to presume brilliance or stupendous failure  for the follow through on this, but I’m also not making my final decision about the Boyd twist until I see next week’s episode; depending how they play out present day Boyd-as-villain this could be brilliant or terrible.

The rest is a bit of a wash. We got a little more info about Caroline’s past and got to see more of Echo wishing Caroline wasn’t around to have a claim on the body she considers hers. Topher is deepened once again; in fact he’s been given so much focus this season it’s almost overkill. But it’s all still pretty damn good but as the season comes to an end and the mythological arcs start to climax the little character moments start to taper off.

This episode really solidified Dollhouse as one of the more tragic tales of the past decade. Not on a story level, though a pending apocalypse is hardly cheery, but on an administrative level.

Dollhouse suffered for many reasons. The show’s high concept sci-fi concept, Fox’s early meddling, and Joss Whedon’s notorious series beginning jitters, something he only escaped once with Firefly.

If the show had managed to gain a strong audience and last long enough for Whedon to stretch out this story properly, it would’ve been a thing of beauty even with the occasional weak episodes. But that didn’t happen and next week we get the penultimate episode which will probably condense a season’s worth of storyline into an hour. Should be fun.

To clarify, Steve Burns is not dead, but my sister and her daughter were both absolutely certain that he was. My sister even bet me twenty dollars that I was wrong, though I doubt I’ll ever see that money.

The more troubling aspect of this brief foray into morbid gambling was my niece who even upon seeing Steve Burns’ Wikipedia page, his IMDB page, and his band’s MySpace page still refused to believe that he was not dead. I’ve struggled with her for a while now, trying to get her to accept things when the facts confront her — she’s still a steadfast believer in the Loch Ness Monster — but this was a particularly galling example.

Steve Burns’ death is not a conspiracy theory, but the way my niece reacted to confrontation was similar to that of a conspiracy theorist, driven by the same sort of behaviour, an unwillingness to change your beliefs. What I took from that conversation was that my niece preferred it when what she had believed for years was correct, that to accept that she was wrong was a slight on herself, an embarrassment. Unfortunately, not changing her opinions as her understanding of the facts improves is the more shameful tact.

This reaction of ossification in the face of new evidence is one facet of why conspiracy theories continue to drain on us. Another is the excitement of it all. It’s more enticing to believe that all the horrible things that happen to the world and the people in it have a shadowy figure lurking behind it all, tugging strings, calling out orders, making the world dance their dance of death.

Kennedy? It wasn’t a lone nut job, it was a conspiracy so vast in its reach yet so stealthy in its wake that there is literally no proof, no substantive witness that can corroborate any of it. That second version is sexier to be sure, so it’s easy to get swept up into the ‘majesty’ of the conspiracy.

I used to be a Kennedy believer, and I even had my doubts about the moon landing after Jonathan Frakes brought forth some compelling evidence¹ so I know what it’s like to be on the conspiracy bandwagon.

Well actually that’s not true. It was easy to believe these things when it was just me and shitty television specials, but once there were other people involved, once I started looking into these sorts of things online rather than on exploitative television specials, I found the endless supply of debunkers, ready with piles of facts discounting every piece of ‘evidence’ conspiracy theorists throw at you. I accepted that I was misled and mistaken, and I moved on with my life.

But many people, it seems, get trapped in this vortex of fear, they get dragged into it by misinformation and by the time someone is there to correct them they’ve become invested in the lie. I don’t think there’s a way out of this — conspiracy theories will never go away completely — except that the media should be more responsible about what they put out there.

Unfortunately, the media seems to be getting lazier and more willing to lie for ratings. Last night, I watched an episode of Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, a show that takes the baton from the Fox Alien Autopsy specials from the 90′s and runs like it’s being chased through the woods by a ManBearPig. It’s so obviously misleading and manipulative that it was entertaining to me. But it also infuriated me.

I don’t know if regulation of these sorts of things is possible or even viable — the sketchy claims of these shows are often veiled in excuses and hedge words designed to evade these sorts of regulations — but the visceral disdain for truth, reality, and yeah I’ll say it humanity that shows like this demonstrate with their lies and obfuscations is deeply deeply troubling to me.

I think that the way these sorts of shows exploit people’s imaginations and their desire for an exciting world with villains to point fingers at is one of the most pernicious aspects of modern day media. Too often you’re given the words of crackpots as gospel, or even worse the words of a reputable scientist twisted to fit the narrative the show wants to follow.

Unfortunately, I’ve got no solutions. Except continuing to ridicule my niece until she gets it through her head that the Rule Of Cool² doesn’t apply to the real world. You should do that same.

Footnotes

1. Yes, this is sarcasm.
2. NB Don’t click that link if you want to be productive ever again

I know, I know, it seems like every time I talk about season two of Dollhouse, I end up complaining about Epitaph One, but that’s because Epitaph One just doesn’t fit.

This season has been expertly layering in the depths of Rossum’s evils, and hinting at a dark future ahead if Rossum’s plans go forward. We’ve seen remote wiping, presidential Dolls, and they’ve hinted at remote imprinting, and the first episode of the night was about the dehumanizing aspects of shared thought. These are all harbingers of a vague yet looming threat, except that it’s not vague at all because an unaired episode fleshed all this out before. Epitaph One hasn’t been working for me. Rather than intensifying the experience of watching this universe march toward oblivion, it serves as a spoiler.

All of the things that would ultimately lead to the apocalypse of Epitaph One were not there in the first season, or if they were it was in such a minimal form that it’s not worth discussing. And so season two’s task was to unveil that possibility, piece by piece. Which it has been doing. But it all feels empty because Epitaph One brought us there already along with a cliff notes recap of what led to it.

There’s no doubt that this season is doing what Epitaph One did but better. Which is why no one watching this show should watch Epitaph One before the second season. It just shouldn’t be done.

On to the main story for this episode. DeWitt continues to be evil¹ in the real world and Echo, Victor, and Sierra are fighting for their lives in the Attic.

The Attic it turns out is a semi-shared dream state where you’re constantly amped on adrenaline facing your worst fears. Dominic, who was sent there last season, has been jumping through minds of other people stuck in the Attic trying to stop a large black monster running through the Attic killing people. And when you die in the Attic you’re dead in real life.

Eventually, Dominic meets up with Echo and the others and they catch the killer, who morphs into a diminutive nerd named Clyde when caught. Clyde is one of the founders of Rossum, the one who discovered the tech. His co-founder encouraged him to create the first Doll as a copy of himself (Clyde) but without any ambitions of his own. Shortly after Clyde 2.0, now working exclusively for the other co-founder, sticks Clyde in the Attic, the first of many, and begins to build Rossum’s evil empire.

Clyde also became the foundation of that empire because the Attic, rather than being a place you put people you don’t want to deal with anymore, is actually a massive multi-processor computer that runs all of Rossum, and the processors are the people in the Attic. He’s been killing them basically in the hope of screwing up Rossum’s mainframe.

Clyde can’t remember who the other founder of Rossum is or what Clyde 2.0 looks like, though it’s not clear if that’s a side-effect of being in the Attic since 1993 or that they took it from his brain, but apparently there was a girl that has seen both of them and was caught by Rossum, a girl named Caroline. This is a cool twist and it finally answers the question of why Caroline was on the run from the Dollhouse. So they’ll need to imprint Echo with Caroline and use her knowledge of Rossum’s lead people to try and stop them.

And what they need to stop is basically what we saw in Epitaph One, which is also the backdrop for a bunch of this episode as its Clyde’s worst nightmare as well, an apocalypse that arises from Rossum’s evil doings. Presumably, Rossum is aware of this and would like the world not to end, since that would be bad for business and for profit margins, but we’re supposed to accept that a self-serving corporation would gleefully head into an apocalypse, so I will accept that; there was a time when I would have thought that was a completely outrageous concept but seeing how vociferously the health care industry is fighting reform, despite the absolute certainty of the total desolation of the American economy if growth progresses the way it has for the past few decades, I’m more sympathetic to the self-destructive corporation conceit.

Eventually, Echo figures out a way out of the Attic and she and Victor and Sierra all escape — the way out is dying and then magically coming back to life, but because Echo is Echo it works — and it’s revealed that DeWitt put Echo in the Attic to find out about Rossum’s weaknesses. And now everyone in the Dollhouse is in on the conspiracy and they all want to stop Rossum. So that’s a pretty cool direction for the final episodes to follow, even if it seems like the apocalypse is going to happen regardless of what they do.

This episode has little in terms of theme. The main Dolls experienced their worst nightmares ad infinitum but that didn’t really offer much new to work with. The apocalypse was brought to the forefront, and the Dollhouse hardened against Rossum, but all of this is basically plot. The idea of humans being used for their processing power is not a new one, but I think it’s done better here than anywhere else I’ve seen it; comparisons to The Matrix are misplaced, however, as that was about the body heat of a living person generating power, not about brain’s being used for computing power.

And, despite the tonal dissonance, I really liked the line about not knowing what year it is because they don’t know how long they’ve been off the air. Though if this weren’t a Joss Whedon show, I probably would have chided the writer’s for shoving a cheap meta-joke into a tense scene.

This episode was powerful for sheer narrative thrust. Not a lot happened to the characters, but the story shot forward toward what I hope is a thrilling conclusion. We’ll see in the next year.

Footnotes

1. Completely contrary to the flashbacks from Epitaph One so any viewer who’s seen it knows this is all a ruse or temporary at the very least.

I think one of the reasons I initially disliked this episode was because it introduced a new realm of mind-fuckery beyond what the Dollhouse was doing. This is something the show probably should be doing half-way through their second season: building the world, growing it out but keeping the core there, is what smart shows do but given the context of knowing that Dollhouse ends in a few episodes and that this particular Group Think technology will likely not be explored again — not saying it won’t be, but this has the feel of a one-off when compared to the other mythology based stories we’ve been inundated with recently — in the time the show has left.

But it was still a very cool idea, and even more it was a very sci-fi idea, and while Dollhouse is certainly one of the shows on the air right now that’s mostly open about its sci-fi basis it still tends to hide that aspect of itself whenever possible.

So Victor, who maybe I have to start calling Anthony (or maybe Tony), is released from his contract, dropped into the real world, and is quickly scooped up by a group of ex-soldiers looking for new recruits. Turns out they work for Rossum in a private army and are all connected neurally so they share thoughts and eventually lose their own identities to the Group Think.

Boyd and Topher get Echo to help them find Victor, and when they find out about Rossum’s private army they imprint echo with a few more minds with useless skills and imprint Sierra with her original mind, Priya, in the hopes of using her connection with Victor to save him from losing his identity.

Cutting all the interesting but not particularly exciting action sequences out, Echo is driving Tony and Priya away from the super soldiers and decides to let them go because they have their original minds back so they should be free. But before they can get away Topher’s disruptor is used on the three of them. Echo wakes up and DeWitt tells her she’s going to the Attic, along with Victor and Sierra. And that’s where the episode ends.

So despite the initial reaction, there are a few really great things about this episode. I especially appreciated the explication on what happens to released Dolls. We’d already seen Madeline living a fairly pain-free life post-Dollhouse despite her child still having died. It’s made more clear here that these sorts of traumatic events are either erased by Topher or molded to have less of an impact when he re-imprints the ‘original’ personalities back into the Dolls.

That little detail is another sign of the writer’s filling in the blanks while introducing more mysteries, something a second season should always do, but here it’s a little depressing because you can see in the scripts that the writer’s were hoping the show would get picked up. This isn’t the sort of episode you would get from a writer’s room waiting for the axe to drop¹.

Another small note that got played repeatedly in the first season, best exemplified by the first episode Ghost, was that Dolls can atone for the failings and weaknesses of their imprints, that that somehow heals the original. But here, those threads come together in a much more practical manner.

Eleanor Penn is still rattling around in Echo’s head, and she received catharsis thanks to Echo so she is capable and functional as a subset of Echo’s mind. In the case of Eleanor Penn she was already functional though broken, but there could have been worse cases that Echo ‘fixed’ in her weekly missions that lead to useful skills being easily accessible. This is all long-term thinking on the part of the writers, which is great to see but also sad because we know the impending fate of the show.

I like the speed at which the show is pushing forward the narrative this season, but it certainly feels rushed when compared to the first season; Rossum becoming out-and-out evil seems like a third season reveal, maybe even fourth season, which makes me wonder what sorts of things they had planned for the show had it been renewed. The continual re-scoping of the show’s core each season worked wonders for Lost, so it may have been equally successful for Dollhouse, but I guess we’ll never find out now.

I can’t think of much else to say about this episode. It was an above average episode and set up the next one quite nicely. See you then.

Footnotes

1. Unlike Epitaph One which I’ll talk about in my review of the second episode of the night The Attic.

Alpha has been going around killing off all of Echo’s previous romantic engagement clients, while Echo has remained in confinement as DeWitt searches for what happened in the three months she was away. After venturing down a failed psychotherapeutic avenue, Topher tells her that Echo seems fine to him, which is a bald lie as the next scene he’s screaming at Ballard and Boyd about Echo’s crazy brain scans, who reveal to him that Echo remembers all of her past imprints and can recall them as needed. This was made clear in the last episode, but repeated here I suppose for people who didn’t understand that she was doing it on purpose.

When Echo goes out for an engagement, with the man Alpha killed in the opening scene, she returns with a note from Alpha. Shortly afterward, Sierra returns from an engagement with a message from Alpha, who ordered both of those engagements. The Dollhouse catches on to Alpha’s mission of killing all the loves of Echo’s life, and DeWitt orders all the Dolls re-wiped in case he’s tampered with them. The message Alpha gave to Sierra, meanwhile, has led Ballard and Boyd to his next target, the birthday boy from the very first episode of Dollhouse, who Alpha has on the roof of a building ensconced in explosives, with a dead-man’s switch in his (Alpha’s) hand. An explosion ensues.

Unable to protect her clients in the real world, they start collecting them all and putting them under guard until they can track down Alpha. The only one they can’t get hold of is Joel Mynor, from last year’s stellar mid-season episode Man on the Street, who is on a secret vacation and no-one knows where it is. Except maybe, his wife, who Echo can recall as needed. So they use Echo to find him and bring him in. But it doesn’t matter because Alpha broke in and he was only killing clients to scare the Dollhouse into re-wiping their Dolls — turns out he put a virus into Sierra’s brain (somehow) that made all the Dolls sleepers in wait — so he could cause havoc and use that as a diversion to get at Ballard, the only person Echo truly loves, the one she’s not programmed to love.

Alpha tries mapping Ballard’s brain to find out what makes him so special to Echo, though if he’d watched Dark City he’d know he was looking in the wrong place, and in the act of it, Ballard goes brain-dead. Echo beats the shit out of Echo when she finds Ballard’s brain-dead body, but stops short of killing him because Alpha has imprinted himself with Ballard’s mind. The episode ends with Ballard in a coma, and everyone aware of Echo’s special skills, including DeWitt who looks none to pleased.

So this episode had a couple interesting ideas, but nothing as rich as the past three had. Mynor’s statement that ‘You can’t ever really delete a program, once it exists it’s alive’ was another way of evoking fear about science. Once something has been discovered it’s already too late. I still think that Dollhouse’s position on scientific progress is too Manichean but the show is layering it into unexpected places very subtly, so I have to comment on it, and comment positively I have.

The show also continued to push the idea that Dolls are people, or at least special ones like Echo are. It seems like the show is heading towards a world of Echo-like Dolls, all composite and guarded against imprints taking over their minds. It’s interesting that the show seems to, in turns, push Luddist and Transhumanist views. I suppose here it’s a little of both. Many of the characters fear that the Dollhouse will destroy humanity, and in some ways it will, but through that change a new humanity could rise, one more like Echo, able to switch between personae and skill sets as needed but retaining a core sense of self. I certainly hope that’s where it goes, because I can’t find another version of this story that leads to the events of Epitaph One but is imbued with the messages of these past few episodes that doesn’t make me dislike the message of the show.

One of the more surprising turns of this season has been Boyd. While not mercurial, this season as head of security, he’s certainly been a very different creature when compared to season one. And, speaking of character shifts, as much as DeWitt’s current bitch persona seems tacked on to surprise viewers who saw her fighting Rossum in Epitaph One, I have to admit I really liked her line “‘Not tonight honey, I have a headache’ really isn’t one of the excuses we allow our Actives.”

So Ballard’s in a coma, presumably he’ll get out of it before the season ends, you never know with this show, though it would be interesting if they turn him into a Doll so they can imprint him with his original mind, now mapped thanks to Alpha. Stay tuned for my review of next week’s pair of episodes when DeWitt’s knowledge of Ballard and Echo’s three month escapade will likely cause a fan-excrement meeting in one form or another.

When I reviewed Epitaph One, one of my critiques was that the remote imprinting was impossible given the current system of the Dollhouse; putting Active architecture in place was a complex process, as we saw in the first episode of the show, and if it were to happen something had to change, something beyond a mere remote wipe, and in this episode it did.

It was interesting how it played out, and the twist with DeWitt made the event more than merely going through the motions, but it still felt mostly empty to me.

I don’t think I’ve brought this up except in my tweets but the biggest problem with the jump into the future is that Dollhouse hadn’t earned it yet. When Battlestar Galactica jumped forward, it was daring and ballsy, but it would’ve been a cop-out if they’d done it too early. Similarly, Lost’s flashforward set up a future to be fulfilled in the upcoming season, but it worked because the story was dense enough, the history rich enough, to make those future events significant.

Dollhouse didn’t have the strength of its character’s histories to make the vision of the future impact the viewer, so they took the other route: story. But while Jack’s flashforward was exciting because we saw that people got off the island, it was stronger still because Jack wanted to go back. Character trumps story. Always.

Anyways, I don’t want to overwhelm this review with even more railing against the almost unanimous love of Epitaph One, because the episode was still a great one on its own merits.

Echo is rummaging around the real world, still AWOL from last week’s episodes, when she happens to screw up an already screwed up (possibly illegal though that’s not really clear) immigrant’s life. Meanwhile, at the Dollhouse, DeWitt is getting pressured to find Echo.

Jumping ahead three months, DeWitt is no longer head of her Dollhouse, with her Rossum boss Harding taking over the day-to-day. Other things have changed at the Dollhouse. Topher has been given a mandate to develop a remote wipe technology, under the guise of simplifying the Handler’s life, and Harding seems more open to sending a Doll out on a recklessly dangerous mission, as the sadist client in the first act makes more than clear. After Topher unveils the remote wipe gun he’s developed he secrets DeWitt away to his hideaway room where he reveals he’s been done the remote wipe tech for months but feared what Rossum would do with it.

He saw Bennett working on a similar small project for Rossum when he was in DC in the last episode, and figured out that each Dollhouse is building a component for a larger system: a remote imprinting device. A technique that doesn’t require the Active architecture in the person’s brain before imprinting. In fact, Topher built it. Shortly afterward, DeWitt brings Topher’s designs to Harding, despite Topher’s desire that Rossum never get their hands on such a terrifying power. And so, in a vain attempt to regain good graces with Rossum, DeWitt has assured the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Echo has been living a strange sort of domestic life with Ballard, who she sought out after screwing up her attempt to help that immigrant, Galena. She’s been working as a nurse, thanks to her ability to recall previous imprints on demand, and eating mac and cheese — none of her clients ever seemed to want a woman who could cook — as Ballard teaches her to use her imprints to their fullest. Echo plans on going back to the Dollhouse when she’s ready, and she thinks she’ll be ready when she can free Galena from prison.

Thanks to her nurse position, she goes to the jail and sets up a fake death for Galena, but the plan goes awry when she wakes from her death a little too quickly. After that, Echo uses her ‘Blue Skies’ persona from early last season, to break herself and Galena out of the jail. Now that Galena is free, Echo and Paul have constructed a new life for her, as Lisa, and then come back to the Dollhouse where DeWitt, drunk on her restored power, banishes her to solitary confinement until she can find out what happened to Echo for those three months. And then the episode is over.

Thematically, this episode had a few nice touches. The idea of Echo and Paul giving Galena a new identity, to escape her sordid past, is an excellent parallel to the idea of the Dollhouse. Also, Echo’s love for Ballard is another in a long line of developments in Echo’s personal life, one they emphasized this episode when she talked to him about how she’s not Caroline, she’s Echo, and what if Echo shouldn’t be waiting for Caroline to talk her body back. What if Caroline isn’t all she’s cracked up to be? The most interesting development of this episode was that we now have a love triangle between two bodies: Echo loves Paul, but Paul loves Caroline.

Similarly, Topher is continuing his growth, becoming one of the more reliable dramatic pivots the show has. And at the same time, his inventive mind couldn’t help but build the remote imprinting device. He loathed the very idea of that technology, but he built it nonetheless. Topher works as a rough analog of human scientific progress as seen through the eyes of someone afraid of scientific progress. The fact that it mostly works for someone like me who believes in scientific progress, and that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” is a testament to the writers’ ability to create a compelling story.

Overall, Meet Jane Doe was a great episode, only slightly hampered by the ever-looming shadow of Epitaph One. I’ll publish my review of episode 2×08, A Love Supreme, shortly.

Senator Perrin has taken his month off-air to build up the nerve to call out Rossum Corporation for running Dollhouses, and he’s going to prove it through the testimony of Madeline/Mellie/November². Rossum tells her not to do anything as they have a plan in place, but she doesn’t seem too prickled by that suggestion. DeWitt thinks November is being manipulated into doing this because she was happy with the way things worked out last time they spoke, she also infers that this manipulation is a manoeuvre against her Dollhouse, so she wants to take November away from the Senator to solve her disclosure problems, ‘help’ November, and most importantly discover who is trying to make a play against the LA Dollhouse and why.

As Boyd starts the exposition train, Topher has a tragically myopic rant about Perrin ‘shutting down all research’ and reverting society’s scientific achievements. I’m not one to argue that science should be reined in by politics, but Topher is basically saying science shouldn’t be reined in by anything, morality included. Of course, that makes perfect sense as something Topher would say; in a previous episode he is noted by DeWitt as being someone without a moral compass. Still, you’d think even someone as amoral as Topher would realize the difference between ‘shutting down all research’ and Perrin’s more realistic goals of stopping heinous human rights violations.

During the expositional powwow, Echo does her little sidle and reminds everyone that this is a world where Dollhouses are real by telling them that Perrin’s wife ‘isn’t right.’ On the monitor, Perrin and his wife are having one of those puff piece television interviews all senators must get on occasion and, having seen that the point isn’t quite hammered into everyone’s brain yet, decides to make a very peculiar statement: ‘She’s perfect. It’s like they made her just for me.’ An odd statement for anyone to make, but certainly even odder coming from someone who has been actively investigating Dollhouses, someone who seems fairly confident that the ‘they’ in that statement could be someone other than God or her parents, who he likely hasn’t met since she’s not a real person. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s time for the credits.

So, compressing the rest of the story for the sake of not writing another 5000 word blow-by-blow, the Dollhouse starts to think Mrs. Perrin is a Doll. Topher builds a disruptor that knocks out Dolls and Ballard goes on a mission to get November from the Perrin’s, knocking our the Mrs. if necessary. When Ballard leaves, Echo is sent on a hooking mission to blackmail the Senator but he’s figured out she’s a doll and he’s not having any of that so he brings Echo to his wife. The two stories collide and Ballard flips the switch on the disruptor but Mrs Perrin is unaffected; Mr Perrin, walking up to the front door of the house, on the other hand suddenly has a searing pain in his head. The wife is the handler, the Senator is the doll.

Echo takes Perrin on the run because she thinks they’re both Dolls, but they’re quickly caught and brought into the DC Dollhouse by Perrin’s handler. At the DC Dollhouse, a crazy Summer Glau — is there any other kind? — is the head head programmer and also knows Echo from her life as Caroline. Apparently, the dead arm she’s slinging around is Caroline’s fault, so she’s got a little baggage.

With Echo in the custody of the DC Dollhouse, DeWitt and Topher go there to get her back, and also to do a little surreptitious reconnaissance on the Dollhouse that seems to be plotting against theirs. While away from the House, Topher has left… Topher in charge. Specifically, Victor imprinted with Topher’s mind, another stellar use of Enver Gjokaj’s phenomenal mimicry skills and all-around astounding acting chops.

Real Life Topher and Summer Glau have a fantastically nerdy and awkwardly flirtatious encounter, but since they’re in the process backstabbing each other amid the flirtation this relationship seems tragically unlikely. Also, Topher’s attempt at stunning her for thinking she’s a Doll, à la Whiskey, probably didn’t go over well, despite his intimation that she was beautiful enough to be a Doll.

DeWitt and her DC counterpart, played by the always reliable Ray Wise, hammer out an arrangement to release Echo to DeWitt’s custody. Said arrangement involves DeWitt not hammering Wise’s testes slowly and painfully. Turns out Echo is free to go.

Topher gushes to Topher about the fineness of Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau) as they hack into the Dollhouse, but Bennett has already released Perrin and Echo to wreak havoc. To get them back, Topher and Bennett are trying to use the disruptor inside the neural feedback network that all Dolls have. This works in both their favours since it gives Topher access to Perrin’s brain map, something he needs in order to find out what Perrin’s ultimate goal is, and gives Bennett an opportunity to remotely program Perrin to kill Echo, well anyone really but Echo’s there, because that baggage of hers is heavy stuff.

Eventually, Perrin’s assassin programming gets deactivated, but not before he kills his wife. Rossum, however, knows how to roll with the punches. Perrin rushes into his Senate hearing and denounces the evil cartel of companies trying to frame Rossum, claiming that they killed his wife with a car bomb, and manipulated November into thinking she was a Doll when she had actually spent the last three years in a mental institution. ‘There is no dollhouse.’ He declaims. Everything works out, if you want to call it that, in the end.

So now Perrin has absolved Rossum of any sins, denounced the Dollhouse’s existence, and is calling for a new regulatory body he would head essentially giving Rossum their own foothold in the government. The two Tophers, before Victor is returned to his Doll state, imply that Perrin’s programmed ambition goes much larger than that, that perhaps the ultimate goal is to have a President under their thumb.

The Dollhouse has more to deal with than that though. Ballard has gone AWOL, and so has Echo. I guess we’ll find out where they are next week.

So that’s my brief summary, but there’s a lot I left out. For example…

November’s desire to testify all of a sudden was explained away in this episode as her realizing the things she’s done as a Doll — the example they give is her fucking Tahmoh Penikett, so it’s already kind of questionable how troubling that would be for her — but this seems weak to me. She had hinted at knowing the sorts of things she would be programmed to do as a Doll before; maybe seeing photographic evidence of those actions is what shocked her into coming forward but it still seems a little convenient. It also seems really really sad because she basically got fucked from every direction on this one. She was urged by the guy who freed her, the guy who wants to take the Dollhouse down more than maybe anyone else, not to reveal the Dollhouse. And when she did, it only worked to improve the Dollhouse’s camouflage, and she was subsequently remanded to the caring arm of Bennett Halverson, who seems excited to continue who torturing ways on someone other than Caroline.

Perrin’s whole psychological trauma of dealing with realizing he’s a Doll — and not just any Doll but a Doll version of himself programmed to be smarter, better, more ambitious than the person he’d been before — was played really well. The variations on Dolldom that the show is exploring are all fascinating and challenge the audience with new vagaries to the Dollhouse that will inevitably force the viewer to rethink their stance on the Dollhouse. What is right? Is reprogramming yourself to be better a bad thing? If not, where is the line drawn? There are so many little nuances to this idea that Whedon and his team are delving in to. I saw this immediately, so when people started trashing the concept of Dollhouse a couple years ago, I didn’t know what to say, because anyone that derides the font of variations screaming for explication that is the technology behind the Dollhouse must not want to ask those questions; either that of they’re unable to see the broader strokes waiting to be painted. Dollhouse is one of the most thought provoking shows on television right now, and the broadness of the questions it asks all branching from that single conceit is astounding. I just wish the national audience were more interested in exploring those sorts of ideas themselves.

One final big picture idea that I really loved about this episode, one that ran through the episode but didn’t really fit into the core plot more than marginally, was the re-exploration of Caroline’s past. The first season had so many small discoveries about the kind of person Caroline was, but there are so many gaps remaining. I’m glad the show took a moment away from their ‘foreshadowing’³ of the events of Epitaph One to take a look back into the past. Aside from the brief flash we saw being very evocative — Caroline abandoning Bennett under a fallen beam to avoid capture, presumably by Rossum — it also brought back to the forefront, and dovetailed with Perrin’s crises nicely, the conflict between Caroline and Echo. Which one is the hero of this show? Which one do we want to win out? We watch this show and all the growth we see in Eliza Dushku’s character is seen as the growth of Echo. She’s become aware of her circumstances, aware of her imprintings, she’s developed into something more than a mere Doll. But can we morally want to see that progression to its ultimate conclusion? Or should we be hoping for that personality to be killed, replaced by the return of the real Caroline? And if so, are we ‘killing’ that person now? This is heady stuff, and I’m so glad the show is asking even if it isn’t something they’ll likely resolve in these final episodes.

I was going to end off this post with a collection of quotations from the episode, but that seems a little tawdry. Instead, since anyone reading this has (hopefully) already seen the episode, I simply suggest you go back and enjoy pretty much every moment of the Two Tophers and also the scenes between Topher and Bennett which are so wracked with a weird nerdy sort of sexual tension I almost can’t handle it. And I’ll make special note of the synchronicity they shared in both naming the disrupting device a ‘disruptor.’ As Bennett said, ‘What else would you call it?’ A great moment of geekiness that also demonstrated a real connection between the two characters.

So, with all that said, I’ll see you all next week when the show continues its death spiral, and unlike Heroes’ death spiral, this one is spiralling towards greatness. A greatness too few people will experience.

Footnotes

1. Because these were aired back-to-back I’m considering the two episodes that aired as one.
2. November henceforth for the sake of clarity and because no one ever really leaves the Dollhouse
3. See my reservations regarding that term with respect to the events of Epitaph One in my review of episode three of this season, Belle Chose.

I’m 25 now, and still have accomplished shockingly little with my life, so I sympathize with this view. Watching Jim Halpert settle into a life that we’ve all been silently (or not) rooting for him to escape is a little sad, wistful perhaps. But depressing? No. Because Jim isn’t settling, he’s settling down.

I don’t know why people don’t see this. From the first moment Jim Halpert graced our televisions, his life’s purpose has been little more than sharing said life with Pam Beasley. Jim didn’t want to change the world, he wanted to be Pam’s world. Mission accomplished. Time to hunker down and start a family. It might be a little banal, but that’s what he wants out of life.

Similarly, Pam wanted to be an artist, but more than that she wanted to not be a receptionist for the rest of her life. Now she’s a saleswoman. Mission accomplished.

They probably could leave the office and become more successful somewhere else, and maybe when the show ends, the finale will be them moving on with their lives, I don’t know. But the last couple seasons haven’t been leading us down that road. The Office seems to be about what a family is.

Last year, when Jim and Pam almost eloped they stopped because their coworkers – their friends – were having a goofy dance party and they realized that they wanted the odd little community they’ve joined to be there, to take part in the celebration.

I think it was the second season when Jim invited the office over to his apartment to have a little shindig of sorts. He had a roommate and there have been references to non-work friends in the past, so to claim that Jim has no friends outside of work is disingenuous. Maybe he’s not friends with most of those people anymore, but to me that’s more an after-effect of growing closer to his office mates.

Work relationships, romantic or not, are very very common in the real world. Settling down and starting a family is very common in the real world. The Office is about the real world. There’s a bitter taste to that, because not many people have the desire for a simple uneventful life shared calmly with a lifelong best friend. But, quite frankly, if that ending is depressing to you, well that’s just depressing.

Too many intelligent shows are falling quickly in quality after the first few episodes, those written external from the production process, and too many shows are experiencing staggered airing of new episodes because of the logjam in the writer’s room.

The lesson here, is that writing doesn’t work the same for all shows. When most television was episodic — that is, each episode was mostly independent — it was easy for a writer’s room to work on episodes as the season progressed. But with the new generation of television shows becoming increasingly serialized, writers need more time to make sure each episode fits into the overall story well, that the various threads are intertwining at a decent pace while maintaining suspense and tension.

It seems more and more obvious that networks should be ordering scripts well in advance of air date, before any production begins, in fact. Sopranos did something akin to that for the second half of its sixth season, taking a year and a half to, among other things, ensure the final season’s scripts were all high caliber. I’m not saying you need a year and a half off between seasons, but the precedent is there.

The danger with this is that the seasons as written would be immutable, if there’s a character that the audience loves and they’re killed halfway through the season well the audience might jump ship because their favourite character is dead. But this fixed structure is also a boon to the show, because quite frankly the whims of the audience are not the best compass for plot or character progression. Writers follow the audience’s whims because it means they might keep their audience, and in turn can continue to write their show. What needs to happen is for just one network to take a risk: get a spec script, interrogate the writer as to their plan for the show, and make sure they have an ongoing vision. Give the writer a full staff of writers and assistants and whatnot, that either the original writer or an experienced showrunner will guide, and let them write a full season.

That won’t happen, of course. And even if it did happen, there’s no guarantee the material produced will find an audience, so there’s no guarantee it would work. But something needs to happen. Somebody needs to try something; preferably not the abandonment of serialized television.

This episode marked the return (and demise) of Nolan Kinnard, the man who created Sierra’s prison, played by Vincent Ventresca who fills out the rapist douchebag role perfectly though I still tend to see him as he was on The Invisible Man, a long lost show that was better than its budget, so I see him as more likable than he should be. Ever since Needs, when Nolan first appeared, the show has largely ignored Sierra’s forceful placement in the Dollhouse, and given the long standing claim of dolls being volunteers, there had to be a good reason for her exception. In a smart move, the show laid the cognizance — or willful ignorance — on the higher-ups in the Dollhouse, represented in this episode by Keith Carradine, whose character early on in the episode is shown very clearly willing to mix business and pleasure. So as the story goes…

Priya was a bohemian-in-spirit-Australian-in-nationality artist selling her wares on the Venice Beach until Kinnard makes his move. He tries everything, up to and including setting up a lavish art showing for her work, filled with Dollhouse Actives ready to encourage Priya to sleep with this most especial man. In a nice moment, we see Victor playing an Italian art dealer who quickly woos Priya despite his programmed mission to drive Priya to Nolan; this show really loves to push Sierra and Victor as star crossed lovers destined to be together no matter what the current configuration of their synapses which, to me as a Joss Whedon fan, means I try not to get invested in their long-term well-being and happiness. Nonetheless, that nice moment ends, Nolan drugs Priya to high hell, and convinces the Dollhouse to take her in as a new Active, something Topher finds appealing since her then-current madness makes her someone he can fix by making a Doll.

