Granted, Louis CK’s opinions are slightly less optimistic, but I think that sentiment is worth carrying with you every day. Like David Foster Wallace’s advice to constantly remind yourself that ‘this is water’ it’s something that reminds you of the dangers of succumbing to the status quo.

We’re living in an awesome world, but we’re missing some awe.

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.

Here’s the setup. Midichlorians are not the cause of Force powers, they are a parasite which feeds on light side Force powers, a parasite designed by the Sith long ago. In addition to feeding on the light side, midichlorians die in the face of the dark side.

So what does this explain? Well, when a Jedi comes up against a Sith they always seem to lose the battle for a while before coming back and winning the day. Why? Well the Sith’s dark side Force powers start to kill off the midichlorians and eventually the Jedi’s powers increase because of the decrease.

What’s more, because of the universal pairing of Force powers with midichlorians — and the Jedis’ failure to understand that correlation does not equal causation — the Jedis have this idea that if you don’t have a midichlorian count you cannot have Force powers. And so the Sith are able to operate in plain sight by merely exerting their dark side powers to limit their exposure.

It’s a really clever theory and there are a few more nuances I’d encourage you to read about at the original post.

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.

But this video I came across today offers a counter argument to that. I’m still against marriage in general, but this video has given me an example of a wedding I wouldn’t mind having. Weddings can be whatever you want them to be, because we’re the grownups now:

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.

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.

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.

Once again, Shep Smith cuts through the bullshit at Fox News. It doesn’t matter if the torture worked. You don’t fucking do it.

And yet, these numskulls he’s surrounded by continue to parrot idiotic talking points. There aren’t two schools of thought about any of this. Torture is wrong. Even if it worked (which it doesn’t) it is still wrong.

Why is this guy still working with Fox News? He should join a real news organization.

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.

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.

But whatever else is true, it is a weak, decaying and insecure nation that beats its chest and relies on ugly threats to establish its “toughness” and “credibility” with the world, while the mark of a strong and confident nation is the willingness to take a first step like this one towards its adversaries.

This is true in many respects, most especially in our modern society. But it’s that temporal qualifier that makes the sentence true, a qualifier Greenwald excludes. At the height of the Byzantine Empire‘s reign, it was a military force to be reckoned with, sacking the cities of any nation that dared cross its border. But as its power and wealth dwindled, new invaders like the Saracens exploited that weakness. Ultimately, unable to defend themselves they resorted to buy-offs, providing their enemies with millions of pounds of gold to maintain their territory. As their star faded, much of their power was retained via political back channels, using conspiracies to wage their enemies against each other, and ceding territory for the sake of peace. But their true power was gone¹. It’s true that the truly great emperors of the Byzantine Empire also ruled justly, but that does not belie their military acumen and its use.

I don’t mean here to criticise President Obama’s policies, in fact I agree with his tact regarding Iran, for the most part. But it is a tact of its time. Which is a good thing. Our world is changing, the solutions of the future are not the solutions of the past, and America now has a President that understands that.

Footnotes

1. I apologize if I’m grossly wrong about any of the history of the Byzantine Empire; I’m mostly working off of memory for this, and even then my knowledge and analysis is mostly cursory.

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.

Of course, the arguments for and against Web 2.0 are numerous and varied. Pretending like I have the definitive answer is absurd, but I do find that historically the solution to most problems is found between the two extremes. Which is why slashdot’s “Fire Hose”  — which allows user generated content to be voted on by anyone but still requires editor’s to officially upgrade it to the front page — is the closest I’ve seen to the best of both worlds.

Of course, people have said for a few years now “go to Digg for the stories, go to slashdot for the comments” which is true for two reasons. Firstly, comments on Digg are frequently stupid, ignorant, racist, prejudiced, or all of these and many more. Their comments are so offensive at times that I no longer go to the site at all because I was simply disgusted by the comments I was seeing on a daily basis. Slashdot, on the other hand, tends to have more comments per story but because of their moderation technique you tend to get really smart or really funny stuff bubbling to the top. Granted, the know-it-alls on slashdot know that they know it all, but if you’re willing to suffer through a bit of conceit you’re almost guaranteed to learn something new or at the very least be given another perspective on something you already know.

Slashdot has an antiquated perception among the younger internet dwellers but I think that slashdot will survive at least as long as Digg and most likely outlive it because of its ability to grow into a new internet experience (social networking, et. al.) while retaining its original goals and experiences. But the real reason slashdot is still relevant is a simple one: quotes like this in random user’s signatures:

“Sisko > Picard > Kirk > Archer > null > Janeway”

Granted, I would have swapped Picard and Sisko but to see another person judge Janeway accurately warms the ventricles of my heart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not saying that looks don’t matter. You tend to need that first physical push to get a guy interested in that way, but when Xander “pines” for Buffy, it seems much more about the physical than the personal and only devalues the viewer’s opinion of him. No matter how nice Buffy is to Xander, there is always that other person who knows him better than anyone else and wants him despite his flaws.

Quite frankly, it got tired fairly fast. I mean, as the show progressed it was still referenced, at least until he started dating other girls, but the first season is the most annoying because Xander thinks he still has a chance. Though it was interesting to see a show with the balls to show a “I really like you, let’s date” scene with a spectacular failure as the resolution.

All said, the first season is really strong and with its truncated form, only 12 episodes because it was a mid-season replacement, it maintains a really consistent pace of arc development, something with which later seasons sometimes struggled.

Unlike its indie darling predecessor, the film’s characters don’t feel like they’re quirky for the sake of being quirky. Each eccentricity feels real. Each action follows from the character not the script. Not only that, throughout the whole desperate hilarious affair you actually see characters change. And when the sea change comes upon them, it’s not a instant but the culmination of past events. One such moment of change is the dance scene. Oh the dance scene.

If you’re going to have your movie and its characters pivot on an awkwardly bad dance sequence, do it the way Little Miss Sunshine did it; when that scene started, I had flashbacks to Napoleon Dynamite and feared the worst. And once again Little Miss Sunshine did what a good movie should do: it surprised, it warmed the heart, it made you feel like all the pain in the world is worth it for these few moments we have together.

On a tangent, the movie’s soundtrack is really good and the song which finishes off the movie is a variant of DeVotchKa’s “How It Ends.” I’ve been a fan of DeVotchKa ever since I downloaded “Una Volta” a couple years ago. Their music truly defies categorization and is filled with the same melancholic yet bucolic sense as this movie. In fact, this movie reintroduced me to DeVotchKa as I hadn’t listened to anything new of theirs in quite some time so that alone was enough to make me enjoy this movie. But that’s not the only thing this movie did. I feel reinvigorated regarding independent film. It’s been a long time since I’ve headed down to cumberland to see the newest limited release film and this movie reminded me of why I should.

Now there are lots of valid reasons why IPv6 should be adopted and many other reasons why it hasn’t yet been adopted. There are more knowledgeable people to explain all the intricate awesomeness in IPv6. What I really care about is a quote I read in an ars technica article on the subject regarding the sheer size of the IPv6 address space:

The total number of possible addresses that this gives us [is] 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet [4,294,967,296 addresses] for every second of their lives.

If that doesn’t get you excited about IPv6… well you’re not a geek like me.