There was a lot of hype surrounding last night’s episode of Heroes, entitled “Cold Wars,” because it was all about HRG and the last time the show was well loved was the last HRG-centric episode they did, titled “Company Man,” way back in season one. So they tried to recapture season one (which wasn’t even that good in retrospect) and managed to create a really shoddy hour of TV. Do the writers even try anymore?

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.

I’ve recently taken to reading and posting on the Television Without Pity forums after watching Lost on wednesday nights. For the most part, it’s a vast improvement over the Ain’t It Cool News talkbacks I used to frequent to get my Lost theorizing fix. But they have their flaws.

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.

There’s been a lot of Heroes hate ever since the season one finale disappointed everyone. I fell out of love with the show a few episodes earlier than that but because I’m a TV junkie I kept watching. And watching. And watching.

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.

I remember a few years ago when commercials for Medium were played on the radio. I’d heard the basics of the show and the commercial clued me in as well, and yet despite my love of sci-fi and supernatural stories I had absolutely no desire to watch it. The reason is because it sounded horrendous.

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.

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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. [↩]

Apparently, Kyle XY has been canceled. Despite what you may think about ABC Family, on occasion they produce decent television. It’s astoundingly hard to find television that kids can watch to learn life lessons while staying enjoyable for older people on other merits. Kyle XY was one of these shows.

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.

I love television. In fact, many of my friends have told me, or have secretly wished they had the balls to tell me, that I have an unhealthy obsession with television. I watch more television on any given day than most people will in an entire week. Sitting down and watching an entire television series over the course of a few weeks is commonplace to me. I think it’s fair to say that television is kind of a big deal to me. Which is why what happened last night was very un-me.

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.

A few weeks ago, Entourage returned and True Blood premiered. I’ve enjoyed the former for a few years now so I was glad it was back, and I was waiting with a fair amount of anticipation for the latter, which I’ve enjoyed so far. But it’s fair to say that neither of these, nor any of the other shows that have premiered this year, has been as highly anticipated as what came back tonight: The Office came back tonight; it was back, it was backer, it was back with a vengeance. (Slight spoilers ahead)

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.

I wrote a while ago about how guilty pleasures are stupid and that we should all just admit if we like something even if we know it’s stupid. This week, Prison Break kicked off its fourth season, and there is no better example currently on TV of a show so bad it’s good.

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.

For the last few months, I’ve been generally avoiding Lost spoilers. More recently, I’ve been shunning pretty much all TV spoilers because a few times I was reading spoilers for other shows I caught tantalizing glimpses of Lost spoilers and it was wrecking my chance of going into next season relatively clear of spoilers. And then, today as I was scrolling through TV news over at TV Squad I came across a post describing a casting announcement for Lost that is more than your typical announcement.

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.

There will come a time, shortly after Lost has aired its final episode, when on the torrent sites will come an edited collection of Lost: one where every scene is played out in exact chronological order. And on that day, Christopher Nolan will shit his pants. And fans of Lost will rejoice. That is, until the inevitable chronological canon disputes arise…

This week was pretty awesome. To start off, the materials my design group needs to start construction on our project arrived (though construction has yet to begin due to less awesome issues). Following that, the final issue of Y: The Last Man arrived and gave a satisfying ending to a really great comic. And then Lost returned. That was obviously the most awesome part of this week, whether you think that’s sad or not. Finally, there was no school yesterday. OK, I should fess up about the last thing; it’s not all that awesome. I like school, and missing the chance to learn, especially when the schedule for learning is so tight, is actually pretty lame. But, sometimes it’s nice to have an unexpected respite from those stresses, even more so when it gives you a long weekend.

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.

Well, season one of Angel starts off really strongly. We have lots of really great things going on. The show has a really dry sense of humour and it’s not afraid to mix really great laughs with heartbreak. The season begins with Angel fighting a couple of vamps in an alley, one of whom is the Lost’s future Sawyer Josh Holloway, and when the damsels in distress try to offer him thanks he rebukes them for fear of coming to close to them. It becomes clear that nearly draining Buffy to death in the climactic episodes of last season of Buffy have haunted him and drastically changed the way he deals with human interaction. He’s too scared that it will happen again to let anyone come close, even for a moment of gratitude.