From there, Nolan becomes a repeat customer of the Sierra model, creating a new lover each time and capturing them with the very camera Priya used in her past life, each time casting aside the photo which, given Nolan’s earlier displeasure at the thought of using a Doll, can only be disdain. Ultimately though, Echo brings Sierra’s tortured artwork — a remnant of Priya’s work, filled with birds and bright colors, spare the large splotches of dark ink spilling out on the canvas — to Topher’s attention which brings about all the revelations about how Sierra came to be in the Dollhouse. And when Adelle confronts Nolan about his abuses, he fights back, demanding that the Dollhouse give him Sierra permanently. Adelle has always operated as a believer in the lie of the Dollhouse, and when her superordinate orders her to do as Nolan demands, there is a very real shift in her persona. It’s hard to tell if it will be permanent, but for the moment she has glimpsed the seedy underbelly of vicious implications that festoon the very idea of a Dollhouse.

Topher is even less pleased about the demand than DeWitt and he fights back by returning to Nolan Original Recipe Priya ready to seek revenge. But during the initial confrontation, the writers offer us a taste of what Nolan had hoped would happen. When she begins to declaim her love for a total stranger, Nolan begins to offer himself up telling her that he’d made her say ‘I Love you’ so many times that now she really does love him. This says a lot about Nolan, but even more about the show’s thoughts about Dolldom. Joss Whedon has said frequently in interviews that he doesn’t want the show to become all about ‘Who’s a secret Doll?’ claiming that it would make everyone lose their investments in characters.

Clearly, he doesn’t believe this in the writer’s room because the show continues to develop these sorts of stories. This year we’ve already seen Madeline’s sorrow over her lost child healed thanks to, based on the request Priya makes in this episode, some artful modification of her ‘original’ mind. We’ve seen Dr Saunders, a whole cloth fabrication of a person, move beyond her limitations, and become a cipher for much of the Dollhouse’s core messages. And now in this episode we get to see another person ‘helped’ by the Dollhouse. Put simply, being a Doll isn’t the end of your story in the Dollhouse, something the show I think downplayed in the first season, perhaps to allow these sophomore stories a greater impact.

Getting back to the story, only to veer off once again very shortly, after the ensuing melee and Nolan’s death, Priya rises and casts a shadow on the artwork, one of the many interesting directorial choices made this week, in an episode directed by Jonathan ‘Riker’ Frakes. I’ve not followed his directing work per se, but I’ve seen a good chunk of it simply by virtue of watching a lot of television, and this is absolutely his most accomplished work. There are interesting shots, well placed transitions, and a lot of effort put into the background continuity¹, all while retaining a certain understatedness. Kudos to you, Mr Frakes: continue being awesome.

Getting back to the story yet again, Boyd and Topher discover his body and a shattered Priya. Boyd being Boyd, that is to say a total mystery, calls up a friend capable of disappearing people, marshals Topher in the dismembering and dissolving of the corpse, and establishes a lie that obviates further examination of the fate of Nolan Kinnard. When Priya returns to the Dollhouse, she and Topher share a beer — hearkening back to the episode Sierra and Topher shared last season as friends — and discuss her fate. Priya ultimately asks Topher to erase these events from her, to ‘fix’ her when — though the phrasing of her request quite clearly leaves the possibility of this being an if — she’s ultimately released from her contract.

Throughout this main storyline, Echo works in the background. She brings the painting to Topher, encourages Victor to ‘take charge,’ and even takes up long-term reading thanks to a leafy bookmark. The growth she’s had this season is already vastly improving on what she experienced last year.

I wrote in the first review of this season that I wanted to avoid the blow-by-blow recaps I’d resorted to last year, but this episode was just so good, so filled with moments I was unable to ignore, that I had to write about it all in this fashion. The episodic story for this episode is one of the strongest yet, quite probably the best, and it also managed to integrate many of the show’s ongoing arcs and themes: Victor’s and Sierra’s romance; Topher’s growth, regrets, and ongoing work on creating remote mind-wiping technology; Echo’s increasing awareness; the Dollhouse’s depths. I could go on, but I swore myself I wouldn’t overwrite these reviews this year.

Put simply, this episode was the best the show has offered to date. There wasn’t a single weak moment. I’m fairly certain that Dollhouse will get neither a back nine pickup nor a third season, but this season has been undoubtedly stronger than the first so it’s not for a drop in quality. Unfortunately, this uptick in quality won’t translate to an uptick in ratings. Such is the life of an avid television watcher. For now though, Dollhouse returns in December with weekly double doses. I’ll be there, writing about it, till the very end.

Footnotes

1. Seriously, just watch that opening sequence with the art showing scene, so much great background work is going on there.

I finished it a couple days ago and coincidentally the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumour had just started popping up online, so I thought I’d talk about both in one post. First off, because it dovetails nicely into the discussion of the rumours and subsequent refutations by Braff, is my reevaluation of the show.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll know I’ve been expressing my disapproval of Scrubs there for a few weeks so you might think my final decision on Scrubs is going to be decidedly negative, but in the end I still love the show. Growing up with Scrubs was a fantastic experience for me, I related to JD like no other character on television at the time; he was funny, quirky, romantic, and was a whole bunch of me wrapped up in a grown-up (but not too grown-up) shell. Still, going back to the show, the biggest problem I had with it was the seemingly nonexistent growth for JD over the first six seasons.

Every episode had at its core a lesson for JD to learn, whether it was being more accepting of people’s flaws, more attentive to your friends, less selfish, more professional, or even being willing to relax and have fun on occasion, the show always had a message. Those consistent messages were what made Scrubs something more than just a screwball medical comedy — an interesting enough subgenre as it is — those morals gave the show real gravitas, a weight against which the antics on-screen were contrasted making the ultimate message that much more stark and demanding of attention.

But there are exactly two problems at the core of Scrubs, problems the show couldn’t eliminate until the seventh and eighth seasons when the show was coming to an end. If you want the show to last, and you want the message of the week style that made the show something special, you need to essentially hit the reboot button at the end of every episode. Some plot might carry through, and JD will be ostensibly ‘improved’ for as much as a few episodes; but ultimately that lesson needs to be recycled and he’s right back in the thick of his previously conquered faults.

While the middle (and middling) seasons of Scrubs are often criticised by fans they are usually criticised for the increasingly screwball antics the show resorted to for laughs, so finding this shocking lack of character growth during my re-watch impacted me with great force at first. In retrospect, it seems like that flaw is only noticed in these sorts of high frequency viewing spurts, something someone watching as the seasons aired wouldn’t notice easily.

Still, characters relapsing into their old habits despite a struggle to grow, is not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it’s ripe for drama and a very human reaction. Just because you know what’s wrong with you doesn’t mean you’ll be able to magically fix it. Being better means vigilance, it means never forgetting where you are and who you want to be. So it’s easy for complacency to lead to backsliding. But this leads us to the show’s second core problem: it’s a comedy.

What I described above is more akin to a drama and while Scrubs incorporated dramatic elements it was fundamentally a comedy. What’s more, it was a comedy with frequent fantasy sequences, many which seemed to leak into the ‘real world’ resulting in an increasingly screwball ‘real world’ and therefore greater abuses of original character quirks. Now, being a comedy isn’t a flaw in the show per se, but it develops into a flaw when the show becomes long-running and maintains its desire to deftly interweave comedic and dramatic elements. So the relapses in behaviour were frequently either ignored, because the relapse was necessary to make a joke work, or referenced in a humourous way, belying the drama of the relapse. Both of these approaches led to funny scenes but made the characters, JD especially, seem like aloof douches who never tried to improve themselves.

Which brings me to the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumours. I heard about the rumours and found debunkings of them less than a minute later so it didn’t prey on my mind for long. What I have thought about in some detail were the videos Zach Braff posted online responding to the hoax. In those videos he’s an affable guy, clearly very funny, but on the edge of all that there’s an tinge of douchery. It comes as no surprise to me that Zach Braff is a douche, I’ve been hearing reports from all around of his douchiness for years. Still, he can clearly be a friendly and overall ‘nice guy’ when he wants to as evidenced by those videos. In this respect, he reminds me of JD. They’re both, at a very low level, arrogant douches but they can put on the mask of friendliness and quirky appeal when they need to. Not really a critique, just an observation.

But, you know, even with this reevaluation, I still hold Scrubs and JD and even Zach Braff to something resembling high regard. Sure they’ve got their flaws, but who doesn’t? Scrubs is still a very funny show with a talented cast and funny writers and I certainly don’t regret the first viewing or the recent re-watch. I might not consider the show as weighty as I once did, but the laughs are still there, and the memories from the years of watching it remain.

So is Scrubs worth it? Well, I don’t know. It’s certainly funny enough to be worth watching, but I can’t promise you the stasis the characters suffer through over the years won’t bother those of you looking for some life lessons thrown into the mix. So here’s a cop out if there ever was one: is it worth it? Watch it and find out for yourself.

But with Dollhouse, every episode this season has me coming back to Epitaph One and finding ways it weakens this season. The remote wipe foreshadowing would have been more powerful if on first viewing this wipe was an innocuous plot device. It still has a power in this form, but it seems at this point a necessary event. There’s a certainty to it. We can’t not have foreshadowing. It feels mechanical now. Admittedly, it was mechanical with shows like Lost and Babylon 5 by virtue of their pre-planned stories, but that mechanism was masked.

Still, even without that masking, the foreshadowing packs a punch: Topher developing the remote wipe technology — though, to be pedantic, this remote wipe technology seems the same as the form used by Alpha last season which, as I stated in my initial review of Epitaph One, only worked on Dolls as the Dollification process was considerably more complex than your standard imprint — ultimately ends the world and breaks his mind. But I still don’t feel it as much as I think I should, because of that mechanic necessity. I get the feeling Epitaph One is going to be a thorn in my side the entire season (or whatever else airs of this season before Fox kills it for atrociously bad ratings, though it’s a good sign that this week’s episode recovered from last week’s all-time ratings low for the show).

I tend to focus on arc discussions in these reviews, but aside from that incredibly oblique unspoken reference to Topher’s future tragedy this episode was virtually entirely self-contained. The only additional ongoing idea was Echo’s ability to repeat catch phrases her clients and/or imprints always seem to have handy. Does every person in the Dollhouse universe have a unique identifiable catch phrase or something? It’s getting a little conspicuous at this point. Perhaps a future essay on the show can explore that avenue.

So that leaves us with a very interesting, but also very self-enclosed, one-off episode. The opening sequence was one of the more effectively chilling the show has managed to pull off, though the psycho-paralyser getting hit by a car seemed like an obvious end to that scene, I was hoping for something more inventive. That said, the events following that were all great. We got a chance to see Ballard use his FBI training, something he rarely used even when he was an FBI agent and reminds us that he’s more than just a weird pseudo-pervert. Echo’s B-plot professorial misconduct fantasy was interesting in a morbid sort of way, which I suppose is the way you should enjoy most Dollhouse episodes seeing as the protagonists of the show are glorified human traffickers. And the main storyline crossed with the B story nicely both on a story level and thematically.

And, once again, Enver Gjokaj cements himself as the most versatile actor in the cast, which is saying something given how talented this cast is. Every actor has had one or two outstanding moments, but Enver keeps delivering like no other. As creepy as he was as the serial doll maker — an interesting role for the antagonist in an episode that foreshadows the wireless doll making technology in the coming apocalypse — when he switched into Kiki he completely transformed. Odd name aside, that guy deserves more than anyone on this show a breakout career once Dollhouse comes to an end.

People have been worrying about Dollhouse’s fate quite a bit recently because of the terrible ratings, and some are wondering if the season shouldn’t have started with more stand-alone expository episodes, but looking at the season so far, it’s been doing stand-alone episodes, and they’ve done it better than they did during the first season’s early block of episodes but they’re not being hindered in the way other shows are by a blind adherence to strict episodic storytelling. It’s not afraid to let some moments of the episode impact the future. It should be braver in this respect, I think, with much more serialization and investment in the long running characters, but I feel like it will get there if given the time. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be given the time. I think both the network and the writers are to blame in this respect; the network, for trying to simplify an inherently complex intellectually rich story, and the writers for accepting the task of trying to oversimplify the show rather than fighting with the network.

That said, this season has been very good so far but what little long-term stories they’ve built in these first three episodes has been insufficient to me. They tried the best of both worlds last year and got dwindling ratings as a result. At this point, the show should be taking advantage of the second season pickup and just going wild with all the crazy five-year-plan things Joss Whedon has imagined. When the show got a second season pickup, I didn’t really expect a third. The more I look at it, the more it seems like Fox simply didn’t kill off Dollhouse after the first season so they wouldn’t burn bridges with Joss Whedon or his fanatic followers. So with the likelihood of a third season increasingly dire, the show shoud just go for broke. Let’s hope it tries that in the coming weeks.

What little there was from the Dollhouse perspective focused on November, now reverted to Madeline. On the surface, she seemed to be a ringing endorsement for the Dollhouse. Disappear into a void for five years and come out better. But is she better? She has a distanced aloofness when she discusses her daughter, a calmness that strikes me not as recovery but something more sinister. Did she go into the Dollhouse with a mental trauma so great, she accepted the terms with the understanding that she would be returned to her body without those pangs? Is she even the same person? And is that what she wanted?

I kind of dropped the ball this week and slacked on Dollhouse, so that’s all I’ve really put into words regarding my thoughts on the second episode of the season. It was good, and episodic half of the episode — as opposed to the serialized half — was mostly interesting which is a rare event for this show. This week’s episode will probably be even better, and if I’m not totally fucking lazy, I might actually put some real effort into my thoughts on it. And maybe even publish them earlier than an hour before the next episode is scheduled to air.

The Office always manages to take the cliched ‘special event’ episodes old-style sitcoms used to overhype, and subsequently underdeliver, and offer up to its audience a naturalistic tale. And what’s more, they manage to be funnier through that quality.

And while I didn’t like the newlyweds’ stance on that awesome wedding ceremony video, I understand it. I remember when I saw that video thinking it’s the sort of thing Michael Scott would try to instigate. So it’s natural that they’d be averse to it.

I only like it a) because it removes the sedateness of a ceremony I find overly stuffy and b) it’s an abstract event right now.

Regarding the first point, that’s only a valid stance it you find weddings to be an unnecessary event. Clearly, Jim and Pam don’t. Jim has dreamed of marrying Pam for years, and Pam has similarly had that idea of a dream wedding. Maybe I’ll one day meet the person that makes me feel like I need that moment, but the one semi-successful — obviously not wholly successful or it would be an ongoing condition — long-term relationship I’ve had was amazing and I still didn’t have the desire for a wedding.

But, getting to the second point, I’m not in the scenario of going through with a wedding. I talk a big game about ‘being yourself’ but in the real world I’m a huge pussy who never talks to girls he likes, can’t carry a conversation with most people, shies away from virtually all social obligations, and gets almost violently nauseous when heading to virtually any event where people I’m not very close friends with will be. So while I like the idea of a ‘fun wedding’ in principle, in reality if I did end up having a wedding I’m pretty sure I’d totally cop out and do the calm sedate thing.

Regardless, even with the dancing and cavorting down the nave of the church, Jim and Pam had the wedding they wanted. The one where the only people there were the ones that mattered: PB & J. Two great people that go great together.

Getting rid of his limp a few seasons ago only to have it return because he can’t be a good doctor without it was one of the stupidest decisions the show ever made. The limp, House’s acerbic misanthropic personality, the dangerous risks he takes on a regular basis, all of these things are crutches. It was an interesting set-up for the show, but to play the audience with the appearance of growth for House but failing to follow through and soften his character over time is basically the writers being afraid to mess with their formula. I understand that to a degree, but that doesn’t mean I accept it. The writers should be able to do better. They should be able to keep the show interesting and compelling without keeping their characters essentially stagnant.

An excellent counterexample to House is Numb3rs, a show that seems to me to be consistently underrated. It’s your basic procedural on the surface, but the characters are always growing and changing. Sometimes, a character goes away, other times they’ll return, relationships will be born, the aftermaths of their orders are reflected on, and they’re not afraid to tell a story where the FBI is the bad guy, or the villain we knew wasn’t the villain at all. It’s all around a great show, and for the geek in me it’s much more interesting than House because each week mathematics is used in some way to analyse the crime and help solve the case.

The point I’m trying to make here, something I didn’t in my previous attack on House, is that despite my dislike of House’s faux-serialized format, there are procedural shows I enjoy and Numb3rs is one of them.

In the episode that marks his brother’s first appearance on the show, the moral of the story is that his brother is a pathetic person and JD’s being ashamed of him is a good thing.

He treats women like shit — the most egregious case being his treatment of Elliot at the end of the third season, when he fought to get her back from Sean only to cast her aside literally the second she comes back to him.

He’s incredibly selfish. I mean, that’s obvious given that the premise of the show has JD narrating his own life. But even still, everything about the show is him him him. People will be going through real problems while his petty bullshit that has no real significance is exaggerated. Sometimes that contrast is used to make a point. But really, you can only make that point so many times before your character should just grow the fuck up.

Here’s the thing. I like the show. Scrubs is very funny. And on occasion it has a serious story that isn’t offensive and/or shockingly obvious. But most of the dramatic conflicts come from characters overreacting or some other contrived mechanism. Oh and JD is a dick.

I know some of you are going to be scoff at my remarks and tell me that Scrubs is only a comedy. But when I watched this show as it aired, I loved it for its realistic characterizations, romantic subplots, comedic wit, and the way the show brought that all together like no other show at the time. But going through the series again with a more mature eye, I see most of that falling apart.

And another group of you will surely reply telling me that its JD’s flaws that make him a realistic character. That’s true to a point. But it’s only true to the point at which any realistic person would start to look at these flaws and grow beyond them (for more than an episode), something JD never does, at least not until the last season when he magically grew the hell up. Its JD’s inability to grow and change that make him not a character but a caricature. And a dickish one at that.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Overly aggressive attacks on my sexuality? Bueller?

P.S. In case you need something else to hate about me, I thought the Musical episode was lame (even though I love musicals and was very excited about a Scrubs musical) and I remember thinking at the time that the Princess Bride parody episode was possibly the worst episode the show ever did.

P.P.S. This was originally written on the IMDB forums, but I’ve been meaning to write something about Scrubs here for a while so here it is. I also changed some sentences from the IMDB version for clarity. And I de-beeped the curse words. WTF IMDB?

Being human is not an easy thing. It seems easy because we’re born ready. But to teach something to be a human, to construct a mind that offers even a simulacrum of the complexity of the human experience, for a true “blank slate” to grow to be a person is riddled with trials we can’t imagine.

The Dollhouse doesn’t create from a blank slate, they cobble together minds from a vast and growing collection, and still they suffer the consequences of ignoring the risks involved in such a construction. Creating an inviolate mind from an aggregation of violations tends to result in some failures.

Dr Saunders is a creation of ‘sociopath in a sweater vest’ but she stumbles to a sense of identity, after suffering through a noted numbness during the first season. She sees her flaws — some with which she was imbued, others she generated as a consequence of being alive — as a curse inflicted on her by her ‘creator,’ she fails to understand that in many ways we are all broken, that we are little more than a collection of flaws.

All the Dolls we care about are broken in important ways. In some ways it’s a commentary on the conceit of drama itself. We rarely watch stories with truly normal people living their lives. Conflict, drama, and extraordinary events are all essential to compelling storytelling, so we end up seeing troubled people more often than not. But that conceit comes from the essential truth that we each react to the world in a wholly unique manner. The integration of external stimuli and internal processes is what people see when they look at you, so exposing people to the unexpected, bringing out their internal strengths and weaknesses, is a method of examination.

So Dollhouse continues to watch the Dolls fall (or get picked) apart, breaking down their identities only to have them self-coalesce. The mind, whether innate or implanted, is more robust than we know. But at the same time, the veneer of the Dollhouse staff also cracks, though with more subtlety. Victor’s scars are a painful reminder of the damages the Dollhouse can inflict, one that DeWitt can’t stand to see on someone she’s come to love.

We’re seeing the continuation of themes about what it is to be a person. And the show seems to be settling in on the idea that the Dolls can be people too — Saunders is the best current example of this, though the other Dolls are all exhibiting symptoms of personality. And the idea that Dolls can be people is to me very comforting but also striking and perhaps terrifying.

The ideas brought up in the unaired episode Epitaph One of mindless slaves to violence are more akin to tech-savvy zombies than to questions of identity, and so less interesting to me. That we could be supplanted by entirely different people is much grander in scope; it’s a subtler debasement, in fact it can even be argued that it is not a debasement because the replacement is equal to you. The personalities Dolls get imprinted with may be constructed but that doesn’t imply they are somehow lesser than natural minds. And that’s a terrifying non-implication.

This premiere did such an excellent job of giving me everything I want from a show, along with a few things I didn’t know I wanted, all without leaving the Dollhouse. The real world events were nice, but mostly unneeded. I like the direction the show is taking — I sort of hope they quietly ignore Epitaph One for a good long while — though I still hold out hope that the real world stories will improve at the same rate the in-house ones are.

Some of the storylines are terrible, of course. Hiro and his kin continue to squander in the arrested development of the comedic subplot limited by the writers’ inability and/or unwillingness to grow them beyond mere punchlines. Tracy continues to be a complete waste of a character and of airtime. The only saving grace of Claire’s storyline is the inevitable lesbianic adventures. Nathan Petrelli still sucks as much as ever. HRG continues to… do whatever it is he does when he’s not on screen, because he does nothing of consequence when he’s visible.

I know what you’re thinking. There aren’t really any characters left. Well, you’re either thinking that or you’re thinking the only remaining substantial characters are Matt Parkman and Peter Petrelli, both of whom are shitty shitty characters. Well you’re mostly right.

Matt Parkman is in many ways the epitome of Heroes. He is the barometer for the rest of the show. He started off as one of the most appealing characters, but has degraded apace with the show. He’s easily the most disappointing character right now. And I’m certainly not saying he’s a good character, but he’s no longer a bad character; there are moments now when Parkman is almost a realistic character.

And Peter Petrelli, though I’ve found his story for the past two seasons to be terrible, had a pretty good first season. In fact, rethinking the ending of the first season, it makes sense that Peter’s emotional empathy, not his supernatural empathy, would be the final factor in who would win between him and Sylar. Of course, that’s a minor adjustment, because the tone of the build-up of the season was counter to that, and in the end it wasn’t Peter’s empathy that beat Sylar but his punch. So, really, all my complaints about season one of Heroes remain valid, but in retrospect I think I was overly hard on the emotional empathy angle the writers attempted for unrelated reasons.

So while Peter has been middling at best as of late, he was pretty good this most recent episode. Unlike Parkman’s idiotic aversion to his powers, he’s using his to actually help people. Almost as if he were a hero or something. And the plot this week with him being sued for his overzealous rescuing of people in danger was a great shout out to the comic world and the reason superheroes maintain a secret identity: so they can’t get sued.

And finally, the reason I decided to write this post in the first place, the influx of new characters managed to work this time. The carnival folk, led by Robert Knepper, are interesting in a way no villain has since early-first season Sylar, and what’s more they manage to make these characters interesting and mysterious without the crutch of anonymity. I attribute much of this to Robert Knepper, who as far as I can tell can do no wrong.

In addition, the deaf woman introduced in this episode reminded me of early Heroes, when the characters first experienced their powers. Seeing sound isn’t a particularly awesome power, but the moments we spent with that character were interesting to me. It makes we wonder how much better the show might have been at this point had the writers stuck with their initial plan to rotate out the cast every season, introducing new characters, new conflicts while retaining the same basic structure.

All that said, Heroes is still not a very good show. The last couple episodes were more watchable than last year but the show remains subpar with miles of room for improvement. But, at this point, if you’re like me and still watching Heroes despite the slow crawl towards increasing inadequacy and certainty of cancellation, me telling you the show has improved marginally isn’t really shifting your view. And anybody who gave up watching long ago shouldn’t take this post as an endorsement that you pick up the habit again. It’s not. I just thought I should acknowledge that it improved, if only for a little while, if only by a little bit.

My biggest problem is it’s not a cliffhanger, it’s an ending. It’s not a flash forward in the vein of Lost’s third season finale, giving us a glimpse of the future to entice the audience, it’s an epilogue, meant to offer up a few closing notes on the themes the show wanted to explore.

Joss Whedon has walked back the significance of Epitaph One, claiming that, while it is canon, the memories we saw of the Dollhouse’s future are not set in stone. But the memories are the least of my concerns. What concerns me is that the show now has a guarantee that, ten years from now, the Dollhouse universe will be a fractured world with middling tribes of humanity surviving away from all technology as the world falls apart around them. It’s a powerful message, and Epitaph One expresses it brilliantly, but it’s better suited as a separate story, not as a part of a television show’s larger universe.

And yes, the nihilism of the ending still troubles me. I don’t need a happy ending, but I do need one with some heft to it. The ending of Dollhouse, as it stands, is that technology was a failed experiment. We tried it, but man’s vainglorious desire for knowledge led him down a nearly fatal path and what remains now is a small group capable of rebuilding mankind, but without all that icky technology. That, to me, is an extremely lazy ending. Granted, they only had an episode to delve into this but it still strikes me as hollow, and slightly hypocritical.

Indeed, one of the commons threads of the Dollhouse’s first season, and one that seems to be persisting into its second, is that while the Dollhouse’s technology is an attempt at rewriting a human from the ground up, it is only an attempt. The mind reaches out despite its removal and/or deletion. This is a repeated theme, something that has imbued all the glitches the Dolls have experienced with a greater meaning. But this episode leaves you with the message that those moments of significance weren’t really all that significant, the world will go to hell, and the only solution is to run away.

Again, this isn’t about the ending per se, though it is to an extent, it’s more about earning the ending. I don’t think they earned the ending they gave us. Let me know why I’m wrong in the comments, because I haven’t really seen anyone address my complaints with Epitaph One yet.

I still love it as an hour of great sci-fi, so long as I think of it as separate from the rest of the Dollhouse universe, but I can’t brook its existence in the standard Dollhouse canon. It would’ve been a great (though not amazing) ending to Dollhouse had the show ended then and there, but Dollhouse went on and now it feels out of place and best left out of canon along with the original unaired pilot.

Flashforward got a lot of hype as the next Lost — a laughable prospect to anyone aware of how brilliant Lost is — and while it certainly was one of the more promising pilots of the last few years, it is with equal certainty not the next Lost.

The one advantage it has over Lost is that it wears its science fiction on its sleeve; unlike Lost, which cloaked its science fiction with mystery, intrigue, and vague fantasy, Flashforward is from the outset delving into the implications of time travel and discussions of free will vs predestination. Unfortunately, that’s also Flashforward’s greatest weakness.

The first two acts which detail the initial cataclysm — in case you were wondering what the fuck Flashforward is, the essential premise is that for 137 seconds everyone in the world blacked out and during that time they all saw a vision of their future, specifically April 29, 2010 10PM — are great stuff. The carnage of the aftermath is visceral and jarring with lots of great short shots of people suffering through the fog of war slowly lifting over them allowing a clearer picture to form.

But once that fog lifts the show devolved into a series of conversations pondering the implications of what they’ve experienced. Because of this, there’s not nearly enough time devoted to giving the characters some much needed depth. Joseph Fiennes’ Mark Benford is given some level of history, and somewhat necessarily his wife as well though not with the same depth. I find Benford’s AA sponsor one of the more fulfilling of the characters right now so I take that as a sign that the show knows how to develop characters well, it just opted to utilize the pilot to explore directly some of the headier concepts the show’s dealing with. Not the choice I’d make but it doesn’t ruin the show, unless it becomes a running pattern.

Though the geek in me appreciated the explicit geeky discussions of free will vs predestination, I’ve come to appreciate the character driven exploration of these sorts of ideas that Lost does so well, and so the lack of character development bothered me. Of course, the show managed to make me almost forget about my issues with the show’s characters by ending off on the excellent cliffhanger with the lone person walking amongst the blacked out masses during those fateful 137 seconds. All told, I’m excited for more, though I’m also hoping for more from the show as it finds its way.

That said, I think sometimes people take offense too easily on the subject. Case in point, Feministing’s lambasting of ABC’s new — and already basically cancelled — sci-fi drama Defying Gravity. Defying Gravity is set in a near future where abortions are illegal and one of the main characters, in the flashbacks to five years earlier, gets pregnant accidentally and has to decide whether or not to get an underground abortion.

They attacked the show viciously and then Defying Gravity’s show-runner, James Parriott, responded to the critics directly discussing the themes of the show and even spoiling some future plot points to explain to his audience that the show is about bigger questions than abortion.

I personally think they didn’t handle the abortion stuff very well, but not because the woman who had the abortion hesitated and debated with her close friend over the issue. I support choice, but that doesn’t mean I think abortion should be handled glibly. One commenter disagrees:

I really appreciate Mr. Parriott taking the time to respond. However, I really hate the fact that even pro-choicers seem to have conceded that abortion is necessarily an awful, tragic, agonizing experience. Sure, for some women it is a gut-wrenching decision, but for many women it is not a particularly difficult or traumatic decision.

I guess that’s my problem with Parriott’s description here. Why shouldn’t women ever be shown making an “glib, easy, and insensitive” decision to have an abortion? Why do women always have to be portrayed as damaged and guilt-ridden over their abortion? Certainly that is some women’s experience and it is a valid one, but when it is the only way we see abortion played out it just reinforces the idea that abortion is a horrible, awful thing, which I strongly disagree with.

I don’t think Defying Gravity dealt with abortion in that way at all. The abortion story plays out in flashbacks from five years earlier than the main storyline. The character was an astronaut-in-training five years ago who would’ve not been in the program if she’d kept the kid. But in the main storyline she’s in the program. She either had an abortion or a miscarriage. Ultimately, she has the abortion because she wants to go to space. She puts her career ahead of her uterus. She’s not emotionally damaged because of the abortion, but she also didn’t commit to it with the ease of a colonic which, quite frankly, seems like a rational response; a fetus might not be a child, but it has a hell of a better chance of being one that a tumescent appendix.

In fact, the original post discussed a very similar situation (to my eyes) that they approved of:

The only TV show I can recall watching that even had a character obtain an abortion was Third Watch, in which a cop who has a recovering alcoholic husband, two kids and financial woes decides to terminate her pregnancy. I remember liking it because it was matter-of-fact, and the character makes a decision she knows is best for her family, and isn’t punished after the fact for it.

I personally think anyone who watched the early episodes of Defying Gravity and sees a show fighting against abortion doesn’t understand what science fiction is. Or really even basic fiction. Establishing a world where abortion is illegal and then having a character struggle with the decision to have one is not endorsing the anti-abortion stance, it’s storytelling 101.

What is the point of a television show having a women have an abortion as though it were a non-event? What’s the dramatic point to it? Conflict is at the heart of all stories, and having a women get an abortion with no real discussion about not doing it and no real emotional consequences is quite possibly the stupidest “plot development” a show could ever do.

“What is it with abortion and television?” the initial Feministing post asks. Abortion remains one of the few watchwords television tends to avoid. Why? Ultimately, it seems like anything you do with abortions on television will be attacked by one of the sides of the issue. You can’t have it be a glib non-event in the woman’s life both for dramatic reasons and because the pro-lifers would attack the show for “endorsing” abortion. You can’t make it a dramatic traumatic psychologically damaging event, because the pro-choice people criticise it, even if it’s the woman’s choice to ultimately abort. You can’t make it a simple act emotionally with severe physical ramifications because it will be seen as demonizing abortion.

Both sides of the argument are unsatisifed with any middle ground, leaving most writers with no ground on which to stand. So they avoid the story entirely, to avoid undue criticism. It’s a terrible state of affairs, that probably won’t change anytime soon. But nothing I, or anybody along the spectrum of opinions on this subject, will really have an effect; we’re all just screaming into a void hoping to hear an echo.

That niggle aside, I loved the second episode. The songs were mostly great — with Gold Digger being the obvious stand-out, though ‘Push It’ was hilarious and ‘Take a Bow’ was arguably the most accomplished musically of the songs this week — and the two songs I disliked I think the show wanted the audience to dislike. I mean, everyone knew the repeat of ‘Le Freak’ was a massive blunder on Mr Shue’s part, so it was supposed to suck. And the version of ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ I didn’t like, mostly because the actors lip-synced rather than mime-sang the song so their mouths seemed empty during the bombastic singing and that discontinuity was annoying for me.  Plus the singer of that song was the ‘bad guy’ of the show, so I’m not supposed to like it right? Finnchel¹ FTW!

Speaking of the eponymous plotline, the Finn/Rachel ‘showmance’ was really great this episode. Rather than make it one of those inexplicably unrequited relationships that dramedies whip out faster than Paul Reubens in a movie theatre — two people who are both attractive and have numerous things in common for some reason never see each other² In That Way for reasons unknown³ never made much sense to me — they consummated their relationship very quickly. It’s not permanent, but the relationship has been established as existing and reciprocal, which is the sensible thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll jump in the sack, though Rachel certainly seems hot to trot based on her safe sex declamations at the celibacy club and Finn’s dead postman vision is equally evocative, as relationships don’t always work out just because both people are interested.

Which brings me to the other theme of the episode, the one that played out through the Shue/Emma relationship. They’re both clearly interested in each other, and if there wasn’t a baby in between them, Shue would probably leave his wife for her. But there is a baby between them. Well the idea of a baby anyways. Some have criticised the show for too easily villainising Shue’s wife’s with her deceit regarding her hysterical pregnancy⁴ but I think it was a great way to a) establish more audience unease with Shue’s current relationship after the initial pregnancy announcement likely made the audience feel bad about cheering on the Shue/Emma relationship and b) bring some depth to her character. In the pilot Shue’s wife is shown as mostly a shrew, but this episode softened her and showed that she really does love her husband even if she’s a little fucked up and has trouble expressing it. It was a smart move on the show’s part.

My only remaining complaint, and this is a general critique of the show and it’s not even really one of those either, is that Jane Lynch is playing too much to her type. In recent years she’s become the go to gal for the type of character she’s playing on Glee. With good cause — she does an amazing job with it — but we’ve seen it before. That said, the character was written and then she was cast for it not the other way around, and if you want anyone in that role, it’s Jane Lynch. Really, I just wish she could still be on Party Down. But it’s not meant to be, so now I’ll have to enjoy her here⁵.

Lots of blogs that review TV shows like to list favourite quotations⁶ at the end of their reviews, so I figure I’ll list a few here in an attempt to pander.

• Mr Shue, being very very wrong: ‘Everybody loves disco!’
• Celibacy Club summing up their philosophy: ‘It’s all about the teasing, not about the pleasing!’
• On the lack of a gag reflex: ‘One day when you’re older, that’ll turn out to be a gift’
• On ‘erupting’ early: ‘Actually, it’s a big problem for me.’

Footnotes

1. My dislike for these sorts of name portmanteaus (Finn + Rachel in this instance) is well known, but we all need to let loose and/or ironically employ annoying memes every once in a while
2. Though they’ll often vacillate in a bout of hilariously bad timing for a few seasons on who secretly pines for who.
3. In fact, the ongoing insults to Rachel’s appearance are slightly baffling to me. I think she’s pretty, but she’s constantly insulted for her uncomely appearance. I guess it’s just an attempt to demonize the cheerleaders et. al. but it’s a weird way to do it I think.
4. though with the etymology of the word hysterical, arguably all pregnancies are hysterical
5. And hope that Megan Mullally doesn’t ruin Party Down for me
6. You quote something and the thing you quote is a quotation, though this is a pedantic nuance I normally don’t give a shit about, to be honest.

At a fundamental level, what is Grey’s Anatomy? It’s a character drama set primarily in a workplace. Is it overwrought at times? From what I’ve seen of it, absolutely. But I don’t think anybody that’s watched all of Battlestar Galactica could say they never crossed the line into soapy goodness.

But even ignoring that, this show is not Grey’s Anatomy in Space. Even if being a simple character drama set in space made it nothing more than Grey’s Anatomy in Space, it’s not a simple character drama. Already, the show’s established an ongoing arc and a greater power watching over the mission.

And for those not enamoured with weirdo rooms with God complexes, there’s the characters and their lives onboard a long-term space journey. They’re not just going through the motions here. They’ve got the men left behind learning to cope with their less stellar lives, people on board dealing with the problems of space travel and navigating their histories together while functioning as a crew.

This show isn’t the Best Thing Ever. Virtuality would have been a better show, I think. But that doesn’t invalidate what this show is doing. And so far, it’s been mostly interesting.

I may be slightly biased because the two ostensible leads (the Meredith and Derek, as it were), Ron Livingston and Laura Harris, are among my favourite actors and I’d watch almost anything they’re in. But I genuinely think this show isn’t some trifle; it might become one as the show develops, but everything I’ve seen so far has been a pretty decent melding of romantic character drama and science fiction drama. Watch before you judge.

But the unaired episode, while being an excellent hour, seems to me to be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Spoilers ahead.

The year is 2019, and the world has fallen. The episode begins with Felicia Day and her cohort of “actuals,” people who have retained their original personalities following the mind-rewriting apocalypse, seeking save harbour from “butchers,” “wielders,” and “dumbshows.”

While the ridiculous jargon they spew in the episode fades away after the initial scenes, it’s still incredulous that such mutations of syntax could occur over a course of only ten years. Firefly could pull off weird syntax and colourful language constructions because it was a decent amount into the future, but despite the fluid organic nature of language it doesn’t change that fast.

Some of it makes sense, of course; in a world where there are people imprinted with the minds of dangerous psychopaths, it would make sense that there would be a simple term which can be said plainly in harrowing circumstances. It’s the twists in grammar and other eccentricities that bother me. Again though, they fade rather quickly and I suspect they were mostly put in place to inform the audience that this episode of Dollhouse isn’t your standard fare, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t ill chosen.

The chronology of the episode is fairly simple, despite the flashback structure the episode employ to tell its story. Topher, prior to the first season, joins the Dollhouse and revolutionizes the imprinting process reducing it from two hours to less than five minutes. At some point, the men behind the Dollhouses decide that a new service provided by the Dollhouses will be body replacement¹. Later on, beyond the first season’s finale, Topher develops yet another breakthrough allowing an imprint to transmit via audio sources. Pick up the wrong phone call and you’ve been turned into a Doll or maybe even given the mind of a soldier ready to wreak havoc in an urban war zone.

And so, naturally, somebody weaponizes the Dollhouse technology and exactly that scenario happens. Ballard spoke about atomic energy and the nuclear bomb earlier in the season and it’s obvious now that that was foreshadowing to what the ultimate fate for the Dollhouse universe (Dollverse?) would be. But is it realistic?

Ignoring the rather nihilistic ending the show has now promised us, is the imprinting process possible over phone lines? If you recall the very first episode of the season, Echo walks in on Sierra being turned into a Doll. She is being set up to be a Doll by a very painful and wired process. While Topher simplified the individual imprints, the process for creating someone who can be imprinted remained laborious. Maybe we’re missing something here that will be explained as the series progresses but as is, the scenario they’ve painted feels false to me.

And now, I’d like for a moment to not ignore the nihilistic ending the show has promised us. The people that watch the Terminator films don’t watch them because they hope that SkyNet takes over the world. They watch because the characters in the film are fighting against that future. The idea that they can change that future is what the audience cheers. The audience didn’t like the third film precisely because it fulfilled that prophecy²; it’s a downer ending — though if John Connor makes it long enough to send a reprogrammed robot back to save himself in the past, I think we can assume the human race isn’t done for — but at least there was the initial hope; the twist of fate leading to a tragic end is one excellent way to progress a story.

And unlike other shows, Dollhouse doesn’t portray its harrowing future as bad for the characters, rather it’s bad for the world. An apocalypse has occurred. Even if the show lasts long enough to morph into a show about a group of survivors of a technology-created apocalypse, the world has still fundamentally changed for everybody. And it’s not clear that the show is willing to do that to itself. By placing the future event in 2019, they’ve basically promised the show will never go down that route. So you get to “enjoy” the rest of the series knowing that it will all end with the world irrevocably destroyed and maybe a few groups being herded to a simpler life away from the chaos caused by the Dollhouse technology. I know the show was hinting at the destructive power of the Dollhouse technology, but hinting and promising are two different things.

This bugs the fuck out of me. This episode demolishes everything I liked about the show. I don’t want to watch a show that is slouching toward an inevitable apocalypse. I want a clever smart sci-fi show that explores identity, purpose, memory, and all the interesting things that define who we are. But now, looming over that show is the spectre of this unchangeable future.

I’m not trying to bash this episode; it was excellent. It had drama, comedy, pathos, and it was probably one of the best hours of television Dollhouse has provided thus far. But once you examine the implications for the broader Dollhouse universe, the episode leaves you with an awful taste in your mouth.

So while, like the other reviewers out there, I enjoyed the episode in and of itself, when viewed in the broader context of the series, I felt it was bad. But I’m not a particularly talented writer, so maybe I’m missing something that everyone else is picking up on. We’ll see when Dollhouse comes back for season two.

Footnotes

1. How that fits into the supposed five year contract that every Doll signs is left unexplained
2. I, on the other hand, thought the ending to Terminator 3 was excellent because it twisted the initial hope of the original films. The future they fought came about if not because of their protestations then at least in spite of them.

Vampires were, I suppose, a horror tale in the beginning, and then when Bram Stoker created Dracula they became a symbol for seduction and sex. But they were still scary.

But, so the critics say, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer² we’ve had a slow pussification of vampires. They are no longer ravenous beasts who view humans as nothing more than a slow moving meal, who use their overwhelming sexual charisma as a mere tool to entice humans into their arms (and fangs).

I understand that to a degree, especially in light of Twilight³, but I respectfully disagree. Vampires were made to evolve along this path.

Zombies, werewolves, and vampires are the holy trinity of supernatural horror. Zombies are mindless horror, and any expansion of zombies beyond that is likely to be seen by connoisseurs as no longer being zombies. Werewolves are generally seen as a Jekyll/Hyde scenario with the werewolf half being uncontrollable so any shift away from that changes the definition of werewolf. But vampires are at their basest level undead creatures of the night who drink blood for sustenance. You can make a harrowing tale based around the premise of that creature, or you can tell a story of addiction, or a story of human empathy, or a story about the power of free will over base desires.

Basically, there’s much more wiggle room for what’s acceptable for a vampire story by virtue of their base properties. There’s nothing inherently primal and horrifying about vampires, it just so happens that those were the tales told most frequently until recent history.

So, when people make fun of Bill Compton of True Blood for being a “wet blanket” or some similar term because he desires to live as human a life as is possible as a vampire they’re missing the point. Vampires are homogeneous but not in the way everyone thinks. They’re not universally unfeeling unsympathetic sociopaths. Even looking at their source material can show you that.

Humans are not all the same. And vampires are made from humans. Some, when given eternal life and superhuman power, will forget their humanity and become a darker creature something akin to what we imagine as the prototypical vampire; others may shrink at the very thought of being a creature they previously imagined as an affront to God and may very well consider suicide; and many more will see their new powers not as an excuse to behave inhumanely but as a curse they must reject to retain their humanity.

The other supernatural beasts we’re familiar with don’t have this breadth. Zombies become mindless seekers of brains⁴, and werewolves become a creature who is a regular human most of the time but transforms to an uncontrollable monster during a full moon. Vampires don’t follow either of these paths and so they have a much broader palette from which their personalities can be painted.

So Bill Compton being a self-hating vampire isn’t a failing of True Blood, but rather it’s a sign that people are willing to be more complex with vampires in stories. Much like the wise stoic Native American, and the Magic Negro faded away with time replaced by more natural characters, the monstrous vampire stereotype has found itself a mere permutation in a panoply of perspectives⁵. And this isn’t a bad thing.

But with this in mind, we have to accept that a global shift from one persona to another in vampires would be a weakening of the whole. If everyone began to write all vampires as effeminate waifs afraid of human contact, that would be a terrible fate for vampire lore. But if those original sexual seductive monsters are not supplanted but supported by these new unexplored aspects of vampirism, I can hardly see that as a bad thing, for vampires or for storytelling.

Footnotes

1. I should probably be less lazy and find links to the numerous “Vampires are being made lame” articles and blog posts and essays I’ve read over the last few months, but seeing as you’re reading this endnote that clearly didn’t happen
2. Again, maybe there were pussy vampires before then, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes to mind though I don’t know enough of the details of that novel to include it as a canonical example pussy vampires
3. which has vampires that twinkle rather than smolder when doused with sunlight
4. Well, not really. The brains thing is sort of a stereotype that everyone knows but for which there’s remarkably little backing in pop culture instances of zombies.
5. Sometimes, I think I like alliteration too much

Yesterday, I downloaded a few of the Babylon 5 movies and began downloading the series proper — I already own them on DVD but AVI files are less hassle most of the time and I don’t want to rip them myself — but once I had some downloaded I made a crucial mistake: I watched one.

And another. And another.

You see, Babylon 5 is one of the best television shows I’ve ever watched. And it is unequivocally the best science fiction I’ve ever seen. So once I watched one of the movies, I couldn’t stop. The story is too good, the characters too rich, the morals too strong. And in the meantime, Voyager was busy pumping out generic episodes with generic characters and little to no character development. So, quite frankly, I can’t stand to watch that shit with the beauty that is Babylon 5 fresh in my mind.

I still plan to write up a few subsequent posts about the first half of the first season — I originally planned to write only one post for this chunk of episodes, but there’s so much wrong in there I think it deserves more than one post (I’m still not sure though) — but I’m not going to continue on my torturous little mission. I might return to it at some point — there’s too much Voyager love out there for me to just let it stand — but, for now, I’m just going to enjoy Babylon 5 all over again.

Similarly, with Chuck the season ended with Chuck obtaining a newer more powerful Intersect which gave him physical capabilities as well; twisting this slightly to make the point, he was now on a level playing field with his pseudo-girlfriend Sarah, who until now had been the kickass super-agent of the relationship. And in the process of obtaining this new Intersect the scope of the story was expanded: the enemy of the last two years had been but one part of a larger machine. The parallels are striking.

That isn’t to say the shows were similar. In fact, the contrast between the two shows was much greater in their second seasons than their first, but the similarities in their arcs are  nonetheless notable.

Chuck and Reaper have followed similar paths on the production side of things as well. They were both affected, and truncated, by the Writer’s Strike and as a result both were “bubble shows” that made it back for a second season by the skin of their teeth. Of course, here their paths diverge slightly. Reaper was given a short season renewal. I’d initially read that it was a 9 episode season, but ultimately 13 aired; Chuck was given a full 22 episode pick up.

So Chuck returned in the fall and spent months developing its identity and fanbase to the point that when it was placed once again on the bubble (albeit as a likely renewal) the fans sprang into action. Reaper, with its shorter season, began airing as a mid-season replacement and didn’t have as much time to grow a fanbase. So, despite continual assertions of inevitable cancellation by TV rating analysts, the fanbase barely materialized and the show was killed, while Chuck’s wildly successful fan-driven campaign resulted in saving the show from the increasingly fickle chopping block.

But following the trend of cancelled shows being picked up by other networks, seen this year with Medium and (potentially) My Name is Earl, the execs behind Reaper were rumoured to be looking for a deal that would have allowed for a third season on a new network. Jenny Wade, who starred on this season of Reaper as a demon and Ben’s Anya-esque girlfriend, posted on twitter of an unofficial deal in the works, a deal that fell through rather quickly. Since then, I’ve been following her and she recently posted a video discussing Reaper. In it she, among other things, defends Tyler Labine and Bret Harrison, the stars of Reaper, from fans who said they gave up on the show. This is the first I’d heard of it, but I decided to hypothesize completely uninformed of the context of the comments.

Tyler Labine was cast in a new pilot which was subsequently greenlit for a season order. I can see how that can be construed as “abandoning” a show, but it’s simply the reality of the industry; in addition, his contract for Reaper almost certainly overrode any other deals and the pilot he filmed was merely “backup.” Bret Harrison is another story; he hasn’t quickly moved onto other roles or anything of that sort so the anger of the fans seems even more unjustified to me. What I think it boils down to, though, is Reaper’s unintended doppleganger: Chuck.

One of the more noted aspects of the Chuck renewal campaign was how vociferously some of the stars of the show encouraged the campaign: namely, Bret Harrison’s Chuck counterpart Zachary Levi. While at a convention in London, he took a group of Chuck fans to a nearby Subway and, following one of the ideas of the fan campaign, started buying five dollar footlongs. Subsequently, he appeared on CNN, and most likely other channels as well, to discuss the campaign and support the show and the renewal campaign. As far as I know, Bret Harrison did none of these things, so I presume that this is at least one aspect of why the fans seem displeased with Harrison. Which (finally) gets to the point of this post: are those sorts of actions the duty of an actor?

I don’t think so. An actor’s duty is to act. Beyond that, every actor does things differently. Acting, in the end, is just a job. To some people, their job is their life, to others it’s not. We’d all like to believe that all the actors in our favourite shows and movies ansolutely love the roles they’re playing, but that’s not always the case. And really, it’s not their job to love their job.

Maybe Zachary Levi really loves Chuck more than Bret Harrison loves Reaper. Or maybe that’s just who Levi is; maybe he will spend a week evangelizing all of his friends when he finds a great rib joint. I don’t know either of them. What I do know is that the both of them did a great job. They performed their roles well, and brought to life their characters. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit.

(Obviously, I care a little; personable and fan-friendly actors are better than the alternative, but I’m not going to chastise an actor for not being an acolyte for their show.)

And ultimately, Zachary Levi talking about Chuck on CNN did not renew the show. Zachary Levi would not have even been on CNN talking Chuck except for one thing: the fans. The fans created the campaign, the fans pushed the narrative, they renewed the show. Anything Zachary Levi did was ancillary, just as anything Bret Harrison could have done would have been. The only thing Zachary Levi did to renew the show was give a great performance, one that engendered such an enthusiastic fanbase. He did his job. And so did Harrison.

Futurama has been renewed for 26 episodes to begin airing around a year from now, and all the voice actors are coming back (presumably along with the writers) to revive the animated show that mixed childish humour and deep and profound musings almost as well as Pixar does in their big screen adventures. I’ll be watching. You should too.

I don’t mean when I saw “how it could have done things better” that what I will describe is the best way to do those things. I’m not a genius or anything, and that’s exactly the point. I’m just a guy with a blog, who watches way too much TV, and I can still do better than the shit the Voyager team plopped out on a weekly basis. I’ve already watched a few episodes from the first season and I plan to start my write ups soon. And for the record, my posts won’t be unbridled hating; already, I’ve seen a few decent ideas that were merely horribly executed. Who knows, maybe there will even be a good episode in there every so often.

Anybody that watches all of Babylon 5 knows that the primary arc of the series is tied up by the end of season four. In fact, the series finale was written and filmed at the end of the fourth season in case the fifth season wasn’t approved. So it’s easy to say that season five was filler, something to pass the time until the brilliant and beatific finale. But I say nay.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime¹

First of all, if there was never a fifth season we wouldn’t have the fourth season’s finale, which examined the history of mankind for the million years following the end of the series, with a few glimpses into the fifth season, and ruminations about the fate of mankind now that the elder species have left them to their own devices.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history

Second of all, if the show ended with the series finale aired after the fourth season, the show would’ve had a distinctly typical, almost Victorian, ending with an additional epilogue. Season four ends with all the hard work ahead of them. Earth has been freed from tyranny, a new interstellar peace has been established, and the old ones have headed beyond the rim. As the opening credits claim, it was the damn of a new age. And while Babylon 5 would be a brilliant television show even if it told only the story of that first sunrise, it went beyond that to tell, at least in part, the consequences of those moments.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone

Season five is when Garibaldi’s alcoholism relapses, when G’Kar leaves his people behind, choosing to be a person and not a prophet, when Londo Mollari’s years of good intentions finally brought about his inevitable fall. Season five is the season of consequences. When the Shadows left, their followers continued their chaotic mandate. The telepaths were created by the Vorlons in their endless quest to defend their evolutionary philosophy, and those actions have to be dealt with and managed by those left behind, the younger species. The remnants of the past, fresh wounds from the recent wars, and damage yet to come collided in a story that took the simplistic image of the future that many may have had after Sheridan announced the Interstellar Alliance and delved into the nuances of life. And there are no easy answers.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint

Without season five, we would have a pretty story wrapped up in a bow — and it would be a glorious story, one worth re-telling through the ages — but only a story. With season five, we see the consequences of the story, we see the ending after the ending. We wrap these stories up to please ourselves, to delude ourselves that once that pivotal threshold has been crossed, the war is over; but history, and our current politics, tells us that isn’t the case. We see that nothing really ends.

Footnotes

1. Fragments of a Reinhold Neibuhr quotation found on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Glee is one of those shows that comes along and bites me in the ass. I hadn’t heard of it until the day before the pilot was broadcast, and the idea of a drama/musical centred around a high school glee club seemed terrible. But it wasn’t. It was touching, brave, smart, edgy, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed I liked it a lot.

There are a lot of things to like: the members of the glee club can all carry a tune, and the songs they choose are pretty fun to listen to in and of themselves; the peripheral players of the show all have interesting, but not cloying, quirks; and it’s hard to knock a show for telling an underdog story. But above all that, the message the show shouts from the rafters in its pilot is one that most people should learn: we’re all losers.

Jocks and cheerleaders, to me, are losers; they’re generally unimaginative and their ambitions seem childish and ultimately insubstantial. But I’m a loser to those people because I spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer, watching obscure 70′s sci-fi shows and writing a blog. And I’m a loser to a whole other subset of society for completely different reasons. So yeah, we’re all losers. But our victories are our own. So fuck the naysayers and do what you like.

But even without that theme, which runs through the pilot, the show has so much going for it. Lea Michele, who plays the overly talented self-labeled ingenue Rachel, has an amazing singing voice and she manages to make a character reminiscent of the satirical stereotype Reese Witherspoon played in Election not only genuine but incredibly likable and empathetic. Cory Monteith’s Finn is another stereotype turned on its head: he plays the Jock who secretly loves singing to wonderful effect. Cory’s voice is often overpowered by Lea’s Broadway honed one, but it fits the character and presumably he will improve as the show progresses.

The inevitable romantic storylines have already been set into place, as well. Matthew Morrison’s Mr. Shue has an unlikeable wife and an obvious romantic interest in the school germophobe guidance counselor, played by the always amazing Jayma Mays. And Finn and Rachel have already discussed the likelihood that they will end up together, subverting expectations while hanging a lantern in one fell swoop. I don’t think either of these threads will pay off for some time, but you never know.

I like all the characters. Or more accurately, I like the way all the characters are played. From minor roles like Stephen Tobolowsky’s brief appearance as the glee club director turn drug dealer up to the sundry members of the glee club, each role felt well cast and well written. I can’t wait to see how they all progress as the stories continue.

I’m trying to contain my enthusiasm in this discussion, primarily because otherwise the entire thing would devolve into a series of squees and me dancing around my room while singing along (despite my completely tone deaf singing voice) with the musical numbers, but I really am very excited by this show. I lamented the lack of good teen and high school oriented stories on TV a few months ago when Kyle XY was cancelled, and this show looks to fill that void. (Also, I’m totally in love with Lea Michele already. That girl’s got a voice on her.)

This pilot introduced a lot of awesome, and given the pedigree of the man behind the show — he did create Nip/Tuck after all — I’m confident the show will continue to impress me when it finally gets to air its full season in the fall. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch the “Don’t Stop Believing” sequence another 5,000 times.

I’m really excited about this — despite it meaning I will have to write detailed recap/reviews of each episode — because the first season was, aside from a few weak moments, really great: entertaining, funny, brave, contemplative, and so many other things.

I’ve had my gripes with Fox in the past; they canned Firefly without giving it a chance, the cancelled Futurama despite it being the funniest animated series they ever produced, and of course the brutal prolonged death they offered Arrested Development was visceral and painful to me. That said, Dollhouse was never a strong performer in the ratings — though it fared better than most of the programs Fox aired on Friday nights — and Fox is giving it another chance. So Kudos to you, Fox: you’ve regained a modicum of fanboy respect.

Lost broke my brain on Wednesday. In the best way possible. If you’re not watching that show, I don’t know what to say to you.

But that’s a fairly cold and calculating way to look at writing a review. I don’t want to merely insert enough keywords as to increase my traffic by throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. That said, I have found myself more willing to go back and examine and re-read my more detailed reviews. Looking at the little moments that make a show good is one thing that many other reviewers fail to do, and to write about those details in the hopes of reaching others who, like me, appreciate the little things a show does is a big reason I write about television.

So I’ve decided that if Dollhouse gets renewed for another season, I will write detailed reviews — luxuriating over every shot, every thought, every furtive glance — for every episode of Dollhouse until the series ends. And I mean series the way an American or a Canadian does. If Dollhouse becomes a breakaway hit in its second season and then airs continuously for the next fifty years, I will have a horridly long review for every single episode in the bunch. Of course, the real question is this: is this promise a reason to renew or a reason to not?

After Alpha and Echo headed off into the sunset, it all seemed very blasé as an explanation for the byzantine plans Alpha has concocted to test Echo. This was initially justified by the many personalities of Alpha; rather than Alpha’s goal being the imprinting of Echo with a Bonnie to his Clyde, it was simply the goal of one of his many minds. But that didn’t hold out for long. Alpha’s personalities start to break down and intermingle and the megalomaniac personality that embodies the Alpha mythos starts to once again take hold.

But even then, as revealed through flashback, Alpha is doing all of this because he “saw something” in Echo. Basically he had a crush on her and the psychopathic killer that grew up in his body had many bizarre ways of expressing that. As I was watching those scenes, I was reminded of the obsession that Ballard has with Caroline, and how little of it is based on anything he actually knows about her.

So, for the first half of this finale I was feeling a little let down by it all. First Ballard, and now Alpha; all the men in Echo’s life keep getting killed by candarian demons keep ending up being these cliches of male messiah-complexism. But then the second half won me over; once Alpha had imprinted Echo with all of her past personalities at once, thus creating an Omega to his Alpha, she didn’t follow his path to megalomania.

And all of that was basically getting around to the idea that an Active is more than an object. They’re more than a container. Alpha is not Alpha because he was overloaded by 48 personalities. And Echo did not become Omega because of what Alpha did to her. There’s a fundamental base to each person. You can call it a soul if you like, but it’s there no matter what Topher does. So Alpha was always broken, the composite event merely allowed him to express that brokenness. But as Echo has said before, she’s not broken.

The show is mixing its messages here though, because as the audience is seeing that Alpha went evil because Carl William Kraft was always evil, and Echo stayed sane because Caroline was, new Echo is saying just the opposite. “There’s no me, I’m just a container,” which I think belies the message the show’s trying to put across. And before she can further articulate her thoughts on the subject Alpha gets aggressive again, so it’s hard to see if she’d eventually realise that she is more than a container. Regardless, even if Caroline was hollowed out, little bits remained. So Boo-urns for sending mixed messages, but I suppose it would’ve been a less exciting hour if Echo spent the next five minutes examining the meaning of selfness and the permanence of the soul.

I also enjoyed the Boyd/Ballard hook up, and now that Ballard is working with the Dollhouse, I really hope the second season is greenlit so we can see more of them hanging together and hating on the evils of the Dollhouse while working for it. And speaking of Ballard, what he did in this episode also redeemed a lot of my annoyances regarding him. First off, he awesomely got the FBI to cancel their terrorist alert by telling Tanaka exactly what was going on in that building, and knowing it was just nuts enough to get Tanaka to call off the alert. And then, as the episode ended and he accepted his new position at the Dollhouse — which, by the way, it would be really awesome if he became Echo’s handler next year — under the condition that a certain special Active was given back her old self and her five-year debt paid in full: November.

Yes, Ballard finally realised that the Doll he needed to rescue wasn’t the one once called Caroline, but the one once called Madeline; the one he knew and genuinely cared for. I was really proud of Ballard in that moment. Even if it turns out in the second season (come on FOX, do it for me) that he chose November rather than Echo because he wanted Echo at the Dollhouse with him, he still made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

This episode also let Ballard be an awesome investigator since he was the one that figured out that who Alpha was before he was Alpha was the missing part of the equation.

One of the most interesting things in this episode was the reveal of Dr Saunders’ past. I’ve always imagined it was a possibility that she was a Doll, and it was broadly hinted at when it was mentioned earlier that she never leaves the Dollhouse, so the reveal wasn’t mind-blowing but it certainly put a twist on all her past interactions. As Whiskey, she was the number one Doll, and it was that popularity that led to Alpha slicing her face, in the hopes of making Echo number one, and in turn led to Alpha going in for a diagnostic and the accidental composite event.

Dr Saunders’ acceptance of her past is intriguing though. Since her first appearance, I’ve found her to be one of the most interesting characters and the way she’s dealt with what should be a soul-shattering experience only adds to that. Seriously, Amy Acker can do no wrong. She needs to have her own show.

The finale was great in ways I didn’t expect. I was disappointed by Alpha, though the problem was that the rest of the season built him up too well; it’s very hard to build up a character to those epic proportions and then successfully reveal them to the audience without disappointing in some way. Luckily, a lot of other directions the show took delighted me. Saunders’ revelation, Ballard’s new employer, and Echo’s awakening (and its persistence based on the closing shot of the season) all elevated Dollhouse to a new level and set up a drastically different, yet reminiscent, world for the second season. Which probably won’t happen.

But liking television comes with that risk. A movie has a set goal to tell the story it wants to tell. They can from time to time establish things that can be explored further in sequels but, for the most part, movies are self-enclosed, much like the Dollhouse. Television has to plan for more. Television has to tell an interesting and self-enclosed story while constantly writing a superstory above it all. If the larger story is flawed or uninteresting, you’ll get very little connection with the audience, but if the individual stories aren’t strong enough the audience won’t come back and get caught up in your universe. It’s a delicate tightrope that television writers have to constantly walk, and it’s something that I thought Dollhouse did very well. And even if the show doesn’t come back, we’ll still have that.

As much as Alan Tudyk’s manic portrayal of Alpha pleased me, when he imprinted Echo with a new personality — who? we don’t yet know — and headed off with a kiss it left me worried about how the season will end. I never saw Alpha’s grand plan as being so petty; playing hero for one of the personalities stored in the Dollhouse’s archives is neither nefarious nor lofty. That said, this is a Joss Whedon show we’re talking about so it’s almost guaranteed that it will end up wowing me. So, in the meantime, let’s talk about what I liked.

First off, the Echo-imprint story of the week, which provides the show with its title, with Echo as a teacher trying to touch a troubled student (not like that) was cool. Fixing a person’s emotional problems in software and then fixing the original person in the real world is an interesting extension of the Dollhouse’s technology, but I was way too enthralled by all the intrigue going on in the Dollhouse this episode to really give a damn. So I’m going to completely ignore it; it might be great, but there’s no closure to the thread and I’m not entirely sure that it’ll be picked up in subsequent episodes. So fuck it.

The episode kicks off² with Ballard breaking up with Mellie and packing up his apartment. Which I, for one, am glad to see. Ever since Mellie’s outing as a Doll, I see her pining for Paul as degrading and calculating rather than heartwarming and quixotic. Last week’s episode, when Ballard broke down and used Mellie like an object, finally broke his resolve and so he’s leaving her. Of course, he’s also leaving her in the hopes that she will be taken back to the Dollhouse. Which then happens, thus proving that Ballard actually is a capable investigator; being spoonfed information for the first half of the season was beginning to wear on me so it’s good that he’s discovered the Dollhouse at least partially on his own.

I say partially because he still hasn’t found the Dollhouse, only the door. To get past the door he needs the man that built it. Seeing as his corpse is rotting in Tucson, Alpha playing the role of the builder of the Dollhouse will have to do. Paul’s journey through the Dollhouse is tense, and exciting, but when he finally got to the pod room and he started getting all doe-eyed over Caroline I start zoning out. Hopefully, that thread is abandoned soon, because the more opportunities Ballard has to be in contact with Echo, the more annoying it gets.

A lot of stuff happened, and it mostly seems very meh in light of the revelations stacked into the last few minutes, but one moment that took me by surprise in more ways than one was Enver Gjokaj’s absolutely dead-on impersonation of Laurence Dominic. I mean, it’s so good it’s like they cast one or both of those guys (Reed Diamond and Enver Gjokaj) for this explicit purpose. I will cherish those moments for the rest of my life. OK, not really, but it was really great.

So, I know it feels like I’m giving this episode’s review the short shrift, and in a lot of ways I am. There are a lot of really nice touches in this episode, but that final scene left me with a lot of trepidation about what will happen in the finale. I hope it turns out well, given the likelihood of there being a second season, so I’m just gonna wait it out.

Footnotes

1. There are 13 episodes this season, but the 13th is a standalone that likely won’t even air.
2. Again, I’m ignoring the school teacher stuff, so Ballard’s stuff happened “first” from that perspective.

I remember two years ago, when Jericho was a show was less than stellar ratings that looked “on the bubble” just as Chuck is now; there were rumblings that it might not be renewed, but nobody was ardently fighting for its renewal. Not until the season ended with a spectacular climax and CBS announced that the show would not be returning for a second season did the fan base explode with fury and begin sending tonnes (literally) of peanuts to CBS to demand a new season of Jericho.

Miraculously, it worked. No write-in campaign that I know of had been successful in reviving a show since Star Trek in the 60′s, but the dedication of the fans astounded the executives and so they made an abrupt about-face and gave Jericho a second season. Of seven freaking episodes.

In the case of Jericho, the network execs were essentially telling the writers to finish off whatever they had planned. They kept up the pretense of a possible third season, even having the writers create two alternate endings, but everyone could see the writing on the wall. Some might argue that this is the best you can get, but I think what’s happened with Chuck is a sign of the future of fandom.

Chuck has never been more than “on the bubble,” and even in this impoverished state, most experts have been quietly optimistic about its possibilities. But we’ve learned not to take “good enough” for granted. Jericho had higher ratings than Chuck, and it still got cancelled. The fans have learned their lesson, and they will fight for the shows they love, even before the fight has begun. Preemptive war is the tactic du jour in our world now. And one has to hope it will result in greater gains than the Jericho campaigns.

The fans of other shows haven’t learned their lesson yet, or they’ve been conditioned for failure. In fact, most of the ardent supporters of Dollhouse in the early days were the ones virtually promising that it would be cancelled.

At this point, Chuck seems likely to be renewed, but its relative success — whether or not it gets a crappy timeslot, or a truncated run, or substantial network support, etc. — will be the litmus test for this new form of fandom. Bringing the fight to the network before the network knows there’s a fight is a potent tactic. If it works, that is.

I hate Medium. I hated it before I’d ever seen it, but watching an episode solidified and justified my prejudice. I have no idea why the ratings for that show are even marginally better than Chuck. I would be more upset by Medium getting a renewal and Chuck getting cancelled than both shows getting cancelled. So, NBC: please please please please choose Chuck. Or at the very least, don’t choose Medium. But seriously, choose Chuck.