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.

Looking back on the last twenty hours or so, I can’t remember an unamazing episode of this season. Buffy is usually good even if it’s not great, but this season was easily the strongest and most consistent the show ever produced. Are there more impressive, or just plain better, episodes in other episodes? Hell yes, but the way the story laid out over the season and progressed with a slow lumber for the first half of the season and steadily ratcheted up the tension from there on in puts it a step above any other season as a whole. And it managed to be depressing, moving, haunting, mirthful and joyous along the way.

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.

I wish that were a misleading inflammatory title but it’s not; the world is filled with douches. Already, people on digg are submitting misleading titles which link directly to spoilers for the entire final book of the Harry Potter series. Now, I’m not perfect; I laughed just like everybody else at that video of that asshole spoiling a midnight Harry Potter book release but enough is enough. You guys are douches. The whole world is a stinking pile of douche. (By the way, douche is the proper plural of douche, but it just sounds weird to say “you guys are douche.”)

I really wish that there were some people out there who would respect people’s desire to read a book without holing themselves up to avoid people spoiling it for them! Unfortunately, everybody seems to gain an inordinate amount of pleasure from these heights of douchebaggery. I don’t care if I read these spoilers because I’ve never read a single page of Harry Potter nor have I seen any of the movies but I can understand not wanting to be spoiled. When the super-sized spoilers for the Lost season finale came around a couple months back I ducked away. I didn’t want to know what happened because the mystery and the ultimate reveal is worth the wait. Do some people overract to being spoiled? Absolutely. But should you ruin it for the moderate readers who don’t want to be spoiled? But did you want to be told the twist to Fight Club or The Usual Suspects before you watched it?

Maybe I am unnecessarily exaggerating. Maybe this is only the increasingly immature voice of the digg mob with their five-year-old mind set. But I can’t explain it. Do these people have no restraint? No desire for suspense? No respect for the creator’s wishes? No respect for your fellow human being? Has the internet so completely destroyed your moral core by its anonymity? Or is it that the internet abolished any patience you may have once had through endless spoiler websites? Whatever the cause, I know that saying this will do nothing to change the mind of the degenerate spoiling assholes out there. But maybe, just maybe, some of the people out there simply following for the sake of the joke will consider that purposefully ruining a story these people have dedicated thousands of pages of reading time to might not be something you want to do.

Let’s face it, Hurley is Joe Normal on the island. He reacts the way you would so you relate to him on a normal level. If you have weird Daddy issues, you can connect with Locke/Jack/Sawyer/Kate/Charlie (pretty much anyone on the friggin’ island) and if you have mystical powers that are unexplainable you can connect with Walt or Desmond but what if you’re just a well adjusted normal guy/gal? You’ve still got Hurley. Sure, he’s a massively rich millionaire who is supposedly cursed by a set of numbers (who isn’t these days) but you can still connect with him easily. So what does this have to do with Libby?

Relationships are a tenuous beast. Even more tenuous is the transition from friendship to relationship. With friends, you find yourself with nicknames all the time; sometimes it’s a personality trait personified, other times it’s your last name, it could be anything. Whatever your friends choose for your nickname, it will come back to haunt you if you have any romantic plans for the future. These names are not terms of endearment and if that transition ever occurs you’re stuck. Do you stick with the nickname? Do you switch over to their real name? Or a term of endearment like “honey” or “sweetie?”

That’s the real reason Libby was killed. Not because of the DUI, not because of the CBS sitcom. What would Hurley call her? Libby? Elizabeth? Snookums? Would Libby start calling him Hugo? Or Big Bear? I don’t think any of it would’ve worked out. And what would happen? Viewer division! Who would back who? Madness would ensue! So that’s the real reason that Libby was killed. Don’t believe me? Well, that’s good because this was all a bunch of nonsense and gibbering heavily laced with sarcasm. In fact, I created a Sarcasm category for my blog just for this post.