I think that, should I go back and watch the series anew at a later date, I’d find that the quality had not dissipated but rather the realization that the show is “almost brilliant” had simply been delayed.

In robotics there is a term for that eerie feeling we all get when we see a robot that almost duplicates a perfect human being but has very slight flaws and discrepancies. It’s called the Uncanny Valley. These slight discontinuities jar the mind and make us feel at unease. We don’t feel that unease when looking at a robot like C3PO or R2-D2 or WALL-E because they are not human and the differences are notable and numerous. They become a sort of living cartoon, something we accept as a human analog because we can cobble together empathy based on the few anthropomorphic cues available.

I believe that there is similar valley that exists in the world of television. Most television exists before this valley; the characters are entertaining and endearing, but not wholly real. Then there are the special few shows that exist beyond the valley; those shows have such a well-defined universe, such believable characters, that we are enveloped by the show, taking it in as more than mere entertainment. Kings, unfortunately, existed in the abyss betwixt.

Kings was a show that was too good but not good enough. The early comparisons I made to Carnivàle were a sign that the show was attempting to achieve the greatness that lies beyond the valley; where a show will be talked about and analysed for years after. But it didn’t make it there. Maybe Michael Green didn’t have the writing chops to match Daniel Knauf, or maybe the show would have achieved that greatness over the course of the series. Either way, in my mind, Kings sits somewhere in that valley, reaching for more, and not getting the chance it deserves.

Admittedly, this could just be my view of what a game-changer is. If you consider the introduction of the Dharma Initiative on Lost a game-changing event, then Chuck’s finale was more definitely a game-changer.

Regardless, this finale proved that Chuck is one of the best shows on TV. It manages to intertwine overarching mythology, spy action, drama, romance, humour, and geeky references better than any other show. And what’s more astounding is that none of these suffer for any other. The characters are fleshed out, they grow and change over time, the Chuck/Sarah romance is always there and develops and evolves with each new circumstance, and the action is more dynamic than most other television shows. Chuck is undoubtedly the best show NBC has right now, and to cancel it now would be more than foolish, it would be tragic.

Many people are spreading the word about the “Save Chuck” campaign, and Alan Sepinwall’s open letter to NBC is stellar. The best advice, however, is the simplest. Watch the show. Buy it on DVD. Contact NBC and voice your support of the show. Chuck is a show worth fighting for. So fight.

But that’s the truth of the situation. Chuck has yet to get a greenlight for a third season, and as much as I hold out hope that NBC will keep one of their few genuinely entertaining shows alive for another year, I know that NBC has done little to warm me to their cause; Surface, The Black Donnellys, Andy Barker, P.I., Journeyman, and The Book of Daniel are all shows that were cancelled too quickly by NBC.

I’m leaving my hovel to venture out into the real world tonight, so I won’t be able to watch Chuck, live and vibrating with excitement as I normally do, tonight. But don’t let me stop you. Watch Chuck. You won’t regret it.

This week, the main story was that of a dead Dollhouse client. She planned regular brain scans with the Dollhouse and a plan to revive her in a Doll for a brief period of time after her death. To solve her own murder. Talk about paranoid.

Well, I guess not in this instance.

Echo takes on the role, and while the murder mystery is relatively interesting, it’s not too hard to unravel the clues, and the best part about that entire story thread is the idea that the Dollhouse can offer eternal life, as Topher says, “if they really like you.”

This eternal life troubles Boyd greatly, who seems to be playing the role that the professorial dude from Man on the Street played. As he said then, if the Dollhouse’s technology existed, “as a species, we will cease to matter.” Boyd, not having caught on to the ultimate implications of the Dollhouse until now, says of the eternal life he’s discovered the Dollhouse can offer that it’s “the beginning of the end,” and while his claim that morality doesn’t exist without the fear of death seems a little juvenile to be coming from a Joss Whedon show, the idea that humanity would be altered at a fundamental level if immortality, in any form, was invented remains true.

Heady issues were being tossed around right and left this week, with all three plots examining the Dollhouse in a new and exciting way. First, the just discussed immortality. Second, Topher loads Sierra up with a friend personality. Because Topher has no friends. Which is sad, really. But all of the scenes of Topher and Sierra geeking out are all so fun and airy, that the implication doesn’t hit you until Adelle’s monologue about the need to feel connected, to have friends, to evade loneliness however you can.

Finally, we get Paul Ballard’s sad little tale. He’s fucked, both literally and figuratively, by the Dollhouse this week. He’s unable to break it off with Mellie lest he reignite the Dollhouse’s investigations, but unwilling to invest in a relationship with her. Ultimately, Mellie offers herself up to Paul with no expectations. She doesn’t care that he doesn’t like her, so long as he continues to let he be in his presence. It’s incredibly debasing, and emphasizes that Mellie’s so called love for Paul is nothing more than a programmed parameter. After this monologue, a switch seems to click in Paul’s mind, and he no longer sees Mellie as a person, but as an object. And in that moment, he sinks to his baser instincts and fucks her. The next morning in the shower, as the water fails to clean the filth from his body he tells Mellie that he’s found a new Dollhouse client, but he doesn’t say that it’s him. Paul’s scenes were the shortest and the least frequent but I thought they packed the biggest punch, despite the discussion of immortality in the A plot.

This week’s Dollhouse was all over the place in the best sort of way; none of the stories really had anything to do with each other, and the ideas they were exploring were all mostly independent, but they were all beautifully explored while servicing the growth of the characters along the way. Which is the way good television works.

So the recent study that watching TV relieves loneliness was not a surprise to me. In my previous post, I actually predicted it:

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

It didn’t quite take 30 years for TV to shift the data, but my point remains. One of the reasons I enjoy television more than I do movies is that the longer form of storytelling allows stronger connections to the characters. This goes beyond a need for social connectedness, though this study shows that this is clearly a factor, and into the ability of television to ask deeper and more fundamental questions than film.

Movies often seem grander in some respects, but I think that most of that view comes from film’s greater opportunity, not greater ability, to ask these sorts of questions. In two hours, a lot of ideas can be examined but they cannot be explored to any real depth. In addition, in two hours characters can be examined, but they will most likely not change in any appreciable amount. But television dramas have characters that change drastically. A movie could attempt such changes, but it would be seen as absurd by critics; in two hours, for those sorts of changes to occur would break the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.

In addition, movies require a real dramatic thrust and driving action, and so the framing of the characters always relies on that structure, unless you’re doing a very indie film with no expectation of heavy distribution. Television, on the other hand, can explore multiple characters by virtue of their long-term status. In a movie that tells the same high level story as Lost or Kyle XY or other character dramas, you might get some amount of time devoted to side characters, but nowhere near the attention to detail that television offers; with television, you can truly get immersed in a world.

It’s that immersive quality that makes television more capable of not only examining a world and its inhabitants but also touching you with the answers it uncovers.

I’m not too sore about this, to be honest. Not only is most of my outrage over Kings’ poor ratings died away as it’s become clear that nobody was watching, but this week’s episode made me worry about the show’s direction. Michael Green, who was a writer on Heroes previously, has been heading up Kings and doing an admirable job of it, but as a former writer for Heroes I wonder if he’s picked up some of their bad habits.

Heroes focuses far too heavily on plot, to the detriment of its characters; in fact, at this point they’re all vapid caricatures imbued with so little substance it’s hard to care at all about how the story continues. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening on Kings, merely that it’s a distinct possibility and this week’s episode did seem more focused on plot progression than character development. I sincerely hope that my feelings about this week’s episode don’t carry forward and that the show concludes in a satisfying way. I’m just aware that the show could let me down. At least I have a couple months to cushion the blow.

Judgement day¹ in Gilboa — like the Presidential pardons of today, but with the occasional split baby — and the episode that spawned from the idea was OK. Prince Jack’s finally starting to develop beyond a mere pawn of others, and his plot to divide Michelle and David was great; it also gave us a chance to see why he’s so troubled by David. He’s younger than Michelle so if she married David, a certifiable war hero, it would be pretty easy to establish them as the new monarchy, preemptively ousting Jack.

That said, this episode had too little conflict. Michelle got her new health care system, David’s brother is getting a cake walk sentence, David’s mother is back on speaking terms with him, the Doctor that knows Silas has an illegitimate son did nothing to take advantage of that. Yes, David and Michelle have been separated rather solidly, and the exiled nephew’s return certainly ruffled some feathers (some from his own closet it seems, given the implication of the high heel his father found in his room), but nothing of real import happened. Even ignoring the lack of real progression of plot — because I’m quite comfortable with a show that explores characters with little plot — the characters didn’t really get a lot of growth either.

I hate to criticise the show, because it really is still way better than most of everything else on TV, but it’s not as good as it could be right now, even accepting the limitations of network television. There were good things, but the less good things were more noticeable. That’s really all I’ve got to say this week. I’m sure the ratings were terrible, but it really doesn’t matter at this point. Kings is deader than Dollhouse.

Footnotes

1. I’m Canadian so I spell it Judgement. However, the proper title of the episode is “Judgment Day” hence the disparity.

If you don’t watch How I Met Your Mother, I feel sorry for you. It’s one of the few shows out there that manages to leverage the classic multi-camera sitcom format, while keeping an ongoing storyline and having characters with real emotional weight. It’s one of those genuine shows that can make you laugh and make you really feel for the characters at the same time.

This year, the two main actresses on the show, Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, both got pregnant mid-season, which was a tough logistical challenge for the show’s writers. Smulders isn’t showing too much thus far, but Hannigan had ballooned out and the last few weeks have barely managed to contain her baby belly. Some of the early attempts to explain Hannigan’s baby bump were very clever. Aside from the usual hiding of the stomach with a large purse, or a kitchen island, there was an episode where it was revealed that Lily, her character, was a former hotdog eating champion, which resulted in a few scenes of her, baby bump on display, scarfing down hotdogs. It’s funny to the audience, who is clearly aware of her real-life situation, but also serves a valid purpose. Tonight’s was even better.

In the opening scene, sitting in a bench at the gang’s favourite bar, she is told a joke that is referred to as “boy-funny.” The joke is quoted above, along with the punchline which the show refused to even utter. Upon hearing the punchline, Lily was so offended that she left. And as the narrator said “she didn’t talk to us for four weeks.” I’m guess there are four episode left in the season. In either case: Awesome.

In one of my first rants against Heroes, I pointed out a glaring flaw in the writing of the show: Angela Petrelli is introduced as a distraught widow stealing socks just to feel alive, and yet this year it was revealed that she had coldly assassinated her husband. It was one of the most scathing and unassailable criticisms of the show I had. Well tonight they retconned the hell out of that. Apparently, she stole (or bought, I really was barely paying attention) socks when she needed to see a small action make a big difference or some bullshit (again, barely paying attention). Well, I call shenanigans.

In general, I’m OK with retcons in comics. Not necessarily when Spider-man #220 retcons Spider-man #108, though and here’s why. The stories are far enough apart to know for certain that it wasn’t a planned reveal. Ten issues apart, I’d accept it. But that far apart, it’s just breaking continuity because you’re lazy. The instances I approve of retcons are when a new story is being told from the beginning. So the origin story of Iron Man in Incredible Iron Man can be different, even drastically so, than the one in Iron Man because they’re two separate instances of that character with new stories being told. To allow yourself to tell new stories and explore new ideas, sometimes the details of a character’s past must be adjusted. But in any other instance, I don’t like retcons.

The worst part about this is that I sympathize with the writers in this instance. Bryan Fuller came back to a plodding mess with a bunch of inconsistent continuity hacked together, and he had to at least attempt to reconcile it all. So he had Matt Parkman find out about his child and according to spoilers I’ve read, he’ll get back together with the wife he left for no reason at all but plot expediency. And now he’s tried to change Angela Petrelli’s origin to have a connection to this event at Coyote Hills. Of course, there’s still no reason for everybody going back.

She said it was crucial to fix their current problems to go to Coyote Hills and face the past. But what did it really accomplish? We got that one salient point out of it. Which, I’m still not sure makes any sense. We didn’t really get much else from the episode. Sure there was a bit of backstory filled in; we learned Charles Deveaux actually had a power, though how it connects to his post-mortem conversation with Peter is still unclear; we got a little bit more of Nathan and Peter’s brotherly bickering; we were also told that Claire is actually really awesome and brave, despite her continued idiocy and short-sightednesss. And when it all came down to it, none of those revelations led to their fractured relationships being healed. At least not in any rational way. Instead, it was Sylar posing as Nathan Petrelli that seemed to push them together and let them forget their troubled past.

What I’m trying to say here is, it didn’t work for me. It all seems hamfisted. Admittedly, it almost has to be hamfisted because of what came before it, but that doesn’t make the experience any less distasteful.

First things first: the inside man. This episode leads you to believe that the climax will reveal who has been feeding Ballard information via Actives, but when it’s revealed that Dominic was the inside man — not only that, but he was on a mission from the NSA to ensure that the Dollhouse doesn’t fail — we’re left with the initial question. Here’s who I think it is: DeWitt. My theory relies on one thing: Topher didn’t know that DeWitt was Ms Lonely Hearts. Which, to me, means that DeWitt added a secondary protocol to the Roger Imprint that redefined who he was in love with.

In some instances, I’d be willing to accept Topher not knowing what the engagement is in detail, but to define an imprint which professes to the Dollhouse staff love for an octogenarian while secretly loving DeWitt without knowing some of the details seems unlikely. So, the logical conclusion is that the imprint-overrider that Topher found this episode was being used by DeWitt to adjust the Roger imprint, while also sending messages to Ballard. The only other alternative is that there are a bunch of imprint adjusters hooked into the system that Topher failed to notice. Some of you might say that Ivy, Topher’s assistant is still a suspect but Echo’s spy-catcher imprint would’ve detected that because she interrogated her. Of course, if the messages to Ballard continue, we’ll know I was wrong.

Now that I’ve recorded my idiocy so that others can point to it and laugh later on, I’ll talk about some other things. Echo’s growth this episode was great. The idea of a Doll asking to be imprinted is an awesome stepping stone towards full-on self-awareness. That said, I have to wonder how much the early scene where Ivy gives a lackluster opening script greeting to Echo was a part of that. Immediately afterward, Topher begins talking about the effect it can have on a freshly wiped Doll. Later on, she sees Sierra taken to the chair and then leaving the room a hardened spy. Before then, she sees November go into the chair and return as someone who looks at Echo waving at her with confusion. The glimpses of Echo observing and seemingly understanding these conversations and events going on around her were excellent. And the non-chronological storytelling of the episode enhanced this by letting us see Echo at different points in this arc.

Even the first scene, where Echo says that “she made a mistake and now she’s sad” about Dominic’s Attic-ing, which could be missed one first viewing reveals more of Echo’s growth. Echo has looked beyond the obvious and found the hidden answer: DeWitt’s faith in Dominic was misplaced, and that hurt her. And if you subscribe to my theory, she’s hurt in more than one way because she has to give up her Roger imprint because her surreptitious imprint rewriter is now gone.

Sierra’s Alias-esque foray at the NSA was great for the sheer sci-fi spy-action-ness of it. But what was even better was Ballard’s brief appearance this episode. First off, he’s clearly become increasingly paranoid since he discovered the bugs. Which apparently helps when you’re investigating massive conspiracies, because he’s unspooled more about the Dollhouse and its massive scope in this brief separation from Mellie than he had in the preceding months working on the Dollhouse case for the FBI. But when Mellie returns all his paranoia goes away… at least until Mellie switched into imformant mode and tells Paul not to reveal the details of his investigation to Mellie because she’s been sent to spy on him. And now Ballard had to keep up the romance with Mellie, all the while knowing she’s programmed to love him and having to keep pretty much everything from her. Something’s gotta give, people.

Lots happened, and not in the “a lot happened” sort of way last week played out. This time things seem to have actually changed. Not only is Echo’s greatest adversary at the Dollhouse now out of commission, but her increasing awareness is no longer seen as a threat but as an advantage. It’ll be interesting to see how that, and Boyd’s new position as head of security, affect the situation at the Dollhouse next week. The ratings? Who gives a fuck about the ratings at this point? OK fine. They were just as shitty as ever.

That said, most of what I read is still wrong. I just rant about it elsewhere, at the moment. I’ll try to redirect some of said ranting to here. After all, I wouldn’t want my blog to be targeted at a specific audience thus resulting in higher traffic. Cause that’d be foolish.

It’s only been a few weeks for me as a regular recapper of television shows, and in that brief amount of time both of the shows I cared about enough to discuss on a weekly basis have been cancelled. Not officially cancelled, of course; Dollhouse’s 13th episode, originally planned as the finale for the season, will not be aired, and Kings has been moved to Saturdays. But they’ve been cancelled nonetheless. So I’m done with all that. The more I write about shows, the sooner they seem to be cancelled. Besides, I could continue writing about each new episode — detailing the many ways I love each scene, each characterization, each twist — but everything would end with “if only the show wasn’t cancelled.” I don’t think I want to subject myself to that. So I’m finished. For now, anyways.

UPDATE: Supposedly, the non-airing of the 13th episode was expected. So the show isn’t necessarily cancelled. That said, I’m not buying it. I’ve given up hope. It’s over. Even if the non-airing of this final episode was done in good faith, the damage is done. To the dedicated fans, the ones who were willing to go back to Fox, despite the abuse they suffered with Firefly and Arrested Development, because they were assured that things would be different, this was what we knew was inevitable but silently ignored as the evidence mounted around us. The show is dead. At least this time, people won’t be able to blame shifting schedules on the show’s failure. The sad truth is, the vocal fans of Joss Whedon do little but talk. Because none of them came to watch.

After yet another trouncing by entirely inferior television, it’s being move to the less high-profile Saturday night 8pm time slot. The worst part of this is its being replaced by longer episodes of Dateline. I’ve never understood this response from networks. The show is complete and ready to air in its entirety. There is nothing better to put in that time slot. And yet the networks invariably opt to air repeats or unnecessarily long versions of slightly more popular shows. I understand that ratings are important, but at the same time, giving a show a chance to build a connection with the audience, even if that happens to take a while, seems advantageous to me.

It’s obvious to anybody now that Kings is going to get cancelled. It’s a sad day. Not an outrageous day, and that makes it all the more sadder.

Two weeks ago, when Port Prosperity was ceded to Gath, I was befuddled by David’s reaction. It seemed like he was more than happy to give away the land his family fought for. Some worry or trepidation seemed justified on his part. This week clarified that showing that Port Prosperity is merely in the same region as David’s land. But then, the King decides to return all of the land taken from Gath in their past wars, which does happen to include David’s homeland. He’s less than pleased. His hometown expects him to become the leader of their cause, but his loyalty to the King is constant.

David struggles this week with these divided loyalties. Ultimately, his family’s extremist unbending demands push him from blood to fealty. The one weakness of this plot for me, is that the insurrectionists’ position is irrational. Gilboa offers resettlement and equivalent employment in their new land. Would the soil beneath their feet not be drenched enough in the blood of their forebearers? I’ve never understood those feelings of “Our Land, Our Blood” so it’s hard to feel sympathetic to their cause. But the ultimate point the show makes is that peace requires sacrifices, and not always of haemoglobin.

But David’s struggles were ultimately pointless, and his failure to hold off the violent attempt at insurrection was expected. By allowing the situation to escalate while he went fishing in a river, King Silas made the conspirators against him be more forthright in their plans, which led to them all being gunned down safe for the King’s brother-in-law, William Cross, who was warned at the last minute by Silas’ head General, who’s come to see Silas as weak and is no longer willing to follow him.

Everything that happened this episode ended up working in the favour of Silas, at least in the short term. His son has been chastened, his brother-in-law’s coup-in-waiting has been severely hindered, the insurrection has been thwarted. Everything’s coming up Silas. Perhaps his sacrifice from last week is paying dividends.

Not much more to say this week. Sometimes I want to gush over every scene, other times I’m content to point out a few interesting moments. This week was one of the latter. I have to admit that some of this terseness is coming from my disheartenment over the utter failure Kings has been in terms of ratings. I find myself investing slightly less each week because the outlook is so bleak. So many of my favourite shows are on the cusp of cancellation or have already been denied renewal; I sincerely hope Kings doesn’t disappear at the end of this season, but it’s hard to see it coming back, barring a miracle as ostentatious as that of David slaying Goliath.

This episode was about, as the title indicates, needs. The Dollhouse needs their Dolls to function as required at all times. And recently, particularly after the memory drug from last week’s episode brought up the traumas of their past, some Dolls’ glitching has gotten out of hand. So, in the face of these repeated glitches, they instigate a radical plan: give the Dolls what they need. Rather then further sedate them, or attempt to further wipe their minds, or anything like that, simply give them a chance to resolve the issues that are causing their instabilities. Give them closure. This hearkens to an idea I discussed in my review of the premiere when Echo’s actions were implied to resolve the internal conflict of the personality she was imprinted with at the time. Even though the person for which these fears existed, facing them gave a sort of closure. To what, I’m not sure.

Echo, Victor, Sierra, November, and Mike all awaken early in the episode to find themselves back to their old selves, minus any specific memories of their old life. Their personalities, without any of the events that forged them. When Mike is taken away and returns as calm and docile as the other Dolls, the remaining four band together to find a way out of their situation, whatever it may be.

So, here we are with the personalities, but not the memories, of the Dolls original lives waking in their sleeping pods attempting to figure out where they are, how to get away, and what to do next. Echo, as was implied by last week’s episode, wouldn’t need to be free to find closure: she would need everyone to be free, she would need the Dollhouse to no longer exist. So rather than leave with the others in the inevitable escape she stays behind to free the other Dolls. A pleasant side-effect of Echo’s behaviour this episode is that it washes away the unpleasant taste Caroline’s personality left with me last week. Rather than being quippy despite the dire tasks, she takes on the role of saviour and wholeheartedly seeks the demise of the Dollhouse. I’m much more willing to accept this week’s Caroline as a character I can invest in.

Sierra confronts the man that put her in the Dollhouse, both a proxy to the closure she needs for what Hearn did to her and a legitimate trauma in and of itself. What’s interesting about this is that while Adelle DeWitt is discussing the voluntary nature of the Doll life, we discover that Sierra was made a Doll by a powerful man who wanted to control her and make her do whatever he wanted. This is the first time the pseudo-voluntary nature of a Doll’s tenure has been explicitly denied by the show.

And apparently Victor just wanted Sierra. It’s a little simplistic, but it works because Victor’s personality in this episode was both the most appealing and humourous, and he quickly took on a role as the de facto leader of the escapees so his closure was more related to the obtaining of closure for those under his “command.” Relatedly, Victor’s calm and controlled manner of leading the others makes me think that Victor’s original life was in the military, and so the traumatic war-time memory of Victor’s that we saw last week was of his original life. Which opens the question of whether Victor joined the Dollhouse to escape the horrors he’d committed on the battlefield or was taken from a happy life.

November’s past is the most sympathetic. In her original life, it seems her daughter died and she never fully recovered from it. It’s implied here that she gave herself to the Dollhouse to escape the sadness in her life. But with all of these stories what really got accomplished? The one weak point of the show, in retrospect, is how Dominic and DeWitt have early scenes together where they pretend as though what’s happening is not what they wanted. Put simply, there are too many head-fakes.

The episode starts with Topher saying he can mess with their drug levels, implying that doing that caused the unexpected “awakening” of the Dolls original personalities. But then DeWitt later pretends as though this is part of a training exercise for their staff. Then ultimately, it’s revealed that after Topher’s initial suggestion in that earlier scene Dr Saunders suggests that they give the most problematic Dolls emotional closure so that they can be reset to normal and those internal conflicts will no longer combat the programming of the Dollhouse. So, it all makes sense except for that one scene implying it’s all a training exercise. If that scene weren’t there, this episode would be perfect. We would have seen lots of character growth, the development of the romance between Victor and Sierra was particularly touching, and then ending the episode with all of that being a part of the Dollhouse’s plan. Not only that, but the ultimate reveal that it was Dr Saunders, one of the staff more sympathetic towards the Dolls, that perpetrated this plan was excellent; the show has worked very hard making her sympathetic to the audience, so showing the darker more twisted side of her psyche was a smart, and subversive, move on the writers. But all of it seems weakened by that one little thread that doesn’t mesh with the rest.

As usual, Ballard’s story is mostly dissociated from the Actives — though Echo does manage to leave a message on his voicemail before she manages to set the Actives in the Dollhouse free, thus triggering her “closure achieved” mindset and rendering her unconscious — but he does realize that the Dollhouse has been spying on him for an indeterminate amount of time, and that their technology is well beyond the local black-hat spy gear. Not completely revelatory, but it furthered Ballard’s investigation. But, unless the show offers up some tangible results to his investigation sometime soon, I’ll definitely start to find these scenes tiresome.

I’m a little annoyed that this episode resulted in not only no tangible emotional growth for the characters, but actually cancelled out what growth we’d seen thus far. But it’s also brilliant on the show’s part to twist our minds like this: the “happy ending” of the episode is the Dolls going back to normal. To return to their slavery. Really great stuff. Episodes six and eight were both being pushed as exemplary episodes, and they were both excellent. Let’s hope the quality level is maintained or surpassed as the season concludes.

Earlier this year, CW aired, and quickly cancelled, a show on their Sunday night block called Valentine, about a female romance novelist recruited by Aphrodite and Cupid, along with a few of their Olympian friends, to help reinvigorate the world with Love, one couple at a time. In many ways, the shows are very similar. Obviously, the former is going to emphasize the ambiguity of Trevor Pierce’s situation — is he a broken man, or an exiled god? — and the latter was quite explicit, and delightfully mythological, about the history of their Cupid. But overall, both shows will follow that structure of a weekly romance unfurling as the overarching story develops in the background.

I’ve admitted in the past to being an unabashed romantic and lover of love stories, which why it’s no surprise I enjoyed Valentine, and really enjoyed Cupid. I’ve also been re-watching Gilmore Girls from the beginning and find myself very much caught up in the girlie moments of the show, tittering when they describe their first kiss or sighing during that all-important first dance. So I guess what I’m trying to tell all of you, is that I’m a huge girl when it comes to these things, so my judgement of this sort of material is likely biased. But, hey, if you’re got an hour free Tuesday nights, might as well watch two people fall in love, right?

I’m generally slower writing my reviews than most TV blogs because I have a full time job and other real world responsibility whereas most bloggers have blogging as their job. This is a detriment to my work because it can often seem like an out of date topic by the time I get around to publishing. At the same time, I also get a chance to read other reviews and comments on those reviews. This can both colour my view and also give me a chance to crystallize rebuttals and confirmations of those discussions. Of course, sometimes I have these thoughts independently and it seems like I’m parroting others but what can you do. Other people can be right sometimes too.

A decent chunk of the discussion from the last few episodes, especially from io9 and its commenters, has been focused on the saccharine innocence of David, without recognizing that that is a necessary part of his character. I said last week that this show reminded me of Carnivàle, but it was for more than the use of prophetic dreams and religious destiny. They are both telling the story of the birth of a hero, in the classical sense. I can imagine these same cynics, who criticise David’s virtuousness, rolling their eyes when, early on in Carnivàle, Ben Hawkins uses his empathy to coax a grief-stricken mother to give up her dead child from her hand to be given a burial.

Carnivàle does a better job of this, obviously. Ben is introduced as a man on the run for murder, and that past follows him throughout the two year run, but at the same time, there is hardly a moment in the run of that show where Ben Hawkins is not perfectly virtuous or at the very least fighting desperately the temptations offered to him. But the journey is the same. Ben struggled with this role while being tempted until he ultimately grew into a more mature role and accepted his quest to kill Brother Justin. David will follow a similar path, because both stories are of the Hero chosen by God. So to criticise his virtuous origins is, I think, to completely misunderstand the story that is being told to you. And now onto the show.

The big thing I took away from this episode was that the Queen rules much more than anyone knew. Silas may have catalyzed a broken people, but it was her work in building and designing the monarchy that keeps their people strong and vibrant. Having something greater than themselves kept them believing in the dream of Shiloh in the long arduous years before the glistening city was built. And now that the years of war and conflict are over, the people of Shiloh need to see their royal family. The premiere of the ballet, around which the episode revolves, that the queen cares about. “We are the performance,” she says. The thing to inspire the people, and also to remind them of who is in charge and why. There’s something to be said for exploring that. Often, democracies fall into dictatorships and empires because particularly compelling and inspiring leaders come about. It’s just as reasonable that a modern day monarchy, one created recently not one long ago established and only retained for nostalgia’s sake, would require those same “larger than life” characteristics to remain viable.

Of course, in this episode Silas is doing his own work to maintain that larger than life persona, by abandoning his mistress and her son, possibly permanently; a sacrifice God demanded, it seems. His bastard son is once again sick, and this time it doesn’t look reparable. And, so his recent spat with Reverend Samuels be damned, he seeks Samuels’ counsel and wisdom. What must he do to regain God’s favour? Why must God constantly punish him? First by giving him a son who desires men, then by giving his people a greater hero to worship, and now by taking his younger son’s life. After Samuels offers little comfort, Silas’ truck flips over after colliding with a deer. Seeing the deer slowly dying on the ground before him, he realises that he needs to make a sacrifice in his life and quickly snaps the neck of the deer. He then returns to the hospital where his son lays near death, and goes to sleep. When he awakes, his son is better and he takes that as a sign that his decision from the night before was right. He leaves them both behind for his decadent, and solitudinous, royal life.

The solitude of Michelle Benjamin continues at the gala following the ballet, where she hopes to run into David — who was abruptly uninvited by the queen due to his rising star — but instead gets hooked up for a play date with a childhood friend, who is now a financial success, by her mother. She uses the situation to her advantage to obtain financial backing for her long suffering health care initiatives. Which will likely introduce a romantic rival for David as the story progresses. Speaking of, David is invited by Jack Benjamin to club hop and have a good time in general. Jack, having been ever so subtly pushed by his mother to take David down a peg or two, gets his female friend to get him to do dirty things in public places. Of course, David fights the urge and so the paparazzi only get a shot of him making out with her rather than shots of him fucking. But mackage is mackage, and Michelle sees the story online the next morning.

There are a few nuances I’m ignoring or glossing over here, but I can bring them up later on when they’re more relevant. Maybe I’d seem smarter if I mentioned my personal thoughts on these little scenes now and they come to fruition later, but I’m fine with leaving some of these details out when there’s no strong need to discuss them now. Overall, it was a good episode, and the show’s trajectory is interesting and quick thus far. The writing is strong and lyrical, and I don’t expect it to degrade. However, this is, I believe, the last episode directed by Francis Lawrence, so we’ll have to see if the visual beauty of the show can be maintained without his hand behind the camera next week.

First things first, Paul Ballard gets the shaft this week; he cooks Mellie/November some post-rape-slash-murder-attempt breakfast and then Mellie decides it’s over. After the brouhaha at the Dollhouse and Caroline’s old college, Mellie skips town, and Ballard tell her she knows where he is. So that relationship is apparently over. For now, at least. Which is sort of par for the course for Joss Whedon. And obviously, what Mellie experienced last episode was incredibly traumatic, but it still felt a little abrupt for me.

The rest of the story was interesting verging on cool, but it was all too cursory. The corporation behind the Dollhouse, is working on a memory drug, and one of the grad students they have developing it decided to go rogue and steal it to sell for billions. But he had a partner and he didn’t want to share. So before he took the drug and ran off, he dosed his partner-in-crime which led to a spread-by-touch craziness epidemic.

Because this drug in the wind is a huge deal to the Rossum Corporation, and they happen to own the Dollhouse, they get an army of Actives to play government agent on campus and clean up the mess while hunting down the vial of crazy juice. While all of this is happening, Echo is having another engagement with the motorcycle dude from the premiere, so she’s out of the loop. But when she sees the college on TV she leaves abruptly. She’s remembering flashes of her life before the Dollhouse.

Caroline was, apparently, a bit of a bitch. She dedicates all of her time to war protests and anti-animal testing crusading. So much so that, when she and her boyfriend break in to Rossum’s lab on campus and finds that they’re experimenting with human fetuses and mind control, she’s still most outraged by the doggie in the cage. That was a little much, and actually made Caroline less relatable to me. Regardless, it appears that this break-in is the event that led to Caroline’s enrollment in the five year “become a Doll and you live” program. So there’s one mythology mystery (mostly) answered.

When Caroline gets to the campus she’s taken in by the Doll agents, led by Victor, where she befriends the dude who is behind it all. She helps him break into the lab, where he plans to retrieve the vial so he can split town and sell it, with the memories or her previous break-in bubbling below the surface. He’s got a sad sack story about a momma with too many bills. Which is only relevant because at the end of the episode we see him being given the Dollhouse recruitment speech in exchange for them paying his mom. The cycle continues.

Along the way, Victor, Sierra, and November (AKA Mellie) all experience an unexpected side-effect of being dosed with the memory drug: they start remembering their most traumatic moments. Sierra remembers her rape by Hearn, November remembers Hearn’s attempted rape of her, and Victor seems to recall a eastern European war zone where he once worked. Whether this is before being an Active or not is unclear, but I’m sure it will be explored before the season is out. These traumatic memories fell flat for me as well. Mostly because the two that we remember are both so incredibly recent; the horror of those moments is still fresh in our minds, so it’s bizarre to experience them reliving it as something from a lifetime ago when it happened to them mere days ago. They also suffer no ill side effects from it, apparently. The drug makes them remember those things, then Topher cleans them out, which made the whole sequence feel empty to me.

And for the sake of comedy relief, Topher and DeWitt in the Dollhouse, and Dominic and Boyd on the campus all experience the effects of the drug and hilarity ensues. Topher is pantless, DeWitt jumps on a trampoline, Boyd laughs at his inability to control Echo, and Dominic is super super sorry for trying to burn Echo alive. It’s all really great, so I’ll leave those moments to be relished by the viewer on their own.

All of this isn’t to say that this episode wasn’t good. But the only parts that I really enjoyed, were the “Naked Time” moments where the buttoned up Dollhouse staff got a chance to let their freak flag fly. The rest felt subdued and simplistic to me. This was a solid episode, but one that just didn’t strike me as particularly amazing. I’m also writing this after only one viewing of the episode, whereas all my previous reviews were based on at least two viewings. So, when going back over the season after it’s all over, this may turn out to be a watershed moment for the series, but right now I’m just going to wait for the next episode and hope it’s better.

Kings begins this week with a sign of things to come, both literally and figuratively, in the form of a prophetic dream. Kings Silas bellows across a cloudy rain drenched sky “Don’t Go” and David wakes up to see his dead brother repeating the message: “Don’t Go.” And then he actually wakes up. The more of this show I see, the more it reminds me of Carnivàle: epic in scope, unafraid of complex storytelling and morally ambiguous protagonists, and completely willing to tell an earnest story with mysticism and drama.

This week the Premier of Gath came to Shiloh to sign the peace treaty that has been hashed out in the time between then and the premiere. Meanwhile, one quick to nip a butterfly-crown-based prophecy not in his favour in the bud, Silas orders his General to kill David. Lucky for David, the Premier wants to meet the young man who bravely put his life on the line for peace, so the killing is put on hold. Unlucky for David, the Generals of Gath aren’t as fond of peace as the Premier — something about being shown up by a punk kid with an RPG — and are willing to throw away the treaty for any minor infraction.

With the Generals of Gath readying to abandon the peace that his brother died for, David’s desperation reaches a fever pitch when he sees a sign held by a child saying “Don’t Go” and he steals a cab to block the path of the departing Gath envoy. During the ensuing stand-off, Silas and the Premier reestablish peace. The Premier of Gath says his people are jealous of Gilboa, for their industry and prosperity. But most of all for their glimmering city of Shiloh. And that’s where the Port of Prosperity comes in to play.

The Port of Prosperity is the land David’s father died protecting. It’s also one of the richest areas of Gilboa, taken from Gath years ago, and its riches were used to build Shiloh. Silas agrees to give that land to Gath, in exchange for peace. David’s loyalty to the King has been solidified by his selfless efforts for peace and Silas calls off the assassination.

Throughout this, there’s a story of the prince and his loyal squadron going on a shopping spree which leads to the news of the depleted reserves of Gilboa’s Treasury becoming public. Whether this was a part of CrossGen’s attempt to spread worry about the royal treasury or was merely coincidental is left unclear, but given the scene between William Cross and Jack Benjamin in the premiere, it seems likely it was a coordinated attack. The missing gold also causes King Silas to reach out to a “long dead” former ally he’s kept locked away for years. The former king’s gold was missing when Silas conquered his capital years ago, and been kept secret all these years, but Silas has a hold over the old king: his loved ones are still alive, but he won’t tell which of them are still alive until he gets the gold. And with this thirty-year-long gambit, the King saves the nation from overnight bankruptcy, much to the chagrin of William Cross.

Luckily, the King’s wife has finally decided that enough is enough, stepped aside from her diplomatic party planning duties, and convinced her brother to let the King win this battle. Apparently, Cross’ son has been exiled from the city for many years, and she can find a way to allow his return should he let this discretion slide.

In addition to all of this, David’s mother is in Shiloh attempting to receive her son’s veteran’s pension, and also trying to get David to return home. Not because she thinks he’s not capable of surviving the city, but because he’s too capable. She knows he has a destiny and that is what worries her.

Threaded through all of this is the romance between Michelle Benjamin and David. What seemed set in stone at the end of the premiere has now become very much a hazy prospect. Silas has reminded the princess of a oath she must not break. Is she betrothed to an ally? Is she a member of a convent of some sort? It’s left unclear, but regardless it quickly established a barrier to their relationship. How fast that barrier will fall remains to be seen.

So that’s a lot of stuff happening in this episode, and all of this is painfully oversimplified for the sake of brevity — after my 5500 word review of Dollhouse from the other day, I’m trying to constrain my word counts — but what’s clear is that there’s a lot more mystery in the past that this show will explore. The exiled son, the locked away deposed king, the princess’ oath, and the furthering of the signs that David is destined for far more than an advising role at the feet of King Silas. The story continues to fascinate me, and the sincerity of the storytelling is refreshing. I may be a cynic, but that doesn’t mean all art must devolve into nihilistic ultra-realism.

Unfortunately, the beauty of this show is mostly being ignored. The ratings for the second episode were even worse than the already atrocious ratings that the premiere suffered. This sort of very grandiose epic storytelling is new for network television, and I hope that these brief stumbles are not a sign that the public at large has no interest in it.

Maybe Fox will have to move American Idol one night out of the week, maybe some other network will have to switch a show. But in reality, any show which is sufficiently popular won’t suffer too much from a night switch. We often blame networks for constantly switching time slots of quality shows leading to their inevitable cancellation, but in reality it’s poor marketing of those new time slots that kills the shows. Any show they want people to keep watching they market the shit out of to inform its audience that it’s changed times. So give Obama his variety hour. And stop the fucking whining.

Eight months ago, I walked into a low capacity hall at San Diego Comic-Con for an early morning panel about an upcoming show from NBC called Kings. After a short discussion of the basic premise of the show — an alternate history drama set in a monarchy named Gilboa inspired by the biblical tale of David and Goliath — they screened the first twenty minutes of the pilot episode, and I experienced that same enraptured envelopment into a brand new world that that amazing album had beset upon me. Now, eight months after that initial burst of interest followed by a relative dearth of new information, Kings has finally premiered and my first impression has only been enriched by the complexities I once imagined were possible now made manifest by the remainder of this amazing premiere.

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve compiled snippets of the many reviews of this show. Some of them are fairly positive, but it seems as though most of them chide the show for having cheesy aspects, or soap opera trappings, comparing it to shows like Dynasty and Dallas. I’m not sure why any show that manages to tell a serious story is immediately a soap opera. Is Battlestar Galactica a soap opera because of its intense dour depiction of life? Of course not. It’s merely a show willing to deal with things seriously, as is Kings. To call the show a soap opera is to call Deadwood, or other such character drama, a soap opera: it’s not disingenuous to do so, but it belittles the show to use such a pejorative. All of the criticisms, though, are not unfounded. But the good, and more importantly the potential for good, more than outweighs what little there is to legitimately criticise.

The main story of the premiere, and likely of the rest of the series, is of David, played by Christopher Egan. Taking his name from the biblical slingshot-wielder, the show begins with David living the rural life as King Silas of Gilboa — Ian McShane in a typically brilliant performance — unveils the shiny new capital, Shiloh, built upon the ashes of the cities destroyed by the years of war that ravaged Gilboa before Silas united the lands in the unification War, a costly conflict that left David fatherless with a disenfranchised mother.

Before the inaugural speech is over, tensions are rising with the neighbour nation Gath and two years later the war carries on with David now at the front lines. When the survivors of an ambushed squad are taken hostage by Gath, David defies the orders and, crossing the front lines, rescues the hostages, including the King’s son. This rescue is no small feat given that the front lines of the war are lined by Gath ‘Goliath’ tanks, a menacing visage to all Gilboan soldiers. And so David returns as the hero who slayed a Goliath and saved the King’s son. That’s the first twenty minutes wrapped up in a few sentences. There’s much more there, but I find that the more I like a show the more I want to detail every nuance of the scene (which is why I rarely write about Lost; I don’t want to end up writing 15,000 words per episode) so I’ll leave the rest to the viewer to relish. I will say however, that those twenty minutes are the best and most effective exercise in world building I’ve ever seen.

This premiere has already established that, while this is an alternate history with kingdoms where America once reigned, this world only diverges from ours in the last two centuries. David’s love of classical piano, and more importantly his playing of a piece by Liszt, underscore an implicit history that will certainly get explored as the series continues. How did the world of Liszt change such that not America but Gilboa and Gath were formed? Hopefully, the writers already know the answer.

Perhaps as impressive as the world building is the character building, with every character having complexity and ambiguities which can be developed and exploited over time. The King’s wife, for example, is a quiet but manipulative woman who publicly expresses a distaste for politics while privately and silently ensuring her family’s skeletons stay in their respective closets. Similarly, his son portrays himself a womanizer to the paparazzi to keep up appearances, despite his homosexuality. His desire for power is clear but he is neither the villain nor the brat in this story. At least not yet.

The King’s brother-in-law, the head of a large corporation, Crossgen, which has bankrolled Silas’ rule for years is the most villainous character introduced thus far. His need for war to ensure quarterly profits impel him to push Silas to war despite peace being offered. It’s not until David, once again defying the will of the King, bravely reaches out to their faceless enemy, as the Goliaths stare him down, and brings about renewed peace talks, that his lust for war is sated. Even then, his plots and machinations continue apace to replace the King and continue the profitable war.

David is the archetypal hero. He is a farm-boy turned war hero who doesn’t understand nor desire the world into which he’s been thrown. He quickly falls for the King’s daughter, herself a passionate supporter of improving the nation’s health care much to the King’s dismay. His star rises precipitously, first due the the rescue of the hostages, then later from his part in the reestablishment of peace talks with Gath.

And of course, King Silas himself, around whom all this intrigue revolves, is one of the great draws of this show. Ian McShane, playing a character as conniving as Al Swearengen in a world much more civilized yet just as brutal as Deadwood, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale network television environment. Silas is a complicated man, a melange of numerous regal stereotypes. His opening speech, and most likely every speech after that, describes a story from the founding days of Gilboa when a flock of butterflies came upon him and perched upon his head in a ring as if they were a living crown. A sign from God. And yet, he has none of the trappings of the typical religiously driven leaders of our time: he knows full-well that evolution is a truth, and devotes a family breakfast to the topic; he accepts his son’s homosexuality as a part of his nature; he is an eloquent leader, who uses his words for both good and ill; he is a brilliant tactician whose military experience lent itself to the political travails of a King. Of course, his religiosity is tempered by his desire for power, and when the Reverend Samuels disowns Silas near the end of the premiere he is more than willing to abandon God. But despite these two conflicting aspects of his larger-than-life personality, beneath it all is a long dormant desire for a quieter life. He is a tragic yet terrifying hero, one we know will eventually fall away for David to rise.

The two weak points of the premiere are the wartime scenes and the relationship between David and the King’s daughter. That Gath would hold hostages just past the front lines of battle, even temporarily, strain credulity. In addition, David’s impassioned speech to Gath asking for compassion and common ground would have likely ended with David brutally destroyed by the numerous tanks trained on him throughout the speech. But I take both of these points in stride because a) this is a different world, with different alliances and territories, strategies and tactics could be slightly different b) David held a white cloth stained in his brother’s blood as he delivered his speech; had Gath fired upon a white flag, there surely would have been international repercussions and c) it is David’s destiny to become King — the final scene where the butterflies land atop his head to signal his coming reign is a sure sign of that — and so I’m willing to accept a few well-timed mistakes on his enemies’ parts; many of the most successful kings and emperors of the past have had such luck in the ascension to power.

The other weak part, the love story, is weak because it happened too easily. There’s no real conflict there, they both seem to already be smitten with each other and in a relationship. I was hoping for it to take a while for their bond to grow before all that happened, but this is a minor quibble as the show could easily still get those things done over the course of the season by introducing conflict. It’s also very daring that the show took what appears to be the only romantic relationship on the show and resolved it so quickly. It’s like if the writers of The Office got Jim and Pam together in the first episode. So I’m willing to believe, for now, that they’ve thought about this and are subverting the stereotypes again for effect.

It’s been a couple days now and the ratings have been tallied and they’re atrocious. Kings had a horrible opening. Kings has already finished filming for the season and I used to think that networks wouldn’t cancel a show with complete episodes ready to air, but Firefly and Daybreak shattered that misconception, so I have to hope that the word of mouth on Kings spreads fast and the ratings improve week-over-week, because this show is a real adventure. It’s an adventure in storytelling, it’s an adventure in world-building, and perhaps most importantly it’s an adventure in broadcasting. It’s the sort of high concept high drama story that’s been relegated to cable television in recent years, and yet here it is on a Big Three network (admittedly the smallest of the Big Three). If Kings becomes a ratings success, as it deserves to be, it could be a catalyst for the networks to reinvigorate the increasingly conservative and middling television they produce.

I loved the premiere. I’m  deeply impressed with the show so far. It’s an achievement in storytelling, and I’m sure the subsequent episodes will be as good if not better.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.

If anything, the problem with this show is that it’s too eager to explore the possibilities of this show. It’s too ambitious. The first episode explored the concept of delayed catharsis by proxy, when Echo’s imprint finally stood up to the man that had haunted her for years. The second episode examined the history of the Dollhouse while furthering the ongoing story of Echo’s awakening. The third episode discussed the way in which our society constructs and controls people just as much as the Dollhouse does its Actives. The fourth episode waxed poetically about art and what it is to be human, ideas entirely foreign to Echo, offering up the leading question “are the Actives even human at all anymore?” All of the ideas being examined are interesting and could have an entire series devoted to them, but Dollhouse has only begun. Perhaps its the seemingly haphazard exploration of these ideas that jars people, but it’s not the show’s fault that people had underwhelming expectations.

Nevertheless, this week’s episode continues to ask these sorts of questions. It opens with a group of cult members entering a store on a shopping excursion singing and smiling all the while. After a brief kerfuffle with a local yokel — where he hilariously responds to their continual singing and ignoring of him with “are you deaf, or you just tone deaf?” and offers up helpful nicknames like “Osama Bin Gandhi” — they leave, but their shopping list is left behind with an ominous “Save Me” message scrawled on the back.

Because of the rumours of what happens on the compound, the senator of the state where this cult resides is being pressured by his constituents and he wants a Dollhouse Active to help with the situation. Because of the note, they’ve obtained a short-term “sneak and peek” warrant but they wouldn’t be able to infiltrate the compound with an undercover agent that quickly; what they need is a true believer. And so Echo is imprinted with the personality of an extremely religious person, Ester Carpenter, who has been blind since she was nine. Both to facilitate the retrieval of surveillance of the compound and to reinforce the imprint’s belief that she is blind, Topher and Dr Saunders implant cameras into her eyes which redirect the eyes’ signals to the ATF leaving Echo blind.

Echo quickly gains the trust of the cult, primarily because she truly believes in the faith they espouse. And this is an idea that is mostly glossed over but is most definitely put out there to chew on: they program religiosity. Faith is often seen as something people have or don’t have, so this is another sacred cow the show is willing to challenge with the imprinting of the Actives on the show.

Though the trust of the cult is gained, their leader is more doubtful. He takes Echo to a dark room and shines bright lights in her eyes, looking for some sign of false blindness, but her pupils neither dilate nor retract. Then he suddenly aims a gun at her head but she is blissfully unaware of this and continues to praise him while the gun is pointed right between her eyes. He walks away mostly convinced that she’s the real deal, leaving Echo in the room to be walked out by Seth, the second-in-command. Unlucky for him and lucky for the ATF, the room he leaves her in is also where he stores his massive weapons cache.

The ATF has seen enough and is ready to go in guns blazing, but Boyd wants Echo extracted first seeing as her mission has been completed and it’d be dangerous to leave her in place during the raid. Of course, the head ATF agent is a huge dick — as they always are — denies the request and begins his breach. As Echo is being officially becoming a sister of the church, the ATF agents trip an alarm along the perimeter and have to fall back. But Jonas, the head of the church, is on alert now and begins accusing Echo of leading the ATF there. He bangs her around, disabling the cameras in her eyes, thus returning Echo’s vision. “It’s a miracle.”

The siege on the compound continues until Jonas decides that Echo truly was a miracle and a message to him: he’s not going to fight back with his arsenal. The church members head into a different building. I don’t like where this is going.

As this is happening, Boyd is trying to figure out who wrote the message, hoping for some inside help. After looking at the security footage in the store, he discovers that it was the ATF agent who manufactured the yokel’s conflict so that he could put that note there and further his investigation. “Nobody ever asked to be saved. Not by you.” Boyd says, in yet another little moment that opens up a world of ideas. Something that I noticed after I’d watched this episode was that, really, this cult didn’t actually do anything wrong. The members lived a pastoral life so there was no money to bilk from the members. There was no sexual abuse, no children being married off, no harem of women for the leader. Instead, this cult is just a bunch of people who believed a certain thing and wanted to extirpate modern society from their lives. They had weapons, but I think to complain about that is equivalent to complaining about the right for individuals to bear arms. I don’t know if this is meant to be a commentary on how society is discriminatory to people who are merely different, or an attempt to show how evil can be hidden in seemingly innocent environments, or something else entirely, but I thought it was interesting that little was done to demonize the cult.

So, now that I’ve praised the show for being measured in its treatment of cults, it’s time to disprove my entire argument. Echo is asked to recite a story about people being sent into a furnace to die and not being harmed by the flames because of their faith. Meanwhile, Seth heads off to do… something.  I really don’t like where this is going.

When Seth returns from setting fire to the building, some members decide enough is enough and start to leave but ultimately Jonas convinces them to remain in the building as it burns, relying on their faith to pressure them into staying. But Echo argues against him saying “You can’t force a miracle.” When Jonas remains steadfast in his faith, she knocks him out with a honking big candle holder and gets the rest of the church to finally flee the fire. All but one, that is, who asks “Where will we go?” and further asks “How can you doubt after God restored your sight?” to which she replies “I don’t think God let me see again so I could just watch.” Which is a wonderful skewering of the general mindset of a lot of fundamentalists. And so he spits in her face. She knocks him out, a useful problem solver in any situation, and Seth carries him out. But as she’s leaving Jonas awakens and cocks his gun. Before he can shoot Echo dead, someone in ATF gear walks in and shoots him dead. Too bad it’s Laurence Dominic, head of Dollhouse security, who’s had enough of Echo’s shenanigans and thinks this situation is a great opportunity to solve that problem. He knocks her out leaving her in the flames.

Shortly thereafter,  Boyd comes in in similar gear and rescues her, carrying her out of the fire as the ATF Agent-in-Charge tells reporters that they’re not hopeful for any more survivors. Oops.

So Echo returns to her peaceful life in the Dollhouse, but as she’s returning Dr Saunders asks her if her vision is ok. And after Echo looks around she looks intently at Dominic and ominously replies “I see perfectly.”

The two B plots of this episode revolve around Topher and Saunders, and Ballard and his lovelorn neighbour. Topher noticed that Victor had a “man-reaction” while in the shower. He noticed this while having a conversation about the Valsava Mechanism and he stutters after noticing it, which I’m pretty sure is a joke that nobody but the writer, Tim Minear, got; until I looked up the Valsava Mechanism. Be brings this up to Dr Saunders who cites her reports expressing concern over “residual imprinting” and then suggests they examine the shower videos from the recent past to see how long these “man-reactions” have been occurring.

Ultimately, they find out that Victor’s “man-reactions” aren”t a side-effect of repeated imprinting, because he only gets them when Sierra is in the shower as well. Turns out he’s just got a crush. DeWitt tells them that the purity of the Dollhouse must be preserved — immediately after Jonas had said something similar to Seth, to really drive home the comparison of the Dollhouse to the cult — and orders that Victor be scrubbed. Not sure what that means, but I am sure Victor won’t like it.

Ballard, on the other hand, is continuing his search to find any record of Caroline, Echo’s original identity, by going to someone with access to more government databases to search. Unfortunately, there’s no record of her anywhere. His neighbour brings him his pain medication and some “leftover” manicotti, even though it’s enough to feed a family of four, and she also has another mysterious package that somebody left with her down in the lobby of the building. It has the video of Caroline that Alpha was watching in the pilot on it, which only further intesifies his investigation, leaving his neighbour to be even more jealous and more lovelorn. There’s also a scene of Ballard watching the events at the cult unfold on TV and briefly seeing Echo. After the fallout, he tries to find her but is shot down by the ATF Agent-in-charge who’s a dick to everyone it seems.

There are a few really good beats here. Ballard trying to flirt and admitting it’s been a while. The man who gave the package to Ballard’s neighbour simply being a lazy mailboy was also a funny red herring. Neither of the B plots offer anything of real significance, but they both fill the episode with real humour while continuing to fill out the Dollhouse universe.

There are so many good things happening in this episode, that the complaints of others become even more baffling to me. This is an adventurous show that manages to examine TV-unfriendly ideas while remaining TV-friendly overall.  The people that are complaining about this show increasingly seem like people complaining because they think it’s the cool thing to do. Next week’s episode apparently is a big episode in the mythology of Dollhouse, so hopefully, it will shortly become cool to like this show.

On a meta note, this review/recap is around 2000 words, and the previous one was around 3500. Both of those numbers seem far too large. As this progresses, I think I’m going to find myself really paring down the descriptions of the plot and of specific scenes, however much I may enjoy them, and focusing on the philosophical questions and mythology the show introduces. But be warned. Sometimes I just don’t know when to shut up.

I don’t want to encourage viewers of TBBT or HIMYM to stop watching those shows because they’re both decent shows and HIMYM was on the verge of cancellation every year prior to this. And quite frankly, if you’re stupid enough to actually watch a full episode of Dancing with the Stars, I don’t want your eyes anywhere near Chuck. I’m afraid the stupid might leak. But there is one other show that pulls down strong numbers reliably that probably isn’t totally deserving of them.

I’m going to let the world in on a secret. House isn’t that good. I loved the first season. I have it on DVD, even though it’s shitty non-anamorphic widescreen. I liked the second season. The show had lost some of its charm, but House seemed to be developing as a character. By the third season I started to notice that despite every second episode ending with some significant moment implying that House would be changing nothing ever really changed. The show’s plot got tediously formulaic. House had to do more and more outrageous things to maintain his edginess. And the idea that House, no matter how brilliant he is, could keep his medical license after all the atrocious actions he’d commited more than strained credulity. So, near the end of season three I stopped watching it. When season four started up, I started to watch the premiere and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even make it through the whole thing.

I’m not against episodic television, where not much really changes from episode to episode. Obviously, I prefer serialized television because it allows bonds to be made between the characters and the audience, but I do watch a few shows with very little ongoing story. That said, I do not like shows that pretend that they’re serialized. It insults my intelligence and demeans the characters. And that’s what House does. The ongoing “developments” amount to nothing but the same cardboard cutout characters getting reset back to the status quo nearly every episode.

So stop watching House and give your television time to a show much much more deserving. Seriously.

Dollhouse took another step up in quality this week after the slight fumble last week. In fact, aside from the opening scene where Echo serves as a doula in a secluded estate perched on an icy mountainside — which will surely engender endless theories about why someone would need to hire an Active to aid in childbirth, aside from the helpful and foreshadowy line “I want to forget!” — this episode was once again a marked improvement over its predecessor.

A scene with Boyd and Topher once again explores some of the nuances of the Actives and biology, in general. Topher’s worried about the “flocking” that the three main actives are exhibiting, which is likely a way for the show to explain away why the same four Actives will so frequently be seen cavorting in future episodes when their memory of past cavorts has been erased. This also emphasizes something left implied to this point: the Actives are completely wiped every time they’re brought back to the Dollhouse. Which is a convenient way of escaping the questions other Actives might naturally have when one is on a long-term mission. It also ensures Actives can’t develop long-term relationships even with other Actives or staff. The takeaway from these scenes, for me, was that the Dollhouse is very good at what they do.

After this prelude, the mission of the week is introduced. Here, we learn that (supposedly) nobody on staff knows what the missions are, and the risk factor is determined by a computer program. I don’t see how this could be done unless that program was a full-on artificial intelligence, and beyond that the handlers of the Actives are also fully aware of the mission as they observe it at all times. But for now, I’ll take them at their word, under the assumption they’re lying in some way. Either way, Echo’s mission this week has been rated as having “special requirements.” Meanwhile, a Voiceless Higher-Up calls up DeWitt about the progress of the Ballard mind fuck. They’re working on it, but not fast enough to warrant a goodbye from the VHU.

And now Echo’s “high risk” mission starts off and she’s a hooker. Look’s like that misogynist Joss Whedon has struck again. After the hot and heavy gyration’s of Taffy, Echo’s role du jour, the head of security for the hotel comes by offering a bit of champagne to get their dirrtiness, and Eliza Dushku’s over-the-top sexy squeals, up to their suite and away from the hotel lobby. We see Taffy’s client, now shirtless and chugging back the champagne, chasing her down the hallway and into the arms of the aforementioned head of security who wisks her away to his secret hideaway with its impenetrable keypad-based security, whose code Taffy dutifully observes for future use. Once in this fortress of securitude, the head of security gently consoles her and offers her a pay-off so that she’ll not sue either the hotel or her customers. What’s saddest about this is that I could totally see hotels having stacks of cash sitting around to pay off disgruntled hookers. Anyways, Taffy is outraged at this insult and refuses the money and then knocks the dude out and gets on her bluetooth headpiece, which would have looked so cool and spy-ish only a few years ago and now simply seems quite banal, to inform her team she’s in. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to the unconscious guard. She said it earlier too, but I can only type it so many times without bashing my head into my keyboard and I need to use it at least once more later on. And as the credits play, I once again have to express my appreciation of its length, even though it’s still much shorter than a truly great credit sequence, such as Six Feet Under’s or Carnivàle‘s, requires.

After the break, Taffy’s wonderful breasts are discussed, and a line as bizarre as “honest to blog” was in Juno is uttered in the course of said discussion when Taffy says “You can mention that when you blog about this later.” I guess it’s cheap way to explain that the guy she directs to blog is the tech guy for the job. Though really, I don’t think “I was aiding in the illegal theft of something last weekend and this chick I was working with had awesome boobs” is really the best thing to put on your blog. Incredibly personal discussions of the cause of your broken heart? Go for it. But leave illegalities out of it, m’kay?

In short order, all the men on the team have their roles defined. The blog guy is the tech-head, the “professor” is the one with domain expertise of what they plan to steal, and the guy pushing for the murder of the incapacitated head of security is the macho muscle that has no real purpose other than to argue for the most violent solution to any given problem. But Taffy, much like Baby, is not one for being put into corners and asserts her dominance with zeal explaining the “no-kill” order their boss has issued for this theft and that she knows to never second guess a client. And wear comfy shoes.

Now that everyone knows she’s the boss, she exposits that their job is to break in to an extremely secure vault which happens to be completely insecure right now due to an hour-long system upgrade hence the episode title “Gray Hour.” They break in and the other criminals quietly wonder why, if Taffy is the best, they’ve never heard of this criminal superstar. Put simply, she likes the quiet life and isn’t looking for attention. Which is a quick way of the show getting across that you don’t need to be famous to be the best at what you do, thus justifying virtually any mission the Actives might have in the future. And to emphasize that she’s simply another instance of the phrase “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” she promptly breaks through a very impressive looking vault door and leads them all into an artwork trove. After the professor makes us all aware of the value of the items in this vault, one painting alone is worth $17 million he says, we learn what they’re here to steal: the Parthenon.

Meanwhile, Agent Ballard has returned from the hospital with a gun shot wound, some drugs, and a sneaky suspicion that Lubov/Victor is lurking in the shadows. He interrogates Lubov about the picture he received from Alpha two weeks earlier and demands to know who gave him the tip that turned out to be a trap. Lubov was given the tip by someone — with a Georgian accent “Russia Georgia,” not “Sweet Home Georgia,” which Ballard Joss-fully corrects “Alabama” — who now knows that he’s in cahoots with Ballard and so wants protection. Ballard says he’ll help so long as he never sees Lubov again.

Returning to the vault, the professor exposits that Turkey, when they were in control of Athens, allowed the Earl of Elgin to take these small marble engravings from the Parthenon so while it’s not stolen per se, there’s probably a good reason it’s holed away in a vault. (Although, while doing a bit of perfunctory research for this post, I found out that these so-called Elgin Marbles are actually on display in the British Museum and Britain has publicly denied requests for their return to Greece, so all of this is a little misleading historically speaking.)

This little tidbit of historical information, leads the thieves to deciding that Greece hired them to steal the marbles back. As this pointless discovery is fleshed out by the non-professors, the professor is unartfully attempting to close the vault door behind himself locking them in and him out with the marbles. The tech-head tries to stop him but gets a gut full of ancient sword for his troubles, and they’re all stuck inside the vault as the professor makes a clean getaway. Luckily, Taffy’s got an outside man.

She calls up Boyd, who’s waiting in his surveillance van, to inform him of the man leaving the hotel and her desire that he not get away. The muscle attempts to interject with the brilliant line “how are you getting reception down here?!” but is shut down as Echo explains to Boyd that she’s got things under control and can get them out of the vault before the gray hour is over. But as her conversation with Boyd ends a sharp shrill noise rings out through the phone. Echo looks confused and quietly asks “Did I fall asleep?” Oh shit.

After the break, Topher is regaling a coworker with his opinions on the various nuances of his brain manipulating genius. It’s like this show knows how to get me all hot and bothered. Unfortunately, before the show can get me completely titillated, Topher notices that Echo’s vitals have gone off the charts. Her behaviour in the vault isn’t much better as she shudders in the fetal position “shall I go now?” awaiting her preprogrammed response. The muscle is confused and decides, as per usual, that the solution to the problem is more violence. Amazingly, it doesn’t work.

Boyd, on the other hand, has got his shit well in hand. He shoots the professorial prick just for the fun of it and gets the marbles. Meanwhile, Topher is explaining to DeWitt how Echo has lost hers. Her vitals are off the chart, and despite explanations from others, Topher knows that her pulse rate, with her current personality, would never go over 65 BPM. Something went wrong. Luckily, they’ve got a recording of Echo’s conversation with Boyd, and Topher is terrified when he hears the high pitched noise that ends the call. After a bit of befuddlement, he explains that Echo has been remotely wiped, something that has never been tested and shouldn’t have even been possible. Echo has essentially been born again without the comforts the Dollhouse has built into their wiping protocol. And she certainly won’t be able to help herself.

In the vault, the muscle is working on getting Taffy back, but all Echo can do is repeat the things he’s told her to say. “Taffy’s gone man, and she’s not coming back.” the tech-head says as he cradles his gut wound. Which leads us to Sierra waking up in the Dollhouse brain-changing chair. “Blue skies,” she catchphrases to DeWitt who says she needs Taffy’s help. Taffy’s back, people.

After the break, we get a scene where the tech-head teaches Echo about art. He talks about the appearance of art, and how it can either be about what you see or about what is. “That’s what art’s for: to show us who we are” he says romantically. It’s an interesting little scene where the discussion about the art around them effectively mirrors Echo’s disintegration under the stresses she’s experiencing. It would be nice if the scene was a little longer, even though it’s a little shoe-gazy, but the muscle decides it’s time for more muscle. He calls them all weak and busts out a drill to… I’m not really sure what he plans to do with it, he does know vault doors have protection against that sort of thing, right?

SierraTaffy is livid back at the Dollhouse, that she got passed over after all the work she put into planning the Parthenon heist. She repeats EchoTaffy’s story about never second guessing clients. She even adds on the comfy shoes bit, to emphasize how meaningless the distinction between the first Taffy and the new Taffy is. They’re both the same person, just in a different body.

Now that Topher’s had some time to process what happened, he feels the need to barrage the audience with completely meaningless technobabble about “neurotropic factor” and how impossible it would be to break through all the firewalls he put into place. He’s certain that this isn’t a one-man hack. Which is a little odd given his scenes with DeWitt later on. He calls up Boyd to ask if Echo seemed normal when he took her out tonight. Boyd answers but wants to know why it matters. I’m beginning to wonder that myself. Was he thinking that Echo did the remote wipe to herself? That it was an inside job? Oh right, the show just needs a credible reason for Boyd to know that Echo’s in trouble. And so Boyd calls up DeWitt to complain that he was left out of the loop. And then he demands from the professor a map to the security room they entered the vault from. SierraTaffy continues her role as an exposition machine, explaining that while she has all the skills needed to solve this problem there’s a time factor as well. There are only nine more minutes left in the gray hour, so there’s no way for her to do the job in person, but if Echo can follow instructions everything will be all right.

Tech-head continues his art lecture series, soon to be released on his blog and available on iTunes, and Echo offers the crucial information that she likes sky. And that there’s a mountain in the painting they’re both looking at. She then asks what her name is and explains that when she’s “there,” her name is something else. Is this an example of her memory persisting, despite what Topher’s instruments indicate, or an example of the depth of the base state programming of the Actives? Is she programmed to have the name Echo when she’s in the Dollhouse? It’s a seemingly pointless digression, but it may be important in future episodes. Either way, tech-head is sick of Echo’s child-like persona. He asks her to get something from his bag. As he prepares the syringe, he explains to Echo that they’re fucked and the only way that door will be opened is by the security guards outside, who will take them to prison.

“What’s prison?” Echo asks. “It’s a place with no sky” Tech-head helpfully answers. The look on Echo’s face as she hears this description of prison is deep with meaning and memory. She’s been in prison before. “We’re bad guys.” Tech-head says as he slide the syringe up to his arm. But death is the easy way out, says the muscle. He takes the syringe away, lifts the no-kill order, and takes out a gun.

Topher continues to explore the list of possible hackers that could have remote wiped Echo. Although, that list should probably be pretty small given the secrecy about Dollhouse’s very existence. In fact, after throwing away his most recent accusation for being a hack, he says “there’s only one person I know, who could achieve a remote wipe. And he’s dead.” The look of confusion on his face lingers until just before the camera cuts away when it quickly shifts to one of understanding.

SierraTaffy is trying to call Echo but nobody’s picking up. She explains how she’ll open the vault door. Echo finally picks up. And SierraTaffy and EchoTaffy’s similarities are once again noted by the show. They both hide their vault-cracking resin in their bra. There’s a short vault-cracking scene which doesn’t end up successful and SierraTaffy heads off to her “treatment” with her briefcase full of cash. Something tells me, she’s not going to be leaving with that money.

Because official authorities are potentially getting involved, it’s time for the Dollhouse to make sure they’re isolated, so DeWitt orders a couple operatives to be ready to eliminate Echo should the need arise. She is also explicit that she doesn’t want Boyd knowing about it, as she thinks he’s grown too attached to Echo.

The alarm has been set off, the guards are closing in and the muscle is telling Echo to shoot at the bad guys. This confuses her because she was pretty certain that they were the bad guys. So the muscle holds his gun to her and says to shoot or be shot. Echo would prefer to just go, sans shootout. Somehow, she gets it into her head to take the syringe of death and inject it into the muscle’s neck. How she knew it would harm him is left unanswered as her previous reaction to it was completely benign. Regardless, the muscle goes down and shoots off a few rounds as he does instigating a one-way fire-fight in which he fires blindly and yet somehow manages to hit every guard that the camera shows. Tech-head gives Echo instructions on how to get out and then throws a smoke grenade. Boyd follows the map drawn for him. He gets to the whole in the wall as Echo and the tech-head are making their way out.

“Are you OK?” Boyd asks. “He’s broken.” Echo responds talking about tech-head as she passes him over to Boyd. Boyd reaches his hand out for Echo to take to which she says “I’m not broken.”

Finally, Ballard gets back from his help-getting mission which turns out wasn’t so much a “help you out” mission as it was a “fuck you over” mission. Lubov is marked for capture everywhere and if he tries to leave LA, he’ll be picked up by the FBI and dropped off with a handshake at the Russian mob’s doorstep. Harsh, dude.

Well, Echo’s back to being a blank slate, the marble is intact and headed to the client and Topher says the remote wipe did no permanent damage. But that’s not what Topher is really there to talk about. He knows that Alpha was the one that remote wiped Echo. Nobody else could have done it. DeWitt needs a signature from Topher: his security clearance has been upgraded. Alpha is indeed alive. And out there. The Dollhouse is not all powerful says DeWitt. Though its creation appears to be.

Echo has returned to her calm life at the Dollhouse, and yet seems affected by these recent events as she draws a sad face in the steam of her mirror. And wipes it away.

This episode once again relied on integrating the mythology with the episodic storyline. Like the second episode, Alpha introduced something unexpected into one of Echo’s missions. It still remains unclear what Alpha’s goal is with these sabotages, but they seem to be having an effect on Echo. For example, at first glance, the thread with Boyd trying to get to Echo to help her out seems pointless, but after re-watching, it seems like they’re trying to show that Echo managed the situation without Boyd’s help. Unlike what Topher said, she did help herself. Is this a growing ability in Echo? And if so, was it instigated by this event or was it always there waiting to be demonstrated? And is that why Alpha spared Echo during his massacre?

The mythology of the show and the questions regarding Echo’s growth are deepening. I’m glad that the show is expanding the mythology so quickly, though mostly because it means we’ll probably be getting answers some time this year, and given that the likelihood of Dollhouse getting another season diminishes each week, I hope for some level of closure before Fox bitch slaps this show into oblivion. The show still suffers from the problem that the Ballard storylines are far too separate from the rest of the action. This episode took a step in the right direction by getting DeWitt involved in his story, but it needs to be even more integrated. I know I say this every week, and given that the show started at a B+ and is thus far at about an A- the improvements might seem marginal, the show really does continue to improve with each new episode. And episode seven is supposedly when the season really kicks off. I can’t wait.

I started watching Kyle XY for a lot reasons. The first reason I had was the music: there’s an ongoing thread in the original scores for Kyle XY that, to this day, reminds me of Explosions in the Sky. And we all know that Explosions in the Sky’s music makes even the most mundane moments seem epic so the early moments of the show were greatly enhanced by the minimalist bombast of the score. I mean, there’s a scene where Kyle eats a freaking muffin in the first episode that makes it seem like he’s climbing Mount Everest.

So the music made me stay for a little while, but the thing that really made me stick around was the novelty and realism with which they handled a character with complete and utter amnesia, though it’s not really amnesia per se. The scene I linked to earlier is Kyle’s first meal. He didn’t know what food was or how to eat before that scene and his discovery of it is handled very well. In a scene shortly after this he pees his pants because he didn’t know what that strange sensation he was having meant. There are lots of little interesting trains of thought brought up through the narration in those early episodes that offer a fantastic look at what it might be like to be born fully grown. This sort of storytelling is already very much in the realm of science fiction, but the show goes beyond that by introducing Kyle’s superhuman abilities and the mystery of where he came from, why he isn’t there anymore, and why he has no bellybutton. And while those sci-fi elements are interesting, the thing that really truly makes me excited to see each new episode is the characters.

When I wrote about Kyle XY getting canceled I mostly brought up its sci-fi aspects, but the real world relationships are why the show is so good. That science fiction is a part of the tapestry of the show is surely a reason I enjoy it, but I get as much pleasure from Kyle using his super genius brain to hack into a mainframe as when he’s super nervous about his first date with Amanda.

Last night’s episode had some of the sci-fi stories to tell, but the real beauty of them was that they were there to facilitate telling stories about the characters. Kyle used his ability to visually explore memories to help Jessi, his female bellybutton-free counterpart, get some closure on the disappearance of her mother. Those scenes also brought some much needed empathy and humanity to Jessi and managed to convert me from a Jessi pseudo-hater into a full-on Jessi/Kyle shipper. And all of that happened in just one of the plots of the episode. In another thread, Josh and Andy, one of the best teenager relationships — one of the best relationships in general to be honest — on television, are forced to deal with their impending separation. And he makes all the stupid mistakes you know you shouldn’t make when you’re desperate not to lose the most important person in your life. Josh began the series as the slacker joker who never takes a moment seriously and if you started watching this show with this episode you would have been amazed at his evolution and growth.

I wish this show was continuing on. Mondays at 9, two shows come on that I watch: Heroes and Kyle XY. I think you all know my stance on Heroes by now, but I haven’t done my due diligence in expressing my love of this sweet little show. Don’t let the fact that it airs on ABC Family dissuade you: this show is worth your time. Enjoy it while it’s still here.

Of course, I wouldn’t title this post “The Death Spiral Continues” if I were extolling the wonders of a show. I merely take the time to discuss Chuck to contrast it with the increasingly dreaful show that follows it Monday nights on NBC. This week’s episode of Heroes continued to disappoint and downright offend as Parkman’s inexplicable prophetic painting continues to repeat a story that was overplayed and poorly executed when they did it the first five times. And when Rebel gives them useful intel, Matt and Peter finally start thinking and they double up on the mind powers to help them get past security. A smart idea and they got a couple good scenes out of it. Of course, why they wouldn’t at least cover the security camera in the room — leaving the others wondering who it could be — is one of many questions that are aroused by the idiotic behaviour in this episode.

Indeed, while in “Building 26″, Matt and Peter get ahold of video surveillance and Matt’s first plan is to leverage that information to get Daphne back. “One life at a time” he says, as though that makes sense. If your plan is to chip away at the problem until it’s been fixed and then suddenly you’re given material capable of destroying the very foundation of the bricks you’re chipping at, a change in stratagem might be in order. And then, when Peter escapes with that information, instead of bringing the information immediately to all the news outlets and uploading it to Youtube and posting to dailykos under the username LoveIsTheAnswer about the abuses of the Executive Branch and how horrifying the rounding up of these superpowered-Americans is for the freedoms of all Americans, he calls up his totally trustworthy brother who’s never betrayed him before and makes a deal to exchange all the incriminating evidence he has for Matt and Daphne. Even Nathan is astounded! It’s the stupidest deal ever. If you release the information to the public, Matt and Daphne would be ultimately freed, along with everyone else they’d illegally imprisoned. That’s what TNC would call “stepping over dollars to snatch up nickels.”

Oh but the stupid is strong with this episode. That’s just one of three equally stupid and repetitive stories. Claire is protecting Aquaman and, while he’s less annoying than West from last year, the story comes across virtually identical. They’re on the run and the guy saves her with his power somehow. Meanwhile, they discover that they’re not alone, that they have someone to share this part of themselves with. It’s just boring and Claire’s ongoing self-assuredness in the face of her obvious inadequacies is exasperating. And Sylar rediscovers his dad. Turns out his dad sold him to his uncle. Who knew?! The scene where Sylar relives that memory was played as though it were new astonishing information when it’s been known for at least a couple episodes now. The closest thing the scene has to a twist is when Sylar’s dad kills Sylar’s mom via some good old fashioned head-slicing telekenesis. Which, much like last week’s reveal of Mohinder’s pseudo-complicity, doesn’t make sense. Sylar obtained his telekinesis through his real power, the ability to understand complex systems intuitively and “fix” them, so to give telekinetic powers to his dad makes negative sense.

I’m feeling more and more angry with Heroes each new episode. I truly want the show to be good. I don’t like abandoning shows, especially not shows with sci-fi and comic book trappings, but Heroes is not entertaining for me anymore. Other shows are much better. Chuck, for example. Watch them instead.

The superstar-gone-crazy storyline isn’t entirely original, but because this is Dollhouse you get a chance to compare the assembly-line construction of pop stars the industry operates on  – there’s even a line about Rayna, the pop star in trouble, having stalkers since “singing for the Mouse” a clear reference to the Disney Mousketeers and their continual stream of stars — with the programming the Dollhouse gives to its Actives. Of course, there are obvious advantages to a story such as this…

Meanwhile, in the Dollhouse story-line a new aspect of the Active’s programming was revealed in this episode: Actives are given a persona, the identity they’re portraying, and a parameter, the underlying requirements of the mission. Echo’s persona is a singer, but her parameter is to protect Rayna at all costs. It’s an interesting addition to the mythos that opens up lots of possibilities regarding the inconsistent programming of the subconscious and conscious minds of the Actives.

The story definitely goes over-the-top with the diva personality — the exasperated line “Is somebody eating a mint?!” comes to mind — but I suppose it helps in establishing that she’s crazy. Echo’s solution to the Rayna’s suicidal tendencies is simple: bring her close to death so she can realize it’s not that appealing. But it breaks from her mission parameter in a 3 Laws of Robotics sort of way, which is interesting but a cause of consternation. Because of Echo’s improvisation there’s talk of an Attic, where inactive Actives go to sleep forever, which harkens to the boxing of Cylon models on BSG. But in the end she saves Rayna from herself. She also seemingly remembering her earlier interactions with Sierra at the Dollhouse during the mission; even stranger, Echo and Sierra seemed to remember each other when back at the Dollhouse. Things are moving quickly here, and Echo’s awakening will surely be a “game-changing” event in Dollhouse should the show survive long enough to feel its effects.

On a related note, I have to say I was really impressed by the performance from Dichen Lachman, the actress playing Sierra. Her captivity scenes were very good. She played the fear very realistically. Kudos to her. I just hope she doesn’t play an Australian persona too often; I know she’s already Australian so there’s no need to work on an accent but the landscape of American television is becoming inundated by Australian actors playing American roles which on occasion have to pretend to be Australian. Not that it’s a bad thing when they’re all as gorgeous as Yvonne Strahovski, Dichen Lachman, and Alex O’Loughlin.

And finally, Ballard’s Russian mob informant is revealed to actually be a Dollhouse Active presumably on a mission to get Ballard killed. It’s not a huge surprise, again because of the press photos showing that actor as an Active, but it’s a new development and the reveals thus far only skim the surface of what Viktor’s mission actually is and what the Dollhouse has in store for Ballard. At first glance, the information given to Ballard was to set him up to be killed by the mob, but who’s to say what the real intention was. Ballard’s plots are all so minor and insubstantial right now, it’s hard to put any effort into examining them, but I’m sure as the show progresses he’ll get closer to the Dollhouse and more integrated with the rest of the show’s stories.

The show’s improving. This week’s episode wasn’t as good as last week’s for the same reason the pilot was a little lackluster: the main story wasn’t that enthralling. But the show is getting better. The characterizations are getting richer, the long-term stories are getting layered in wonderfully, and the dialogue is getting smoother and Joss-ier. So freaking watch it, because the ratings are not good people.

Fuck off, Heroes.

On the TWOP forums, some people will come out proclaiming that a certain episode of Lost was patently obvious and they saw it all coming. Most of the time, I’m astounded by that. “Nobody could’ve seen all the little details that came out during that episode coming!” But the bookends of this Heroes episode were obviously supposed to come as a shock and failed utterly to do so. And the only reason the little details that came out during the episode weren’t obvious was because I was still under the assumption the writers would try to make the characters actions make sense.

Instead we get an utterly pointless “reveal” that Mohinder received oblique references to the Guantanomutant Brigade’s plan via HRG a few weeks before all this happened (which doesn’t even make sense because Suresh got into HRG’s car to try to escape the commandos earlier this season); and Parkman decided to become really stupid, or at least further express his innate stupidity. I admit, I enjoyed the scene last week where Suresh, Parkman, and Peter took HRG away for nefariously good purposes, but when they continued with that story all we got were a couple lame references to torture and Parkman realising that if Daphne is alive he doesn’t need to be a dick. He still barely knows Daphne. And the life that he initially saw of them living in NYC raising Molly isn’t going to happen since Molly seemed to have disappeared at some point during this season. They still haven’t really given a reason for the appeal of that relationship. I think they wanted to imply that they’d become a long-lived relationship earlier this season with the household squabbles they had before the squad of mutant-ready commandos took them away, but we never saw any of the connective moments before that so it feels hollow to me.

And the torture stuff was even worse, because in the real world torture doesn’t even get accurate results. So Heroes attacks the technique of torturing people for information not because it’s useless and doesn’t even get you useful information, but because it hurts people. And obviously the intense staring that Parkman gave HRG is nothing compared to the psychological warfare that took place inside the torture chambers of the Bush administration. So they fail in two ways.

And for some reason they’re trying to redeem Nathan now, but here’s the thing: this volume started off with him giving the information on the heroes to President Worf. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have needed to rein in the more extreme hardline members of his anti-hero task force. His intentions are bafflingly stupid.

Heroes failed to redeem itself. After last week’s episode, and the Heroes screed I wrote shortly afterward, I was close to quitting Heroes entirely — which is a pretty big deal given how long I’ve been watching Smallville, a show that peaked a long long time ago and was offensively bad for a few years there — and this episode has done nothing to shift me away from that stance. Naturally, I have to stick it out until at least the end of the season — i.e. Bryan Fuller’s return — but unless the show improves drastically in those last few episodes don’t expect me to still be watching when season four rolls around.

From what I’ve read online, this was originally scripted as the seventh episode of the season. Some of the direct correlations between scenes in the pilot and this one make that statement suspect but it does explains why there’s so much exposition regarding the mythology mysteries, answers which normally would have taken half a season to unfold. But if if truly was the seventh originally, I can see why they bumped this episode up because it was an amazing hour of television.

Last week’s main story was a little lackluster, despite the interesting implications of what happened in it. This week was more exciting, less cerebral. The sort of exciting adventure the show needed to let its audience see a less restrained side. Not that this was a light-hearted romp; an episode where a seemingly innocent adrenaline junkie’s weekend date — with the crazed survivalist Richard O’Connell played brilliantly by Matt Keeslar — for Echo turns into her running for her life from the same man determined to find out if she’s worthy of living, if she can escape his manhunt, isn’t something to dance around about. But there’s much more levity in this episode, and the dialogue has become much smoother. The growing pains the pilot suffered from are almost completely gone here.

While this week’s main story was by far the more interesting half of the episode, the flashbacks in the Dollhouse to the events of a few months ago were excellent as well. The naked man who ended last week’s episode is Alpha; an Active, presumably one of the earliest versions of the Actives given his name, who, either at least partially retained his implanted personalities despite mind wipes after missions or was implanted by an unknown party with a personality and skills he shouldn’t have, broke free killing almost everyone in the Dollhouse and disappearing. He spared Dr Saunders her death, instead slicing her face leaving her scarred and damaged, and left Echo alive and unharmed surrounded by the dead bodies of her fellow Actives.

In this back story, we also learn of the imprinting process Boyd, Harry Lennix’s character, went through with Echo which made her unconditionally trust him in any circumstance. This trust is ingrained in her via key phrases which she reacts to in a preprogrammed manner. Which is why when, in the midst of the hunt, Echo ignores Boyd’s invocation of the key phrase and instead takes charge of the situation and going up against O’Connell on her own Boyd is perturbed. As would the Dollhouse if Boyd mentioned it, but it seems like the paternal connection he has with Echo will encourage a few helpful omissions from his report.

Alpha is said to have been killed after his escape by the Dollhouse, but we know he hasn’t and his message to Ballard was received this week while Paul was examining the crime scene from last week’s episode, much to the chagrin of the detectives actually assigned to the case. (Ballard has a few scenes this episode and they’re all fairly unrelated to the rest of the action on screen which is why it’s possible they were taken from whatever was originally the second episode and injected into this one to make the continuity stick.) Now that Ballard has a face to connect to the Dollhouse, albeit a face that doesn’t exist according to the FBI database, he will be even more determined. There’s a nice scene in there where Ballard’s attractive and clearly into him neighbour tries to offer him a nice home cooked dinner and gets shot down via the obliviousness and doggedness of the agent. It’s a little heavy-handed at getting it’s point across, but it’s still better than the kickboxing scene from the pilot.

The beauty of Joss Whedon’s work, as I noted when discussing the Buffy episode Doppelgangland, is his ability to combine stand-alone story lines with ongoing arc threads and this episode is an brilliant example of this. O’Connell’s actions originate from him and the conflicts he introduces are resolved within the span of the episode but the mystery of his origin’s, which were meticulously constructed by someone else (most likely Alpha), add to the overall arc. Similarly, the back story related to Boyd’s introduction to Echo not only allows some exposition regarding the process and Active and their handler go through together but also develops the long-term relationship between the two characters which is built upon by the main action of the episode.

If this episode is a sign of what’s to come from Dollhouse, then consider me in it for the long haul. However long that may be.

In an attempt to weed out trolls and flame wars they have strict rules about your demeanor. You have to write grammatically correct and full sentences. You can’t attack personally, you need to stick to the subject of the thread and of the forum. You’re also not allowed to write spoilers in the “episode discussion” threads which is great because you can theorize and question without worrying about someone spoiling the show. But these rules and restrictions come at a price.

Every time I come to the forums, I read post after post which criticizes Kate and Jack. They call Kate a cold-blooded selfish bitch and basically do nothing but wish death upon her. They call Jack an idiot and say that he is the worst and most boring character on the show. But Kate is not a selfish bitch; she has a fucked up history, lots of baggage, a fear of commitment, and lots of other things wrong with her. But she feels every minute of that. And throughout the series thus far, she has been incredibly selfless, and willing to help the entire Island community. Jack is sometimes an idiot, but everyone is sometimes. Jack had to live his entire life under the thumb of a father he was unable to please. A father who would criticize him for attempting to help out a kid being bullied. His entire life is guided by that need to fix things; to impress his father. When he flies to Australia to pick up Christian Shephard’s body, he’s doing more than just mourning a father. He’s realizing that he will never earn his father’s love.

I’m not discussing these crucial aspects of their personality because I think that what they do on the show is what I would do or the best thing to do. It is, however, what I think they would do. These characters are not static. Jack tries to fight these urges, Kate tries to fight these urges. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. That is at the very core of humanity, and to attack these characters because they are consistent and not merely set pieces through which the plot progresses is idiotic.

So, when a forum poster attacks Jack for not questioning Kate further about Aaron’s fate and calls Kate a murderer, I respond forcefully with a logical rebuttal. Jack has never seen Kate as a murderer. He has never cared what she did in her past. He knows her. Whether or not he actually knows her, he thinks he does. He trusts her more than anyone else. That’s why he asks her for her support when trying to convince the Oceanic 6 to lie. He loves her so deeply, that he’d give up his freedom and perform surgery on a man he has come to revile so that she could be happy with another man. To think that Kate having murdered someone, no matter how justified or unjustified it was, would sway Jack’s trust of Kate is downright intellectually dishonest.

So, in my response to this practically trollish comment, I called that poster out for making that statement. I asked them if they were really going to use the “Kate is a murderer” line. I followed this up with a calm and correct rebuttal as to why that was a foolish statement. I then followed that up by telling the poster that they should judge the character’s actions by the character, not by what you want the character to be. I held no ill will to that poster, but I sincerely hoped they read that and realized the error in their analysis.

Instead, my message was deleted and I got a warning from a moderator because you are not allowed to discuss other posters on the thread. Which is a foolish rule, because the forum’s users lose any ability to examine the merit of one anothers’ examinations. I’m not saying that we need to be boorish in our critiques but without the analysis of analysis, any improvement of ideas occurs away from the group which results in the group seeing the improvements but not the improvements to the process which led to that. Perhaps, I was too brusque, but my point was valid and even ignoring the direct communication toward the other poster there was still content apropos to the discussion in that post. Deleting it only hurts the collective intelligence of the group.

I understand the need for some level of moderation on forums. Aint it Cool News’ talkbacks have no moderation save some manual processes enacted when a particularly persistent troll writes hundreds of useless messages and harasses the community indiscriminately. Without moderation, most of the internet would devolve into a slew of attacks and slurs. But to delete valid content because it was deemed slightly snippy according to the whims of a moderator is unacceptably, and unecessarily, Draconian.

Most recently the hate has been pushed onto Hiro, and here’s why. The show sucks. It has nothing to do with Hiro, or his current journey. At least not in particular. What’s wrong with Hiro, is what’s wrong with Heroes.

Abuse of Awesomeness

During season one, one of the recurring characters was played by Richard Roundtree. AKA Motherfucking Shaft. So obviously he was playing a badass with awesome powers. Wait, what?

Shit. Well, he’s in a coma but he can wake up and reveal his awesome superpowers and kick all sorts of ass. Wait, what?

Fuck. Well, he’s dead — and it appears the only thing his death accomplished was to get Peter laid — but Hiro is all about the time travel, so Shaft can still show up in the past and be even more awesome because we didn’t see it coming!! Wait, what?

Oh, come on! You bring the guy back so that he can tell Peter that Love Is The Answer?! And what was his power anyways? Talking to the future? That’s a retarded power, and I don’t even think it was him doing it so it’s especially crappy.

And then, following their atrocious treatment of Shaft — not to mention the purposeless character Charles Deveaux’s very existence — they pump up the awesomeness by casting Bruce Boxleitner for a recurring role during season three. Except that he’s in two fucking scenes in total and they were pretty close to useless in the long run. My point is they’ve got a huge problem with follow-through. And not just with their stunt casting. Everybody remembers that most unheinous moment early on in season one of Heroes where time stops for Peter Petrelli and Ninja Hiro From The Future shows up to deliver him a message.

Future Hiro was fucking sweet! He spoke English without the accent; he carried around a katana; and the slimming lines on that leather trench coat really worked for him. He came from five years in the future but now three years later — possibly four given the sporadic time jumps the show does — he’s still a dweeb who talks in broken English and wears the office clothes for the job he hasn’t been to in years at this point. When Lost showed Jack depressed, addicted, and bearded up three years in the future, they followed the fuck through.

Discontinuity

Retcons are a staple of the comic-book world from which Heroes steals its ideas draws inspiration, but in the comic world, retcons typically come about because of universe altering events or because the story is being reimagined for a new generation. But changing the dynamics of the foundations of your characters doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In the series premiere, Angela Petrelli is arrested for shoplifting socks because she “wants to feel alive.” Presumably because the six months she’s lived without the love of her life, Arthur Petrelli, have left her feeling alone and empty; without her better half. No wait, she poisoned him and was planning on killing him even further just to make sure he was dead before her son walked in mid-homicide. It’s these emotional discontinuities that really kill Heroes.

Does Peter ever think about Simone Deveaux? Or the Irish chick he erased from existence? Does Hiro think about Charlie? Do any of these characters think about the consequences of their actions, or the pains in their past? I don’t see any of that in the performances or in the writing.

The characters perform as the plot requires. Their emotions exist to serve the plot. Their powers shift to drive the plot. Everything about the show is hollow and meaningless. You can change the pronouns of the last four sentences to refer to Hiro and the statements would stand, but the show, and how it treats its characters is the real problem.

Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s new show on the network he swore to never work with again, premiered Friday night to not-great ratings and to not-great reviews, but I think what we’re asking ourselves right now is “what did Blair think of it?” If you really want to hear about it, either read this longish review or, if you want to hurt my feelings, skip to the end.

The opening scene where Eliza Dushku’s character Echo signs up to become an “active” — a reprogrammable human willing and able to be whoever and do whatever the client requests — at the Dollhouse — the eponymous organization behind this booming industry — was definitely there for the mythology builders. It quickly established that the reasons Echo joined the Dollhouse will be a part of the mythology of the show while preparing the viewers by asking the question “what if actions didn’t have consequences?”

The first consequence-less action we’re shown is a perfect weekend between Echo, playing the flirty and fun twenty-something role, and some dude with too much money. It’s interesting that they chose to introduce people to Echo as a high-end prostitute, but it’s also obvious they chose it to demonstrate that actives are completely blank slates when they’re not “active.” Switching from Echo’s peppy and sexy dance moves with a bright smile on her face to the doll-like emptiness of the actives is both a quick way to demonstrate the answer to the opening scene’s question and also gives Dushku a chance to stretch her acting muscles, which is really what this show is all about.

After she’s returned to the Dollhouse and “reset” there’s a short scene of awkward exposition with a brief foray into the philosophical questions this show will undoubtedly ask week to week, when Topher, the tech behind the mind-wipes played by Fran Kranz, says “[Echo's] living the dream” to which her morally conflicted handler, played by Harry Lennix, responds “whose dream?” It’s a simple scene but it sets up Topher as the Xander of the Dollhouse, and establishes the conflict at the heart of Echo’s handler. I keep wanting to use the phrase “effectively introduces” because most of the scenes are explicitly designed to introduce these concepts and characters to the audience without being too weighed down by clunky dialogue.

Following this, the requisite Monster of the Week is introduced as a little girl is kidnapped out of her bedroom in a pretty effectively creepy scene. Then the credit sequence plays which is interesting but not quite interesting enough to want to watch each week. I’ve previously talked about my annoyance with the lack of interesting and evocative credit sequences in modern television. HBO and Showtime excel at this but the networks apparently aren’t willing to give up a full one or two minutes for credits the way cable stations are.

After another scene which establishes what the client of the week needs out of the Dollhouse, a hostage negotiator to handle the payment of the ransom for his daughter, we’re blessed with a scene between Echo and the staff doctor, Dr Saunders, played by the always beautiful Amy Acker. Acker plays this scene very peculiarly, with a strange cadence to her delivery. She seems guarded in her interactions, which may be as a result of the two or three large scars across her face, which do nothing to make you forget that Amy Acker is gorgeous.

Echo then walks in on the creation of an Active, a procedure which is more painful and invasive than the typical “treatments” she’s used to. Echo’s dialogue in this scene is a little too child-like for my tastes, actually all of her scenes in the Dollhouse have this problem. Hopefully her growing awareness of what she is will solve this problem, but for now we may be cursed with obnoxiously written child-like dialogue from the inactive Actives.

By now all the set-up for the episode, and most of the set-up for the series, is in place so it seems like a good time to introduce Paul Ballard, the FBI agent tasked with finding the Dollhouse, played by Tahmoh Penikett. Long story short: he’s very dedicated, to the detriment of the rest of his life, hence the ungraceful reference to his divorce. Oh, and in this scene Tahmoh has a weird shape to his lips that I never noticed on BSG so I hope it’s just a fluke of the scene and not something he’s actively applied to his character’s appearance. Because me no likey.

After all this set-up, we’re over a third of the way through the episode, already an extended 50 minute episode, so the story proper begins with Echo arriving at the client’s house as Eleanor Penn, an expert negotiator who’s handled these sorts of payouts time and again. At least she thinks she has. There’s a couple scenes of her establishing her dominance and her overall awesomeness, and an interstitial exposition scene from Topher about the techniques of implantation. The personalities the Actives are implanted with come from real people, which implies another mythology question that will be answered over time.

I’m not in love with the main story of this episode because, quite frankly, the story of someone who helps kidnappers get their money without police complications isn’t a particularly thrilling idea. There are some interesting tidbits though; in particular, one of the real people who was the basis for Eleanor Penn was kidnapped herself as a child and sexually and physically abused which makes the client, who’s aware of where Eleanor Penn came from, ask what would make those men put such terrible memories in her mind. An interesting question, and one that won’t be forgotten on this show.

Meanwhile, in the world of Paul Ballard he manages to find a Russian mob member who might be able to get him information about the Dollhouse. Though, the mobster looks remarkably like the third male Active in the promo photo above, so I’m thinking that might be a dead end.

After this little interlude, we return to the adventure’s of Ms Penn who’s about to hand over the money in exchange for the girl when one of the men in the team of kidnappers sparks a deep memory in her. He’s the man who took her years ago. Wait, what? Yeah. This episode doesn’t handle it very well, but the question is still floating there to be asked.

After a few scenes of Echo heading back for her “treatment,” which unbeknownst to her is when she will return to being Echo, the Dollhouse ultimately decides to allow her to remain as Ms Penn long enough to get the girl back from the kidnappers despite the complications of the mission. The girl is saved by Echo, and the kidnappers are all unhesitatingly shot down by another Active, Sierra, the one being created in the earlier scene and the other female Active in the photo above. There’s another interesting snippet here. The real person who was taken by the kidnapper years ago killed herself a few years earlier because she was haunted by the memory of that monster for the rest of her life. But here, her memory gets closure. The kidnapper is killed and before he did she gets a chance to stand up to him and face her greatest fear. Is this catharsis equivalent to the real thing? Is the recording of this woman’s memory resolving her deep-set issues in some way resolving them for the original person. It’s an interesting question and an idea I hadn’t thought of when first thinking about the premise of this show. It may be a ridiculous question and one that only I asked but it caught my attention regardless.

Finally, to close of the show we have another mythology building scene. A nude man is seen from behind preparing an envelope for Agent Ballard encouraging his hunt for the Dollhouse while watching a video of a pre-Active Echo discussing her post-graduation goals. The camera moves back to show the room he’s quietly resting in has several dead and bloody bodies in it. Who is this man? Why does he want to encourage, and aid, Ballard’s search for the Dollhouse? And why does he have a video of Echo before she was Echo? There’s a lot in that scene to be explored in later episodes.

This review was much longer than it probably needed to be, but I felt that a pseudo-scene-by-scene write-up was necessary to get at the numerous themes and ideas being introduced throughout this pilot. Should I keep up these episode reviews of Dollhouse, which is unlikely given my post frequency,  they’ll likely gloss over most of the details. As for this episode, the one thing I liked was that while the exposition wasn’t handled with excellence it was usually paired with a mythology or character development chaser that made it more palatable.

Overall, I’m excited about this show. I want to see what happens when Echo begins to remember things she shouldn’t. I want to see Ballard’s investigation progress. I want to see more of the history of the Dollhouse; how it came to be; how people become Actives; what kind of person donates their personality to the Dollhouse and why. Most of all, I want to see more Amy Acker. If this show gets a second season, I hope she’s upgraded from recurring to regular cast. She brought such intrigue and mystery to her two scenes and I can’t wait to see why her character is the way she is.

But then again, given the massive Joss Whedon marathon I undertook a little over a year ago, I suppose it’s not a huge surprise that I’ll be watching this show to the (most likely bitter) end.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

Footnotes

1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it.

The stories centred around a family that took in a John Doe youth who has a mysterious past and no bellybutton. As Kyle learns how to live — making friends, respecting elders, all that stuff — the kids watching can get reinforcement for the virtues of good behaviour. But the characters are never saccharine, they’re not perfect little angels, and everything doesn’t always work out for them. The parents talk to their kids about their problems and when sex starts to rear its head into their increasingly complicated life it’s played realistically from both the children and the adults.

Well-written characters and intelligent plots are hard enough to come by in youth-oriented television in the world of Raven and Hanah Montana and Zack and Cody but then the show starts layering in sci-fi elements and that’s when it gets interesting for me. Kyle has no bellybutton. To a sci-fi geek like me that’s fairly self explanatory: he’s someone born from an artificial womb, which means he’s either a genetic experiment or a clone. But the show takes its time in exploring Kyle’s history and what he could be.

As the history deepens and the sci-fi elements go from implied to explicit, the show has seen declining ratings — something I hope doesn’t happen with this new season of Lost and its much more explicit sci-fi elements — and as the characters grow up the stories become more mature which could cause some hesitation from more conservative parents, but the show’s core messages remain the same. Or rather it did.

The show is introduced with the fairly banal concept of redoing the story of David and Goliath in a modern day society, but this is as accurate as saying Lost is about a plane crash. Within the first episode — I’ve still only seen the first twenty minutes of the two hour premiere — this premise has been established and the story moves onto the consequences of the battle.

I can’t say much beyond that, primarily because I haven’t seen much more beyond that, but what I have seen has left me with a lot of optimism about the show, if not its future given our increasingly serialized-storytelling-averse society. For some reason, most of the promotional material is a little pop-rock montage heavy but the real footage I’ve seen establishes a much more epic story being told, one where pop music is unlikely to fit in.

I wish I had more to offer about this show, mostly because that would mean I had seen more and I wouldn’t have to wait until March, but I don’t so this is just a friendly reminder to everyone out there to give the show a chance. And PVRs are great, but ratings still matter, so try to watch it live. Especially if you have a Nielsen box. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: too many shows have died too early because of people waiting to see if the show will turn out good. Don’t let Kings be one of them.

It’s called preference. I don’t want to kiss guys and I think it would be gross. Just because you accept other people’s homosexuality doesn’t mean you have no problem performing homosexual acts.

In some ways it’s right, but at the same time going back to that thread now I see myself as woefully ignorant. Actors are paid to perform roles. And most of the actors who get interviewed about kissing against sexual preference (truthfully, no-one ever asks NPH how weird it is to kiss hot chicks all the time) are famous enough that if they didn’t want to kiss a guy, they wouldn’t have to. And really, even if you’re a struggling actor desperate for a role and you’ve got an audition for a gay character who goes through an intense and intimate sexual awakening (not that I’m working on a screenplay or anything) why wouldn’t you do it? A kiss is only as intimate as you make it. A kiss is only as sexual as you make it. And all of that happens in your mind. It has nothing to do with how deep your tongue goes down their throat or how hard you push your face onto theirs.

Beyond all of that, I’ve grown up a fair bit since then. I’m not wet in the pants to make it with a dude, but it’s not something that disgusts me any longer. And there’s always a chance the dude’s a good kisser.

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

This study talks about how TV is escapism — which is true of any entertainment media, even though the same study says that happier people read more books — but in many ways, good television holds a mirror up to you and examines the various aspects of humanity. A few years ago, I was at a (cliche alert) crossroads in my life. I was around half way through a university degree which was promising but didn’t hold the appeal it did when I first applied. Beyond that, my faith was dwindling. For years, I had a constantly evolving understanding of God and religion. When I first had my religious re-awakening in high school, a lot of people thought it was because I had a crush on one of the girls that went to my church, but the fact is that I simply wanted to understand God better. I was experiencing teenage angst and wanted to figure what “all this” is about.

My faith grew over those years but ultimately I found myself having an understanding of God that differed and contradicted the one that both the Bible taught and that my church taught. Because of my growing skepticism of psychics, ESP, and other paranormal phenomenon and my growing understanding of how science explained the universe, I no longer thought that Jesus was actually the son of God. I still believed that he was a wise man likely sent by God to teach people a newer better way to live and worship, but I could no longer consider myself a Christian.

So, I was confused about life, the meaning of it all, and a few other things. Around that time, I started rewatching Babylon 5, a show that I hadn’t watched in quite some time, and I think it’s safe to say that it changed my life. I went from a mass of self-doubt and uncertainty about pretty much everything to having a very solid understanding of myself and the way I wanted to live in this world. I still consider Babylon 5 one of the best shows ever made, and almost certainly the best sci-fi show ever made.

There are a lot of times throughout my life that TV has helped me. Not because it let me forget about my sadness for a few minutes, but because I discovered new things. The long, drawn out character development that happens in television allows you to connect more intimately with their lives and in turn make discoveries about yourself.

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

Is a recent interview with Joss Whedon, Joss claimed that he had heard no complaints about Buffy’s foray into homosexuality, or perhaps simply bisexuality, or perhaps even simplest sexual experimentation.

Really Joss?

I’ve got a few complaints. First of all, it didn’t flow naturally. I’m working off of old memories now, but I don’t remember that cut to Buffy sprawled out covered in sheets next to a fellow slayer making a heck of a lot of sense. It works in that we all know that Buffy gets horny when she slays. But if that were the case, then why did her experimentation not happen when slaying with Faith years ago?

Another argument I’ve had with myself is that Buffy, in that universe, was still basically the age of a college student and that’s a time ripe with experimentation. But it’s not that age that induces experimentation, but the maturity and independence of that time. And Buffy has had to be incredibly mature for years. Her times for experimentation are over. One of my biggest complaints with Season 7 of Buffy was that Buffy still acted like a petulant child a lot of the time. She should have been more mature, because she was more mature. The same applies here.

Overall, I just don’t think the situation was handled very well. I’m sure they could have done a lesbian storyline with Buffy smartly, but to me there were simply too many things that didn’t add up or make sense in the greater scheme. I’m not alone either. There were quite a few people who didn’t like the direction the story took on forums, some of them being quite hyperbolic about the whole thing, but most citing their issues with the story in reasonable terms. It didn’t ruin Buffy for me, it didn’t ruin the comic for me, it didn’t even ruin the storyline for me, but to say there were no complaints is a little presumptuous.

It doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network.

Oops. My bad. Apparently, unbeknownst to me — but knownst to others — MRC was having cash flow and managerial issues which likely led to the cancellations. And sure, the atrocious ratings probably didn’t help, but in the end, it comes down to a lack of faith in your product. And me, I’ve got too much faith. Everyone I know considers me a pessimist of the highest order, but I’m in fact an incredibly optimistic, almost naïvely so, guy.

Which is why, when MRC shut down production to “work on scripts” I didn’t really see it as the company saving some cash while they decide the faith of the show. I saw it as a company willing to work to improve a product. For the most part, I genuinely believe that television networks want to do more than just sell advertising.

Yes, sometimes networks are too quick with their trigger finger, cancelling shows before they’ve had a chance to build a base, but overall they try to let shows develop if there is promise. Unfortunately, a brilliant show with ever-decreasing ratings doesn’t show promise to most network executives, much to the detriment of good taste. So there is a level of practised cynicism I should have by now, but I generally don’t. No matter how many times I get burned, I keep going back to the networks to see what new brilliance they have that no one seems to be watching. Not that Valentine or Easy Money were brilliant, far from it, but their deaths are a symptom of a greater problem that television is enduring right now. A problem I on occasion rail against, but most of the time am ignorant of simply because I have too much faith.

Oh well, two fewer shows to watch every week.

Beyond that, most of McCain’s policies were overly simplified or left unmentioned. And the few that were mentioned, such as the spending freeze, wlater had holes poked in them by Obama and McCain never rebutted. Every time McCain criticized a policy, Obama responded with a clarification of McCain’s lies and disinformation.

This debate was won by Obama, and in my opinion by a greater margin than any of the previous debates. Not only was Obama a more persuasive debater, but his policies align with my own personal opinions better than most politicians. Obviously, that skews me towards him, but I’d be willing to admit if McCain made valid points that made me question my preference. But he didn’t. Obama won. Hands down.

And Joe the Plumber is now officially a celebrity. Probably only for a week, but he’ll have a wikipedia article, gosh darn it, you betcha.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that both of the shows I’m looking at today are on the CW, a network that has done nothing to engender the support or interest of the internet since killing off the much loved Veronica Mars. It’s also fifth in a three-car race when it comes to network television, but being in last place doesn’t stop a network from having spectacular shows. Just look at early 90′s Fox.

In addition to being on a D-list network, these two shows are both a part of the new deal between the CW and Media Rights Capital which outsourced Sunday night programming to MRC, so the odds of anyone giving these shows more than a read through of their synopses before moving along were already pretty low. So, let’s take a look at two lesser-known television shows premiering this year and their odds of survival.

Valentine

Valentine is a dramedy that focuses on modern day love stories. So far each episode deals with a pair of soulmates who have come to a crossroads in their lives and if not pushed in the right direction their love will not come to be, which typically means bad news for all involved. And at those crossroads are a team of love specialists who are actually Greek Gods. Headed by Aphrodite, now known as Grace, the team consists of Aphrodite, Eros (AKA Cupid, AKA Danny Valentine), Leo (AKA Hercules), and Phoebe who mans the Oracle at Delphi (no longer at Delphi) which helps them gain intel on the love struck soulmates they’ll be helping that week. And since every show needs an outsider who needs expositing at, the first episode introduces a mortal romance novelist to the fray because the God Gang is losing their touch when it comes to Love and they needed a fresh pair of eyes.

Beyond the basic “couple needs some love” weekly story, there seems to be an ongoing story related to the greater mythology of the Gods. In the first episode we learn that as Gods become less relevant they become weaker until they become mortals. Aphrodite demonstrates this by cutting her son with a blade and showing him the blood. Clearly, love doesn’t have the sway it once had in our cynical world. It seems as though this show intends to argue for a few related issues in its overarching themes: What the world needs now is Love, sweet Love; War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing; and finally, that our modern lives are eliminating romance and intimacy from the world and replacing them with instant messages and twitters. That last one doesn’t have a snappy song lyric to go along with it. Sorry.

On the mythology front, Ares, the Greek God of War and Aphrodite’s husband, who now goes by Ari — which by the way is a really clever renaming, because Ari is a Jewish name and the middle east is basically the centre of war in the modern world — makes an appearance in the second episode and extols the power of War in the modern world and the uselessness of Love. There are other aspects to the God dramas but let’s not get bogged down in those details.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. The worst kept secret in the universe. I’m a sucker for a love story. Note that I didn’t say a good love story. A mediocre love story might not make my heart leap quite as much as a good love story, but it jumps nonetheless. Beyond loving Love, I also love mythology and the Greek and Roman mythologies in particular. (There’s a reason I watched six seasons of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and it wasn’t Kevin Sorbo’s brilliant acting.) So this show has the double whammy of mixing Love stories with Greek mythology.

That said, based on what I’ve seen so far it’s focusing far too heavily on the Greek God side of the story. It’s not that I don’t like that story line: it’s fairly interesting. But so far the love stories they’ve cooked up are more interesting and sorely underdeveloped, and given that each episode is unrelated they could really be milking that format and letting their serialized arc stretch out longer.

Easy Money

Easy Money is about a family-run loan shark company. It reminds me of Sons of Anarchy, though I’ve still only seen the pilot of SoA so I really don’t want to stress that comparison. The main character is middle child Morgan Buffkin, who is being represented as the smart one in the family. In the first episode, he buys a book and argues with his friend, who’s selling him the book, that Einstein invalidated Existentialism by showing that everything is connected…

Clearly the writers don’t have a strong grasp of either philosophy or physics (or want their audience to understand that their main character isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is) but at least they’re trying.

Despite his bizarre understanding of physics and philosophy, he really is the smart one of the family. While virtually every customer they have tries their best to get out of repaying their debts, Morgan manages to get it out of them, whether by pretending to be the manager to a ventriloquist, or by uncovering adultery to cajole payments out of people.

There are quite a few disparate threads in the two episodes I’ve seen: there’s a new loan shark business in town is run by thugs who are not above forcing competition out of business through threat and theft; the husband of the ditsy sister seems to be getting into money troubles; and a few different customers have been introduced with varying degrees of grudges against the family.

In addition to these, the main story revolves around Morgan’s origin. He’s always felt out of place in his family and at the end of the first episode he learns why: he’s not related to them. This seems to be the mystery that the show wants to develop over the course of the season, but it’s not nearly as intriguing as they’d like it to be. It’s possible that these threads are going to align very smartly and give a really good pay-off to the progeny mystery, but at the moment it’s not really drawing me in.

All told, these two shows aren’t half bad. They’re nothing special, but they’re good enough for me to keep watching at least for the remainder of the season to see where it’s all going. As for their odds of survival? Well, seeing as both of these shows have already stopped production, to give the writers time to catch up, it doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network. If the CW were calling the shows, these shows might already have been canceled.

Last night, I screwed up on the PVR set up when I went to record How I Met Your Mother and inadvertantly recorded Two and a Half Men. It suffices to say I was less than pleased. I went down to watch HIMYM, about twenty minutes into the episode, and saw no wonderul red light on my PVR. And screwing up on the PVR, or the PVR screwing me over, is not the atypical event, but rather what immediately followed it: I sat down and started watching the show.

Often, when I sit down to watch a show my dad will drift in and out of the room, he’ll pay attention for a couple minutes and then head off somewhere else, or even strike up a conversation with me when he knows he should at least wait until the commercial. Last night was the first time I ever “drifted in” to a tv show when it was a new episode. This isn’t the same as flipping to Space and seeing Picard digging a trench on Risa and sticking around for the rest. This is flicking to ABC and seeing John Locke igniting a stick of dynamite and, having missed what came before deciding “eh, what the fuck” and watching from there.

Granted, How I Met Your Mother isn’t quite as continuity reliant as Lost or some of my other favourite shows, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t seen the first two-thirds of that episode. Normally, I’d download the episode that night and watch it shortly after, but that night I sat my ass down and said “eh, what the fuck.” This won’t become a typical behaviour on my part if only because it felt so weird, even in the moment, to not know what had come before but the fact that it happened at all is a sign of my age. Or at least that I’m becoming more like my father, and who the hell knows which is the worse of those.

There are few shows that excite me as much as The Office and with good reason. Not only is the show that perfect combination of dry hidden humour and outright slapstick, but it has one of the most compelling and engrossing romantic stories to ever grace television. Squee is usually meant to refer to the excited squeal that fangirls make, but I squee. The genius of this show is that the romance between Pam and Jim, ranging from a simmer to a full boil over the last four years, has never been the butt of the joke.

On any other sitcom, the people the writer’s want you to cheer for have stupid and unrealistic situations thrown at them with Hilarious Consequences and the pratfalls that ensue when one of them tries to hide their feelings are usually the heart of the show for many years. Ross and Rachel started off as a series of jokes and it wasn’t until they were together that the show developed any serious attachment to the relationship as a relationship and not as the source of humourous situations. Similarly, with Monica and Chandler the relationship began as a drunken one night stand and subsequent series of sexual escapades leading to an ultimately fulfilling relationship.

Never has a comedy dealt with unrequited love so earnestly. And from the beginning, the humour comes from elsewhere. The humour is the way they react to the mad world we share with them. The humour is the absurdities of the workplace that we all experience, whether we’re software developers or paper salesmen. The humour is never that Pam is engaged to a lazy man who doesn’t appreciate or understand the woman he’s managed to ensnare. What is the core of most sitcoms, an overweight man with a smart and beautiful woman, is handled with the gravity of the real world. And the show doesn’t suffer for it but rather it succeeds because it never laughs at the people in it. (I’m sure some of you think that the show laughs at Michael Scott but I don’t think you watch the show carefully enough.)

This show might not be the funniest show out there, though this premiere was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, but it is one of the best shows right now. It’s better than funnier shows because the laughs come puncuated by a story that many have experienced before and the rest wish they had. It’s better than more dramatic shows because it doesn’t have to rely on introducing drama to its world, forsaking the characters for the sake of the show.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that I really liked the premiere. Every note hit perfectly.

Holly’s geekiness and her hidden yet patently obvious affection towards Michael is opening up Michael as a person. Somehow, this episode made what would normally be a cringe inducing scene, when Michael encourages the whole office to judge Kelly by her physical appearance, into a slightly charming almost effective comment on eating healthy and accepting people’s appearances. And Jim’s advice during the finale of last year seems to have paid off because Michael is steadfast in the friend zone with Holly. Maybe it’ll take him five years and an engagement for him to tell her how he feels too.

Angela’s ongoing illicit yet amazingly drab affair with Dwight was hilarious, but the show was smart enough to show Angela regretting it and devoting herself Andy… at least until Andy decided that not having his college (he went to Cornell don’t you know) acapella groupas the wedding band was a “deal breaker.”

The second biggest surprise was Ryan returning to the Office. I half expected him to be in Jail for at least a portion of the season, but it appears some community service and a stern firing of was enough to set him straight. So now he’s back working reception, and quietly plotting revenge against pretty much everybody.

Being now spoiler free, I had no idea what was going to happen this year — though The Office is pretty good at keeping its secrets; last year I went into the premiere knowing remarkably little given how much I knew about Lost, a show known for its secrecy regarding future stories — so all of these moment were delightful and funny and all around awesome. But none of them could have prepared me for that final scene. Toby’s back! I’m kidding obviously. As much as I love Toby and am sure he’ll make it back to the Office at some point, the scene that made my day, night, week, and month was that penultimate scene in the rain. It was simple and powerful and managed to avoid all of the cliches by playing it as realistically as every other moment in that relationship. Oh and it made me squee. I’d missed that.

Verses have become afterthoughts, subsumed by choruses and pre-choruses. What’s worse is that songs often begin with the chorus now. Starting a song in media res is not daring, innovative, or Tarantino-esque. It’s simplistic song writing, relying on simple repetitive overgeneralized lyrics which water down the more complex issues dealt with in the verse. As OutKast said in “Hey Ya!” about the song’s message that Love is not magical and eternal: “Y’all don’t want to hear me, ya just want to dance.”

Our culture is far too invested in distractions. I can hardly act self-righteous about this point given the sheer quantity of television I watch. Escapism is something I do every day. But often my escapism isn’t into a shiny happy world of harmonies and melodies. It’s a gritty realistic sobering take on life in space that takes on issues our society grapples with daily. Or it’s a tale of battles between good and evil occurring in one of the darkest times in our recent history. The things I watch and listen to for entertainment inform my views of the world today. If the same is true for the people who listen to current pop music as their predominant music then future generations are fucked.

Music was most likely the first art form our species experimented with (this can be easily disputed by virtue of the ephemeral nature of sound, but at least intuitively makes sense) so its power should not be underestimated. We began with simple grunts and rhythms and as we grew more sophisticated we developed harmony and melody and with the advent of language we incorporated lyrics into the tribal drums and bone flutes. So don’t tell me lyrics don’t matter.

Lyrics do more than repeat tropes over newly generated beats. And if you have nothing of value to say with your words, then let your instruments do the talking. I have nothing against a catchy beat, and I have no fundamental issue with pop music. I simply believe that music doesn’t need to be watered down, nor should it be; it should be distilled into its harshest, most biting, most truthful. One of my favorite songs of recent history is Casey’s Song by City and Colour which contains the lyrics “With you on my mind and my heart held in your hand, screaming ‘Break me’” and that’s it. I don’t need a verse to elaborate on that, those few words along with the accompanying music tell a story better than most exposition-laden pop songs.

It may seem like those two points are contradictory but they’re not; I want terse and smartly written lyrics, but I’m not willing to put up with pop music’s current love of short verses and repetitive choruses with little substance. Pop music is popular music, not bubbly vapid superificial music.

No Passion

These people aren’t driven by a desire to uncover the truth, or to find a sister taken from them years ago. Olivia Dunham is just another agent of the government doing her job. The closest we get to her having real passion for her new position investigating “fringe science” is her interest in the fucked up cases Lance Reddick’s character lists off. Which is really more of a “wow that’s pretty fucked up” interest than a “the world deserves to know the truth and I need to try to find proof” interest.

This lack of passion can be good if you take the show in a different route, but right now the show isn’t like X-Files in that way. With the X-Files, the fantastic things Mulder investigated were, for the most part, real. Aliens were out there, Tooms really did eat peoples liver to live longer. Most of the cases had at least a smidgen of scientific basis behind them. But in the world of The X-Files, no-one believed them. In the world of Fringe, these modern-day miracles are no longer on the edge of science only accepted by wackos. People have robotic arms. Corporations resurrect people for interrogation. We are no longer in a world where science cannot explain the seemingly magical. We are in a world where science is indistinguishable from magic. Granted, the worlds of Fringe and X-Files aren’t too different in this respect, and as the world is developed in the coming episodes they may diverge or coalesce, but right now the world of Fringe is full of people who have no vested interest aside from solving the case. That might work for your basic procedural, but I’m pretty sure Fringe isn’t hoping to be your basic procedural.

No Red Tape

Olivia Dunham is described as an inter-agency liason, which basically means she’s everyone’s boss. So instead of the local sheriff busting their chops about jurisdiction, she can just pull rank and get shit done. That’s great because very often that seemed to me like an arbitrary limitation the writers introduced to elongate a story that could be told in less than an hour. But it’s also terrible because red tape and people incredulous of the truth make you empathise with the protagonists. Of course, this world seems to be filled with true believers. The closest the show got to a skeptical response in the pilot was Joshua Jackson’s character, who is really played off as comical. His doubts aren’t seen as those of a rational scientist, but those of someone blind to the obvious truth. Even when Scully was obviously fighting the truth of the situation, you could see that she wasn’t simply saying “Mulder that’s ridiculous.”

Missing Time

This is purely a complaint on my part. There is no positive side to this. Walter Bishop and William Bell worked together in the 70′s on these bizarre things. Then Bishop was put in an institution and Bell moved on to create the biggest company in the world. Now, Bishop is back helping out Dunham and his son on cases similar to things he worked on back then, and Bell seems to be related to it. So my question is this: in the intervening years, no one was able to move beyond the things Bell and Bishop were working on all those years ago? Bell himself did nothing to move the field beyond what was developed thirty years ago? It’s a leap that I’m not willing to take and I have to hope that in future episodes they’ll come upon things vastly more advanced that even Bishop cannot explain.

Kirk Acevedo is Sorely Underutilized

This is just a personal rant about the misuse of actors in general. Kirk Acevedo played Miguel Alvarez on Oz, one of the first critically acclaimed shows for HBO. On that show, he got an opportunity to play a complex disturbed character, and he played it superbly. Over the years on Oz, that character was one of the few to remain compelling and likeable despite the numerous unpleasant actions he commits over the years and that’s a testament to both the writing and the acting. And every single role I’ve seen Kirk Acevedo do since then has been painfully one dimensional. This isn’t a problem with Fringe per se but rather a problem inherent in television today. TV shows have been getting more respect in recent years, but it still has a long way to go before clearly, because most TV shows today still function with barely awake characters thrumming through dialogue meant to continue the plot rather than to drive the characters. Admittedly, this is a shallow judgement given that only one episode has aired so far, but at the moment I’m not optimistic.

Well that’s all I’ve got for now, and it’s not much. Most of my issues are primarily with the implications for the rest of the series that the pilot sets up. They could be handled well, and one of my favourite shows of all time had a very substandard first season so I’m not completely giving up on the show, but I’m not yet in the thrall of this show and they’re going to have to work to convince me.

When Prison Break started, I didn’t start watching because I wanted to watch a bad show. I thought the idea behind the show was intriguing and, let’s be honest, an engineer playing superhero isn’t a common occurrence. The first season was great for its first half and good for the rest. But after that the show got worse. Some people ridiculed the second season because they were no longer in prison, so the name no longer applied. But that’s a facetious argument at best. The people on Lost aren’t all lost, either physically or emotionally, that doesn’t mean the show’s name should be changed.

But that doesn’t mean the show didn’t get ridiculous. And yet, as the show degenerated rather than giving up on the show I continued to watch but with glee over the absurdities found in every new moment. By that point, half the fun of any given episode was reading the recaps over at television without pity, where not a single logical flaw or absurdity is forgiven.

The real problem here is that other entertainment media don’t seem to have this problem with “guilty pleasures.” Reality TV made the term necessary in the television world because no other medium has such bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping trash. Plan Nine from Outer Space is not seen as a “guilty pleasure” but rather it’s loved and revered for being one of the most unintentionally terrible and incompetent movies ever made.

So let’s make this clear; there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. There are simply things we like (and often love) in spite of their flaws. Would you call your brother a guilty pleasure because he has an addiction? Would you call your wife a guilty pleasure because she cracks her knuckles? Humans are passionate creatures who love and hate for reasons ranging from the sublime to the petty. It’s one of the reasons hatred and bigotry exists, and its one of the reasons adultery and polygamy exist. It is a core aspect of our humanity. Ignorance may be bliss but calling our less noble loves and passions “guilty pleasures” belittles them and simultaneously gives them power over us. Looking at the uglier aspects of our psyche, even when manifested as the enjoyment of bad television, is necessary to self-improvement.

Awareness of our surroundings through highly attuned senses and through opportunistic pattern recognition led us to the top of the Darwinian food chain. But now our society exists outside of those confines and so beyond this awareness we require self-awareness: an understanding of our internal flaws. Whether we succumb to or rage against them, our flaws drive us as much as anything else. Ignoring them is as smart as ignoring the oncoming wolf or lion 10,000 years ago.

So, am I pushing the point too hard? Guily pleasures don’t exist. Love comes in many forms and is formed by many things. Being aware of that is a good thing and ignoring it or pretending it isn’t true by calling things guilty pleasures is a bad thing. It weakens you and makes certain your ongoing ignorance of yourself.

First of all, Bill Clinton’s speech was really good and was the best so far at explaining the core problems of the republican party. Some of the online pundits are saying that his arguments against the last 25 years of Republican policy would have been better if focused on just the last 8 years, but I think that the very problem is that they’re trying to sustain decades old policies without reevaluating them based on new evidence. Obviously, Bush’s policies are broken, but they’re not broken solely due to Bush’s incompetence, the deeply entrenched problems of the Republican party clearly contributed.

I do think that Hillary’s speech last night, or what I saw of it, was a bit better in its rhetoric, a bit more lyrical and driving, but Bill Clinton’s speech had more depth, more reasoning, much more information about why McCain was the wrong choice and why Obama was the right one. And of course, he let fly those magic words: “Barack Obama is ready to lead.” and hearing that coming from a former president carries a lot of weight.

I see the Clintons’ two speeches as a one two punch. The first telling Hillary’s supporters to really think about why the voted for Hillary and why they shouldn’t vote for McCain. It was a very feminist-oriented speech with many references to the suffrage movement and the great strides her campaign made to eliminating the inequalities between genders our society still grapples with. The second speech was much broader, attacking the Republicans for claiming that Obama is too inexperienced, just what they said about Bill in ’92. It also touched on why our foreign policy needs to change, and that part of the speech left the best most quotable line from his entire speech where he said that America should lead by the power of their example and not by example of their power.

After Clinton, I saw a bit of John Kerry’s speech but not the whole thing. While it did bring up some good points and continued the attack on McCain, I found myself having trouble listening to it because Kerry’s delivery was lacking. Basically, even though I agreed with what he said, he still sounded like a tool.

Finally, Biden closed out the night with a retelling of his and Obama’s life stories, emphasizing the decisions Obama made to get to this position, letting the people know that this is someone who cares about the nation and genuinely wants to fix it and isn’t just some politician seeking power. In regards to his attacks on McCain, I thought the first was bad and reminiscent of McCain “that’s not change we can believe in… [disturbing chuckle]” speech — though not as bad, half because of Biden’s delivery and half because the audience was willing to at least feign excitement — but I thought the second was really good and probably connected with many more people. For weeks and months now people from every corner of the political realm have been questioning Obama’s judgment and ability to lead the nation. Biden’s repeated refrain of “McCain was wrong. Obama was right.” was really good at showing that just because McCain’s been in the game longer doesn’t mean he’s the better man for the job.

I also want to make a special note of Beau Biden. His introductory speech for his father was amazing. It truly and honestly moved me and I welled up a few times. That guy’s going places if he wants to.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the speeches from the DNC so far and thought they’ve painted a compelling argument against McCain as much as it has been for Obama. And watching all of this convincing compelling rhetoric demanding change and improvement for our government definitely got me fired up and ready to go. I can hardly wait for Obama to turn these four nights of speeches into a Grand Slam.

I won’t describe it here, but it’s something that Lost fans will get pretty riled up about. In fact, I would have loved to go into the new season next year without knowing about it at all. I miss those days of shock and revelation from the first couple seasons. with each new year my love of Lost grew so each new year I sought out more and more spoilers to satiate my desires. But this year I wanted none of it. As tantalizing and pleasing as those spoilers were in earlier years, they ultimately took away some of the pleasure from the show itself.

And that’s exactly why I wanted to go into next season completely unaware of any of the coming twists. Up until now, I had done that (excluding one major spoiler about the premiere which I curse ever having read no matter how accidental) and this casting announcement once again opens up the floodgates.

But I’ll continue my abstinence, at least until we get closer and spoilers are unavoidable, and maybe it’ll be worth it. Stay tuned, fellow Lostophiles.

I know that sounds like a pithy remark with nothing behind it, but it really isn’t. Every other Star Trek captain in the canon of Star Trek (which excludes the novels thankfully) is better than her. Even that douche that got Kirk stuck in the Nexus in Generations. Even that shitty I’m-so-goddamned-evil captain in the episode of Voyager where the other Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant shows up and much more worse for the wear.

Now you might think that her ship is in such good condition because she’s managed to avoid conflict and stayed out of interplanetary politics in this backwater ditch of a quadrant. If you thought that, clearly you’ve never seen the show.

Janeway didn’t survive because of her natural leading ability, like Kirk; Janeway didn’t survive because of her subtle politics and ability to empathize with opposing views, like Picard (among other reasons); and Janeway certainly didn’t survive because she had a deep spiritual connection with the plight of those around her and was destined to play a part in shaping the worlds and future before her. Janeway survived because every week, there was a new particle discovered, or existing one exploited for purposes completely unrelated to all previous known usages, that was exactly what her ship needed to get out of the Tight Jam of the Week.

And her ship wasn’t pristine because of the military strategies she employed in her frequent needless battles, but because the budget required exterior shots of the ship to be repeated in new episodes to make the CGI department cost-effective. Every single battle that Voyager went through in those seven years in the Delta Quandrant — always 75 years away from the Alpha Quadrant even though every season they would find at least one shortcut that shaved five to ten years off their journey — was more destructive than anything the Enterprise D suffered but every week the ship was in tip-top shape once again. Even Enterprise made some lame attempts to show that not everything can be repaired without a starbase and some dry dock time with their body-snatching space station episode. But Voyager doesn’t need things like ship repair and shore leave.

Admittedly, some of these complaints are about the show in general, but the fact is the captain is the show. People will prefer The Next Generation if they prefer Picard. But even ignoring the completely unrealistic journey that Voyager took, there are plenty of things wrong with Janeway.

She was a hypocrite of the highest degree. The very first episode of the show, Janeway barters with a tribal species known as the Kazon for some information. What does she barter with? Water, something she can generate unlimited supplies of through Alpha Quadrant replicator technology, but is incredibly rare on the dying desert planet on which those Kazon reside. Eventually Neelix, her tentative ally up until now, destroys all the water they brought just to fuck with the Kazon. Any other captain would have kicked that rat-faced little shit off their ship then and there. But she keeps him around because he knows his way around the Delta Quadrant. If she had seen the rest of the first season already, she would know how little Neelix actually knew about the area, but even without that foresight, trusting someone who acts so duplicitously is an idiotic move.

That’s not completely hypocritical, although her over-the-top reactions to lesser crimes later on in the series show that she has absolutely no memory of past actions; what’s truly mind-bogglingly hypocritical is when she next runs into the Kazon, instead of offering replicator technology and a sincere apology for the actions of one fool under her stead, she claims moral and intellectual superiority by telling the Kazon that they shouldn’t have fucked with Voyager and that she couldn’t give them replicators, or even replicate supplies for them, because it would violate the Prime Directive: noninterference in undeveloped civilizations.

The closest the Prime Directive ever got to noninterference with already space-faring species was when Picard refused to repair the rickety shuttles used by the two planets to deliver the “medicine” for a long-lived plague from one planet to another. Not only was that an exceptional situation where Picard used the Prime Directive to stick it to the planet of smug drug dealers, but it was also exceptional because their ships were actually inferior. The Kazon had warp drives, a massive interstellar pseudo-empire, and could hold their own in battle against virtually every adversary in their midst, Voyager included. That’s hardly an inferior species. No-one would begrudge her for making peace with the Kazon through a cultural and technological exchange.

But that’s all semantics and law interpretation, right? We know now that Janeway has a very strict interpretation of the Prime Directive, so everything’s good. Right? Well, it is until the Hirogen show up and beat the living snot out of Voyager (another instance of the reset button enacting miraculous repairs) and after two episodes of pointless World War 2 holodeck simulations with the Hirogens as the Nazis (why they wouldn’t chose to be the allies is left unclear) Janeway gives them holodeck technology and databases of pre-existing holodeck programs to give them a head start! But at least she’s consistent. Within an episode. (And even that isn’t a guarantee, I just don’t have the time to do more than vaguely recall the idiocy of this show.)

I recall when a lot of people would get angry at disliking Janeway because she was a female captain, so she’d have to be a little tougher. First of all, Star Trek is supposed to be a colour-blind, gender-blind, species-blind co-operative of planets, so why exactly would the sexism of our society be relevant to her? Second of all, she wasn’t a little tougher, and she wasn’t just being an assertive woman. Her character changed depending on the episode, for the sake of a plot. One episode she’d be a tough-as-nails take-no-prisoners hardass, and the next episode she’d be a soft demure lady-in-waiting who had fallen for the Brave Man of the Week. It’s not that people can’t be both those things, or that people can’t change and grow over time, it’s that these disparate aspects of her personality don’t complement each other and they don’t mesh together naturally.

When we see Picard get stabbed by a Nausicaan as a rebellious youth, it’s not a sudden jarring discontinuity in the character, it informs the character we’ve come to know and love. Picard was a complete character, as was Sisko, but Janeway is woefully outgunned here, both by the calibre of the acting but also by the writing and characterizations. Again it’s not that her characteristics couldn’t work together, or couldn’t work together in a female character; Voyager could have been the best Trek up until that time if done properly, but it wasn’t so we’re left with the piece of shit that unfortunately stinks up the rest of Star Trek canon.

I could go on for much longer (I really really could) ranting and foaming at the mouth about all the things that Voyager did wrong and why Janeway is at the heart of most of these problems, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t know of anyone who genuinely enjoys all or most of Star Trek — that is, not just Voyager — and doesn’t dislike Voyager, and Janeway herself, to a certain degree. And it’s not hard to see why. She was an egocentric and fickle, yet stubborn, captain who, despite years of efforts on the writers’ parts, never became a sympathetic or respected character.

It was Voyager and Janeway (and we’ll never forget the horror that was Seven of Nine) that degraded the image of Star Trek to the world. Deep Space Nine was never as popular as The Next Generation or Voyager, but it was consistently better than the latter and was at least as good as the former. With each new year Voyager got worse, and DS9 got better. But when Deep Space Nine left the airwaves, Voyager had to stand for all of Star Trek on its own. It took only a year, but without the credibility of Deep Space Nine to bolster the weaker Voyager, Star Trek was soon tarnished and that scar remained for Enterprise’s entire run. Enterprise didn’t do much to repair Trek’s image until its later years but it was still better than Voyager on its worst days.

I sometimes wonder what the landscape of Star Trek would be like right now if Voyager and to a lesser degree Enterprise hadn’t failed their progenitors so horribly. Would we still have a relaunch movie coming out next year? Or would Enterprise be closing off its seven year run with a Deep Space Nine movie coming out and a new series exploring the troubled lives of intergalactic starfleet explorers as they journey to our nearest neighbour galaxy. Who knows what wonders they would have found in that deep void. And what terrors.

That said, their newest song, Viva La Vida, is quite stuck in my head but it’s not because of the song but what it makes me think of.

Kings is a new show which looks to be coming to NBC in February and while it claims it’s a modern retelling of the classic tale of David and Goliath — with David played by a young man named David, and the part of Goliath being played by a fucking Tank — it seems much more likely from the footage I’ve seen that David’s triumph is merely a kicking off point for a show that will explore many themes ranging from Love and Devotion, both to family and country, to War and Fanaticism.

So what does this have to do with Coldplay? Well, at the end of the Kings panel at Comic-con they showed us a trailer which was most likely cobbled together from the pilot episode set to Coldplay’s song Viva La Vida. And there was something about the interleaving of the song and the show that stuck out to me. It also goes to show how ineffectual Coldplay really is, something a friend of mine noted a few weeks ago, that a trailer for a show that I had never heard of an hour before I saw it left a greater impact than the song itself.

Before the trailer, there was a discussion with the producers and some of the cast, though Ian McShane was stuck in traffic and didn’t make it to the panel, which talked in very broad terms about where the show was going and the kind of support they’re receiving from the studio and none of it was particularly revelatory or insightful so I’m fine with not dicussing it further. But before that they showed us the first twenty minutes of the pilot to give us a taste of what the show will be like.

I really wish that I had seen the whole pilot or at least had the chance to watch what I was given a couple more times because I don’t want to jump the gun on this and overhype the show. At the same time, I’m seriously majorly intensely excited about this show. What I saw was really impressive; the scope of the show is epic, pardon the pun, with the story beginning as a war-torn nation (or city-state, it’s not quite clear) is finally opening their new capital of Shiloh after years of hardship and struggle. Opening is obviously the wrong word because the city has been lived in as it was being built but with construction complete, an inaugural celebration is at hand.

After this brief introduction to the world and people of this tale, we jump ahead a year and a half to the war of their fathers born again. It’s here that David goes up against Goliath, the name of the type of tank that their adversary lines their front lines with, and by defeating it frees the captive hostages on the other side, one of whom is the King’s son.

I’m leaving out a lot of nuance and storytelling here because when I sat down for the Kings panel I didn’t know what to expect, so I wasn’t mentally prepared to analyze and record it in great depth. But what I saw was enough. This show could be “Carnivàle” good, which is really really fucking good in my books. The acting from everyone was really good, the story drew you in, and you can tell a lot of care has been taken by the creators to develop this world.

I don’t know if this is overhyping it because I’ve seen so little but I’ve been burned before by not hyping shows. I sat by and let my friends not watch Firefly when it first aired, I didn’t push anyone I know to watch Journeyman even though I knew it was one of the best new shows of the year and needed the audience. I’m sick of my favourite shows dying before their time. So if my choices are to overhype a show which might end up sucking, or not offer my support for a show which needs a fan base as it develops, I’ll take the former. Watch it. Make it through a full season. If you hate it, leave it be, but give it a real chance.

Recently, JM Straczynski, (or JMS as he is known to awesome people) creator and primary writer for Babylon 5 — a show that I consider one of the best Sci-fi shows ever made, and arguably one of the best shows ever made — posted to his newsgroup a message that all Babylon 5 fans are reading with some pain in their heart:

So I’ve let everyone up here know that I’m not interested in doing any more low-budget DVDs. I’m not interested in doing any low-budget cable things or small computer games. The only thing I would be interested in doing regarding Babylon 5 from this point on is a full-featured, big-budget feature film.

I Love Babylon 5. I Love it with a capital letter and while this is a bit disappointing, I absolutely understand it, and I’m even more impressed by JMS because of it. He could have pumped out low-budget movie after low-budget movie straight to DVD for another decade and every fan would’ve bought it, but he saw that the low-budget was affecting the quality and he wasn’t willing to further sully the B5 universe with that kind of stuff. I never watched the Legend of the Rangers, but I did watch and own The Lost Tales; it was mildly entertaining but it was nowhere near as good as the show was. And the fact that JMS knows and is willing to admit that just makes me respect him more.

This video is much much funnier (and cuter and awesomer) without the background music.

I’ve only given the two big days, Friday and Saturday, a cursory glance, but from what I’ve seen I’ve got a huge challenge prioritizing the various panels and events that I’ll be going to. Already I’ve run into a few painful decisions because of the sheer quantity of events. It’s rare that I run into situations such as these with a multitude of temptations. With the advent of PVR and bittorent, my TV watching habits have become much more open. Where I once stopped watching one show because a better one was on at the same time, now I simply watch the lesser of the two later on. I’ve gotten so used to the asynchronous nature of my media consumption that this schedule was quite a blow to me.

Now I need to go figure out what makes the cut. Wish me luck.

This is just another example of overspecialization our society encourages. If you like mostly rock music then you are a Rock Fan. Or maybe you’re a Post-Rock Fan. Or a Neo-Post-Punk-Rock Fan. The hyphenates only grow.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of categorization, in fact my recently started project is very much about deep and robust categorization of data. I simply believe that the fundamentalism many people employ when creating these categorizations is unnecessary.

It’s because of this fundamentalism that people simply decide that to enjoy a particular type of media, you must enjoy only that type and anything else is a “guilty pleasure.” It’s another form of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy; no true fan of Punk Rock could unironically enjoy The Backstreet Boys.

There’s a problem with this kind of mentality because it leads to division. As the breadth of information our world can offer is expanded by the Internet and mass media, we become inundated by more and more types of information and we need deeper hierarchies of data to be able to think about it coherently. But this doesn’t mean we need to apply such strict boundaries on what we take in, or prefer to, to simplify ourselves for the rest of the world.

In the end, everything we are is a part of who we are. Liking high-brow humour does not exclude you from enjoying low-brow humour, nor does enjoying scripted dramatic TV shows exclude you from enjoying Reality TV (though hopefully, having intelligence excludes you from the latter).

I can understand the mentality behind telling people that certain things you enjoy are guilty pleasures because it not only tells them that you like something, but it also tells them something about the thing you like; it’s a sort of implied metadata. But this particular snippet of metadata is grossly overused in our culture, exactly because we seem to have devolved into a world exclusive esoteric niches.

As this post has hopefully exemplified, I’m not a man of extremes; having a broad swath of interests, some overlapping, some seemingly contradictory is a good thing. But guilty pleasures sound ugly to me. It degrades you for saying that you should be above this but you aren’t, it degrades your audience by establishing false pretenses with them, and ultimately it degrades the thing you like. Liking something in spite of its origins or your initial perception is not a cardinal sin, nor should it be, so don’t act like it is.

But all told, this week was pretty awesome. Of course, the real meat of this awesome sandwich was Y’s last issue and Lost’s premiere. As much as it sucks to see a long-term story you’ve come to look forward to go away, all stories need to end. That’s why Y was such a bittersweet experience. The final issue was more of an epilogue, recapping sixty years of the new world of inordinately few males. It highlighted the greatest hits of Yorick’s remaining life. There are some reasonably shocking moments, but all in all the story ends with a conscientious, relaxed whimper.

Lost goes in a different direction. The show blasts out of the gate and lays on the awesome in heaping dollops. From the flashforwards to the freighter people to the splitting of the losties, everything follows from the finale of last year and sets up the rest of the season. I say it sets up the rest of the season, but from what I’ve heard this season moves very fast, so many of the threads introduced over the course of this episode may be mostly resolved within the next few episodes, naturally leaving more unraveled threads to play with.

And yes, I purposefully used the word awesome way too many times in this post. I’ve always been bad at describing my opinions on recent events. I typically need some level of hindsight before I can articulate well enough to get my point across, so I’ve decided to avoid that quagmire entirely by using a simplistic adjective to demonstrate my general state. I feel that this may be yet another awesome step in my progress to developing my writing ability through accepting of existing un-awesome limitations. So… this week was pretty freaking awesome.

Another thing that most people seem to generally agree on is that Firefly is the best of the three Whedon shows. I tend to disagree on that as well.

Firefly has a great cast and thanks to some great writing they managed to form a familiar and familial bond in the short time they had with each other (the show was canceled before its first 13 episode season had even completed airing) but I don’t think that’s a particularly exceptional task when it comes to Joss Whedon. I don’t think that just because it was Joss Whedon who created this show that its achievements are lessened, I just don’t think that in the grand scheme of things, Firefly told the stories it wanted to tell.

It managed to get across some great stories about family, commitment, friendship, and didn’t shy away from hating on big government. In many ways, the merging of government and corporate seen in Firefly was more fully fleshed out in the final season of Angel — not coincidentally after Firefly had been canned — and it was hardly visible in Firefly; the only reason it’s known is because of obsessive fans hunting for clues for future arcs in the severely truncated run time.

Are Firefly’s episodes great? Yes. I wouldn’t deny that. In fact, the few episodes that aired may have been better than most of the episodes of Buffy or Angel, but I’m into shows for the long haul. It’s the season long stories and the growth of the characters that keeps me coming back. If Buffy had ended in the first season, the few people who grew attached to the show in that time would have enjoyed the show but what would they think of Xander? Xander is probably the most noble person on that show and his personal journey is the most deeply touching and haunting. Without the time it takes to develop that kind of depth, the character is fun but empty. I like the fun, but the empty? Not so much.

In the end, it comes down to distance. To use a lame car analogy, Firefly might be able to drive faster than Buffy or Angel, but it didn’t get as far as them so it’s immediately a lesser series. So, while I fully believe that Firefly would have been a better series if given the time, it wasn’t given that time. It’s still a great show, but because it was so short — more specifically, so unexpectedly short — it falls short.

There is a problem here though: the amulet. Why would Wolfram and Hart give it to Angel? There are some rationalizations made along the way but some contradict each other and none are particularly satisfying for me. It really comes down to one thing: it was a double-edged deus ex machina. The first being the thing that will save the thirty slayers from the army of twenty million ubervamps to cap off the most climactic battle in Buffy history. The second to bring Spike to Los Angeles. And dei ex machinis annoy me. But and they are not unprecedented in the Buffyverse, so I can manage.

If you ignore that little qualm, which doesn’t much interfere with your enjoyment anyways unless you’re someone who tends to quibble the minutiae, this season not only caps off one of the best shows that ever graced Television but also introduces some larger ideas that the show could have explored in future seasons. Previously, the show explored the ideas surrounding Faustian bargains and Pyrrhic victories, and those themes are expanded on this season which puts the phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” to the test.

Angel and his team have been offered a powerful weapon to wield against the dark forces of the world, the only problem is it exists because of those dark forces, so to keep the weapon you have to pick your battles. Therein lies the rub, and man do the senior partners rub that shit. This season, above anything else in the series, shows that Wolfram and Hart are not really evil. They operate because of the evil in the world, and the evil inherent in the way businesses are run. Firefly had a company, Blue Sun Corporation, that arguably was the greatest force of evil in that universe, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Joss Whedon was in an anti-corporate mood when breaking these stories.

The interesting thing about this season is how various ignorant factions of evil battle each other and the casualties are all Angel’s friends. Gunn was given knowledge of the law, which led to the rebirth of Illyria inside of Fred. Meanwhile, Lindsay was employing the amulet, used in the finale of Buffy, to garner favour with the senior partners and join the Circle of the Black Thorn. And the senior partners were slowly wearing away the team’s once heroic worldview. As Lindsay said near the end of the season, heroes don’t compromise with the world; they see the world the way it is and they fight it.

All of these evils twist and distort our heroes intentions, making them less and less heroic, whether they know it or not. And when Angel is finally returned to the right path, it made sense that Cordelia would be the one to do that for him. Not because Cordelia was Angel’s most recent Love — we’ll exclude Nina since they weren’t dating yet — but because she’s the one who’s been with him since the beginning. She’s seen his ups and downs and knows what he wants to hear and what he needs to hear. It was a fitting end to the character, though if they hadn’t made her so damned mature over the past couple years it would’ve been entertaining to see her get completely swallowed up by the glitz and glam of the Wolfram and Hart lifestyle.

There are some who feel like the ending for this season was bad: they are wrong. It was the most tragic yet uplifting ending the show could have done and it’s the melange of those two characteristics that has always made Angel such a fantastic show.

Dawn is completely annoying almost all of the time. One of the few episodes she doesn’t piss me off is the aforementioned where she thinks she might be a potential slayer; in that episode, she’s mature, responsible and selfless. But in every other episode where she plays anything beyond a peripheral role she’s a completely insufferable selfish childish brat. The first time through I’d probably given up hope of Dawn being a character of any depth, but damn my naivete I really thought going into this rewatch that I’d like Dawn by the end of all of this.

And I already knew I didn’t like Kennedy all that much, but it’s amazing just how much I truly hate her. It’s not that she’s bossy and acts like she knows more than Buffy, and it’s not that she does nothing but encourage Willow’s magic, willingly ignorant of her dangerous addiction, and it’s not the hastily developed lesbian relationship between her and Willow, which was probably only created so that Joss Whedon could finally state conclusively to the world that Willow was not bisexual but homosexual. It’s that the writers so obviously want her to be an appealing character by making her strong, independent and “sassy” but, in my eyes, it just made the character abrasive and annoying.

And Buffy was just plain annoying. After about the 30th speech to the potentials about how much they suck and they’ll probably all die trying to conquer this evil… it gets a little tired. Almost every second episode of the season ended with Buffy giving a rousing speech full of bravado both stating how unprepared they all were for this and how they’re going to win regardless. Meanwhile this speech was immediately preceded by Buffy getting the shit kicked out of her or some other terrible calamity. So we get a season full of barking paired with useless impotent bites.

The writers were trying to show how desperate the situation really was but by doing so they made the ultimate success seem… unrealistic. When the single Turok-Han is released early on in the season it’s OK if he kicks Buffy’s ass at first; that’s expected from new enemies. But when, for three straight battles, she is utterly pummeled and barely survives it’s a sign that this is a formidable enemy and not a minion. This is not her being off her game for a fight, this is a real badass kicking hers.

But what happens when the final plan is devised about, oh say, five minutes before the climactic battle? All of the potentials, who have barely been trained in battle let alone hardened by years of real world apocalypse aversion, become ubervamp destroying machines because they have… the exact same mystical strength Buffy always had. So what turned the ubervamps into a bunch of pussies? Plot contrivance, that’s what did.

But that kind of thing is something I’m usually willing to ignore if the other aspects of the story felt true; but the emotions Buffy went through during this season didn’t feel true. Buffy constantly isolates herself despite every single one of her friends constantly trying to open her up. And I don’t think that leadership implies a solitary life. I think Buffy thinks that, despite all the friends she has been surrounded with her entire career as a slayer. And quite frankly, it’s getting old. Well actually it got old in the fourth season but its annoying persistence has yet to win me over.

I think I would have appreciated this path of further isolationism if it led to some lesson for Buffy, but all it led to was Buffy Being Right. When Buffy is finally called on her self-righteous, mightier than thou bullshit by… all of her long-time friends and the potential slayers she isn’t taught a valuable lesson about how to lead without alienating your charge, she doesn’t see the dissent and rethink her authoritarian stance, she gets pissy and decides that hey, her friends are all fucking worthless anyways. I mean, Spike agrees with her so she must be right, right?

So Faith gets a chance to take charge and she royally fucks up. Right? Well that’s what the show would like you to think. In reality, through some magic (literally people, this is a show about vampires) she managed to get some information out of one of the Harbingers but it turned out to be a nasty trap. Well that’s some bad luck but there’s no way for them to have known. Buffy is gracious enough to admit this when she returns to pick up the tattered pieces of their dissent. She ever so graciously absolves Faith of her sins. And then Faith decides to let the audience in on how completely alone you are the second you’re responsible for anyone else, just so any stragglers in the audience can finally figure out the Buffy was right all along. Of course, her feeling alone doesn’t really explain her behaviour except that when you feel alone, no-one else matters so treat everyone like shit instead of treating them like people which isn’t a particularly good message.

With that unexpectedly long rant over with, I feel I should finish this off by saying I still loved the season. The story was compelling, I still loved the characters (most of the time), and, like I said at the beginning of this whole mess, the final moments of the show are terribly moving and I don’t just tear up, I sob like a baby when it comes around. When it’s all said and done, the finale was practically perfect, but there was a lot of parts of the build-up that didn’t ring true for me. But I can live with that if it lets me have the ending the show received. The ending a show that held my heart for so long deserves.

My biggest gripe with Angel was the Cordelia/Angel love story. They were very close and grew closer as the show continued but their love should have remained platonic: the deep respect and admiration shared between champions who have fought beside each other. And their relationship was not a heavy catalyst for anything else. All of the events necessary to bring forth Jasmine could have happened over the course of the series without the burgeoning love. The conflicts therein fed into certain developments along the way but those developments could have happened some other way.

I also don’t like Cordelia being evil, even if it is only because she’s being controlled by a Power That Was. Though when you rewatch the season it’s fun to see all the points where evil Cordelia is subtly twisting the world around her preparing for Jasmine’s arrival.

Season three and four of Angel told a really compelling story, continued to explore themes of redemption and atonement, and had murky water, “so grey there’s hardly any black or white to it” ambiguous moral decisions galore. So it’s hard to complain. Much like season five of Buffy, there’s nothing especially horrible about it, but the moments of greatness come with a nasty tinge of adequacy and questionable plot development.

Both have been so impressive and expressive with their core message. From the startling and terrifying realism of the shock of losing a loved one found in The Body to the nearly beatific monologue Angel gives at the end of Epiphany, both shows were just endlessly awesome through and through those years. One thing that I noticed this year was the much improved serialization on Buffy. In previous years, there was an overall season arc but each episode felt fairly self-contained but this year the stories spread out over the season in a much smoother manner. I still think that seasons two and three were their best stuff but the constantly intensifying story really made the season much more dramatic and addictive.

But as much as I like the more mature themes the show explores in the fifth season, I can’t help but remember the annoying early Dawn. I never loved the character, even in the final year of the show — probably because she was more and more frequently given the childish reactionary personality the annoying selfish half of Buffy handled in earlier seasons — but in the first half of this season she’s like Wesley Crusher on crack for annoying fans. It seems to me that they created the Dawn character to give Buffy someone to care for and not lead — a daughter of sorts — but I don’t think the show ever recovered from her introduction. For that season the story was beautiful and moving and I love the sacrifice that ends the season, but after that she returns to being an annoying teenager who gets in the way more than anything else. Like season four, season five has some fantastic episodes and some really moving moments, but there are aspects of it which still rub me the wrong way. Of course, it’s still a vast improvement over season four in virtually every way.

And yet, with all the greatness going on over on Buffy, Angel still wins out for me. The thing that really stands out about Angel to me is this: there is no Big Bad. When the season is over, the world doesn’t decide that evil is Just Not Worth It for the summer before a new unspeakable evil decides to give it a try. From the very first episode of Angel, Wolfram and Hart is shown as ambiguous at best with regards to morality. But they’re never the Big Bad. Evil simply persists in Angel’s world. Holland Manners says to Angel that if each and every human didn’t have a little tinge of evil in them, Wolfram and Hart couldn’t exist. This goes with the idea that Angel is in many ways about the banality of evil. Wolfram and Hart isn’t the source of the evil we see in our world, it survives because of it. When Angel finally understands this after a dark turn in his character he comes to a realization:

If there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters then all that matters is what we do. ‘Cause that’s all there is. What we do. Now. Today. … All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don’t think people should suffer as they do, because if there’s no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

That idea is the reason I think Angel is the better show. Angel comes to a realization that, no matter what you do, evil will persist but that doesn’t matter; what matters is what we do in the face of evil. This sentiment echoes something Angel says in the fourth season.

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. It’s harsh, and cruel, but that’s why there’s us. Champions. It doesn’t matter where we come from, or what we’ve done, or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world were as it should be. To show it what it can be.

And all of this comes back to the idea that there is no Big Bad. There’s life and there’s what you do with it. Which is a good philosophy whether you’re in our world or a supernatural one filled with demonic monsters hoping to bring ruination to all of humanity. Beyond the appealing worldview there is the fact that, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a great deal of stuff going on with the peripheral characters, Angel was much more of an ensemble show. It wasn’t until the later seasons that Buffy explored the lives of the Scooby Gang in any real depth; there were episodes like Dopplegangland and The Zeppo earlier but they dealt with the insecurities of the character and weren’t a part of the greater mythos of the show. On Angel, on the other hand, characters underwent strife and character growth from the beginning. Doyle’s heroic sacrifices stemmed from what was revealed about him and what had happened to him in earlier episodes. Cordelia’s ongoing struggle with her visions rarely took the spotlight but was persistent even when the plot of an episode was not reliant upon it. Wesley’s development from a bookish weakling to a warrior, though still bookish, and his ongoing distaste for father figures never felt forced and informed much of how we see Wesley’s actions. I did not even mention any of what has happened to Angel over the course of these two seasons; the show is so rich with well developed characters and subplots that it’s not necessary.

There is just so much that I love about Angel and Buffy as shows and as explorations of the human condition through inhuman subjects. Now that these seasons are over with I get to enjoy seasons six and three respectively. Buffy will pleasure me (in my dreams) with episodes like Once More, With Feeling and Tabula Rasa and finally let the fans who had yet to realise it see that Xander is what keeps the world from falling apart. Meanwhile, Angel’s actions from the last season will come back to haunt him in more ways than one and the consequences will reverberate throughout not only the characters but also their world for the rest of the series. This rocks way too hard.

Let’s be honest here for a second, Buffy is a bit of a bitch sometimes, and the rest of the time she’s a huge bitch. Most recently was her behaviour towards Riley during the fifth season. On first viewing it might not have been noticeable but Buffy’s distance from Riley stands out in hindsight. And I feel like his actions, while not completely justified, make a heck of a lot of sense. When I was younger I probably just sided with Buffy because she reacted to any accusations, no matter how accurate, with utter disdain and indignation, but with age and experience I can see what Buffy is doing and it doesn’t endear me to her.

Through the course of the show Buffy reverts to a childish little girl a little too often for my tastes, but every time she does someone is there to give her some freaking perspective. And most of the time it’s Xander. Without Xander, Buffy would either be a mess or dead. Granted, Xander can be a douche sometimes too; they all can. But they all contribute to the slayer. We can even ignore the most obvious example of this — when Xander, as the heart, joined with Buffy to defeat Adam — and still see that Xander is the one who keeps Buffy on track. He’s their rock. He provides stability to the whole gang and from that stability comes strength. And that’s how Buffy wins.

The show was much less serialized than in later years, but you could still see the reverberating consequences of stories. The most interesting aspect of the season is the growth of Angel. As Wesley said, it’s our desires that define our humanity and, while there was a tacit understanding of why Angel fought the good fight, the Shanshu prophecy gave Angel something to desire; something to make him human. Angel moves from that view as his story continues, he begins to fight the good fight because it should be fought, not because of some base self benefit. Angel is always seeking redemption, but somewhere along the way he realizes that redemption isn’t a destination, it’s an ongoing process.

Already in the first season, you can see how the stories told on Angel will be much darker and ambiguous as to who is evil and what is moral. And neither the questions nor the answers get easier as the show progresses.

I think that to properly handle this kind of stuff out you have two options: you can either have a Buffy marathon where you watch the Angel episodes that directly crossover with Buffy episodes or, if you really need to see all of Buffy and Angel, you should go through a detailed analysis of where Buffy and Angel episodes overlap and schedule accordingly. My best idea so far is to interleave Buffy and Angel episodes unless there is a multi-part story. So if there is a two parter in Sunnydale then you watch them directly after one another and then follow it up with two Angel episodes. This way, each series goes steadily forward but the ratcheted tension of multi-episode stories doesn’t get broken up by intervening series episodes.

There are some problems with that but it’s probably the best way to do it when dealing with a multiple TV shows. Of course, how many shows have interconnected shows running at the same time. I mean, you could have a Frasier Crane marathon, but that would entail watching all of Cheers and then all of Frasier; neither show aired at the same time. I’d wager that no other shows have this kind of problem — with the possible exception of the Star Trek shows, but they have completely separate storylines so you could easily watch them independent of each other — so this may be the last time I have to really think about this kind of problem.

But at the same time, the first thing Angel wants to know of the Oracles when asking of his new fate is if he is “free.” In the third season episode of Buffy, Amends, Angel says that he’s a weak person and he always had been. He was tortured by his past actions for over a century and in the back of his mind perhaps he felt that if he did enough good, the math would even out. And it’s with this shallow idea that Whistler convinces Angel to fight for good and aid Buffy. And with this scene we can see that this idea still holds a place in Angel’s mind; as much as he does what he does to “show the world what it can be” he’s still a weak person hoping for redemption. In later years, he realises that there is no redemption for what he’s done and that fighting with that goal is fruitless. The goal of fighting evil is to fight evil; because the people who can, should.

I really love this episode not only because of the heartbreak Angel must endure — to give up what is surely his ultimate dream — to continue the fight against evil, but also because it shows us a point in Angel’s progression as a character that shows a sort of shallow heroism; but heroism nonetheless.

The show doesn’t have the corny or cheesy mentality that drives a lot of Buffy, so its stories can be much darker and the show immediately takes itself much more seriously. Not that Buffy didn’t become a really serious, and sometimes very depressing, show in its later years, but Angel started off with the mentality of showing the real world. This show isn’t meant to be a supernatural allegory for adolescence, it deals with the nuanced evils in the world like the evils of apathy and of banality.

In the coming episodes, the show will grow, and, while it won’t reach its apex until its later seasons, these early episodes show a show ready to deal with the big ideas. Also, this is the first time I’ve watched the Buffy and Angel episodes interleaved since they aired that way lo those many years ago so it’s great to experience all those fun little cross-references anew.

And when Buffy started off in high school at the beginning of the series she made all sorts of friends quite fast. Hell, by the end of the series she was commanding a damned army of students! Do the writers really expect us to believe she’s the demure, insecure wallflower she’s presented as in this episode? And are we really supposed to believe that she could get her ass kicked by a poser on-campus vampire? She has, to date, kicked the Master’s ass, defeated Angel and Spike — two notoriously vicious brutal vampire of the past — and yet this wannabe vampstress can kick her ass? I don’t care how bad she’s feeling about not fitting in on campus, vamp slaying is mechanical at this point and she needs a real threat for it to be realistic.

I’m not great at making friends, in fact I’m terrible at making friends, but even I managed to scrounge up a couple people to talk to in between classes, so to have the show act like someone who is as pretty, as funny and as interesting as Buffy would have trouble making new friends, in any situation, is beyond absurd.

A lot of people hate season 4 a lot because it introduced Riley, and while I never had any strong distaste for Riley myself, I get the feeling I’m going to be considerably more annoyed with this season than any of the previous ones. There are some really great episodes this season, including the Emmy-nominated Hush, but that doesn’t mean the season as a whole isn’t poor. More as my marathon progresses.

Xander was still a douche when it comes to Angel but it was considerably more sedated than in previous seasons so it didn’t bother me nearly as much. So much happened in this season with all of our main characters growing up in some way or another. Xander finally managed to find a place in the world and accept his place in the Scooby gang. Willow grew into the wiccan arts, a story thread that will continue to build for the rest of the series. Even Cordelia is given moments of real growth. But beyond that, this season was about how things change. Not always for the better, but things change. And as Whistler said in the season two finale “the big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”

And one thing I have to say about the Faith storyline is this: it’s what the writers of Lost wanted for Michelle Rodriguez. They didn’t get it because they made the character too unlikeable too fast, but because Faith started off as a more vivacious version of Buffy, and was slowly revealed as a deeply troubled person we feel for her much more. I only mention Lost because as I was rewatching the Faith arc it reminded me so much of Ana Lucia that I felt it deserved comparison.

This season was about self-discovery which, unsurprisingly, is something that normal students must go through as they prepare to either enter the real world or head into post-secondary education. Either choice is scary and leads to a much more complicated and dangerous world, and the tone of future seasons only represents the realities of our world transposed to the realities of theirs. They made it through high school and next season… things fall apart. Not only is the former gang schizmed across two shows but the trials they are put through change them all in drastic ways. I can’t wait.

But I’m gonna pretty much ignore the arc elements. It suffices to say: Faith bad, Mayor badder. On to Willow. Something about which I have had many a dream.

She finally realises that she’s boring. Well, she’s not actually boring; she’s a computer-hacking, witchcraft-performing, super-nerdy, super-sexy girl. Any one of those things on its own would mean she was not boring, and putting them all together is not a “two rights make a wrong” kind of situation. But anyway, she likes to think she’s boring and decides to be more dangerous. Which lead to her performing a funky time-folding spell with Anya, formerly the vengeance demon du jour for scorned women, that got messed up and led to her parallel world vamp version coming to in our world. And then the fun begins.

The jock whose homework was to be done by Willow get his ass womped, Willow gets to pretend to be a dominatrix psycho bitch, and last but not least we get our first overt clue to Willow’s future homosexuality. My personal views on homosexuality aren’t exactly as strict as Joss Whedon’s; for instance, just because you fall in love with a girl doesn’t mean you couldn’t also fall in love with a guy. Most people would stick to whatever side of the tracks they’re on, but if you’ve gone both ways before, you’re no longer bound to one side or the other. (To be fair, that might just be a part of my consistent delusion of hoping that Xander and Willow will end up together in the long run, because they’re perfect for each other)

There are so many school-boy-squealing, this-is-freaking-awesome moments in this episode but the best ones sums it up pretty well. Giles rushing like a little boy headed toward his mom to hug Willow. Nuff Said.

The episode is your standard episode: impending apocalypse and relationships in turmoil. The only difference being that Xander isn’t really a part of the gang here. They’re all too worried that Xander is putting himself in too much risk and shouldn’t be as involved in their escapades. So while they’re off saving the world from falling into hell, Xander is having all sorts of adventures. First he falls into some bad luck with a group of undead guys looking to blow shit up, and that’s all well and good until they want him to join their undead gang whose main prerequisite is… well, being undead.

Then, he gets to save the day, at least marginally, by slamming his car into an apocalypse demon whose plan is pushed into the background where it would normally be the foreground. But again, this episode is Xander’s which tends to shift the focus. Anyways, this momentary success leads to a sexually frustrated Faith and Xander’s first time. Then, as we can’t just make fun of Xander for a whole episode without some sort of personal growth or life lesson, he finally manages to save the day. The crazy zombies plans are thwarted when Xander chicken’s the main unman into defusing the bomb. And thus Xander is a hero, though no-one will ever know because Xander realises that showing off isn’t what heroes do.

Of course, really this whole episode is a massive adventure in cock-teasing because they show glimpses of a massive battle with a vicious demon, and even revel each other with the spectacular events of the previous night the following day, all without having to destroy their budget with heavy effects. Just a couple tentacles and and some strobing lights and they can simulate a season finale sized battle. Bastards. But God do I love them.

When the show Angel begins, we’re treated to a new prophecy related to the ensouled vampire. The so-called Shanshu prophecy promised Angel the chance to be human after preventing the apocalypse. But the final story of Angel isn’t that Angel fights to give himself a better life. He fights because there are people worth fighting for. He fights because the world isn’t as it should be and he can do good. As Buffy says in the climactic scene “You have the power to do real good. To make amends.”

Angel doesn’t want to keep fighting. The memories of the things he’s done are so terrible and haunting that he doesn’t think life is still worth fighting for. He thinks the world would be better without him. He says to Buffy “I’m weak. That’s all I’ve ever been.” trying to convince her, and himself, that he can’t resist the temptations of the world and its inevitable that he’ll make the world a worse place. Buffy says “If you die now, all you ever were was a monster.”

Every moment of this scene is replayed in the later years of Angel. And the most powerful moment is when Angel, begging Buffy to let the sunrise destroy him and end both his suffering and the threat he represents to the world, says “Just this once, let me be strong” to which Buffy replies “Strong is fighting. It’s hard and it’s painful and it’s every day. It’s what we have to do.” As a long time Angel fan, who on most days considers Angel to be the better show of the two, I can attest that this sentiment is at the absolute centre of what that show is about. So this episode, aside from being a great addition to the ongoing stories of Sunnydale, prepares the viewer to see Angel go through these struggles on his own in the coming years.

All joking aside, the episode is really great because it shows a truly hopeless world and, quite frankly, life without hope shows you what hope really is. By the end of the episode the world is… well, the world is over. Cordelia, who initiated the parallel universe in the first place, dies midway through the episode and you realise that, it doesn’t matter how it happened, this is the real world now. And the world just keeps getting worse until you arrive at the final moments and all the people we’ve grown to love and care for over the intervening years, however twisted they may be in this dreary world, dying by each other’s hands. Angel calls out for Buffy as he turns to dust, and though there is no history between them, the pain of the life lost to the ether reverberates through the moment.

Finally, we come to the end of the montage. Everyone is dead save Giles, who now knows how to reverse all of this. Just as he is to destroy Anyanka’s power centre, she asks of Giles “You trusting fool. How do you know the other world is any better than this?” and Giles replies with such pain in his voice “Because it has to be.”

The plus side here is that all of this is a part of Xander’s growth. Xander’s hatred comes from Angel’s involvement with Buffy so it makes sense. That doesn’t make it less annoying or a more desirable storyline. Really, the only good thing about these annoying storylines is that they are a part of realistic character developments. Sometimes, you don’t like what kind of person someone was, but that doesn’t devalue who they have become.

Overall, the season was even better than the first, and the interesting thing is that it didn’t seem to follow the formula later seasons dictated. Later on in the series, the show settled into a form more like the first season, where the “Big Bad” of the season in introduced within the first couple episodes with trickles of arc development revealed each subsequent episode. The second season was much more casual with its arc development. The real Big Bad of the season wasn’t revealed until the middle of the season, when Angel lost his soul. The arc was still continuous but it seemed structured as three or four smaller arcs joined together through consequence.

If memory serves, season three is structured differently, and seeing as those two seasons are probably the strongest of the series, I’ll have to compare the two once I’m finished the third season, which should be in around twenty hours or so.

And just now, I noticed a fairly glaring plot hole. In the episode “Innocence,” the Gypsy man talks to the person entering his room as though they were Jenny Calendar with Buffy, which is what we’re led to believe given the previous scene, but it turns out to be Angel who’s there to kill the guy. Now it’s entirely plausible that Angel Knocked on the door and the Gypsy guy said “Come in” without looking assuming it was Jenny, but you’d think they could’ve shown that. Without those two additional seconds the scene feels like a gaping hole left by the writer and not only that, but the mistake wasn’t picked up by anyone else on the staff.

And yet, as with all my issues related to Buffy, it’s a drop of sucky surrounded by oceans of awesomeness, so I can’t really complain about my own growing cynicism.