Monday’s new episode of Chuck, which originally served as the 13-episode finale before NBC extended the episode order for the season, ended in a rather climactic moment that will forever change the way the show works. I’m not talking about the fact that Chuck finally killed someone. I think that was well played and an inevitable step for Chuck, something that logically had to be the way Chuck’s arc from Intersect 2.0 to full-fledged agent. What I’m talking about was Chuck and Sarah’s happy ending in Paris.

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?

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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 [↩]

The world is getting smaller. With the advent of the internet, information that used to be far away and troublesome to obtain is available within a few minutes in your own home. And now, with the advent of social networks any information you need about your friends is available just by checking their blog, or their twitter page, or their facebook page, or any number of online sources for the intimate details of their life once left to their close network of friends.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. I joined facebook primarily because I wanted to catch up with old friends I don’t talk to much anymore. But for the most part, this can be done passively. I add them as friends and when I go to write on their wall, I come across a tidy aggregation of their hobbies, their interests, the music they like, the movies they like, what schools they’ve gone on to, what jobs they’ve held, and much more information. So before I even ask them how things are going, I’ve received the answer.

Beyond this, any answer to a question asked through facebook is automatically tainted with more forethought than that from a private conversation. That response can be read by anyone you’ve deemed a “friend,” a loaded phrase given the hundreds or thousands of “friends” you can amass through social networks. A facebook conversation has a very different dynamic than that of a real conversation.

Because of this, I’ve never found myself enthralled with facebook. Keeping in touch with dozens of former friends is an empty effort to me. I’d much rather cultivate the few good friendships I have in real life. Obviously, you can develop more substantial relationships through facebook, as you would in the real world, but there’s no real incentive to me. In general, friends you’ve lost touch with weren’t lasting friends. Whether it’s because you changed or they changed or you ran out of things to say to each other, friendships die for a reason. Trying to rekindle them through facebook isn’t likely to succeed.

Which I guess is why I barely ever visit facebook anymore. That initial burst of regained connections has faded away. Obviously, this depends on the person. I’m not anti-social per se, but I’m certainly not comfortable in highly social environments which is why I tend to avoid them.

So my intended use of facebook is not what most people use it for, but even excluding that facebook is not a replacement for more direct communication. Whether it’s face to face, or on the phone, or through instant messaging direct communication, that direct connection is needed for friendships to be anything more than acquaintances.

Buffy’s first season had one flaw in my mind. Ignoring the bad film stock and really bad effects, the one problem I had with the storyline was what I call the “Love Line.” Willow clearly wanted to traverse the border between best friend and boyfriend with Xander and not for a moment did they not show them as being perfect candidates for such a transition. Meanwhile, Xander’s boy-child brain is stuck on dating Buffy; there’s a lot of good reasons for that, but Xander had made the decision to be in love with her before he even knew her.

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.

I love monologues. All the truly moving scenes I’ve seen in television and film have involved beautiful and powerful monologues; a character has dealt with the problem for so long that the internal containment fails and everything just comes out. In those few moments you feel the pain and the joy of the character more than you thought possible. You can go through a whole movie without sympathizing with a character but at that crucial moment, the truth of the words is too beautiful to ignore.

The only problem with monologues is they need a response. These aren’t soliloquies, said to oneself to illuminate the audience, they are there to let the oblivious subject become aware of what the audience has known all along. Monologues need a result. There needs to be acceptance or rejection, cheers or jeers. There needs to be a musical swell as the maligned lovers jump into each others eyes, or the look of shame on the antagonist’s eyes as the realisation of his wrongdoing comes upon him. An utterly ignored monologue is one of the most awkward events one can experience.

I’ve tried to ignore the silence of your protestations. Every word echoes through my brain and close reading begins to look like a cursory glance as the faults in my phrasing fragment my mind like a supernova of insecurity. What did I say that was so wrong? How could my words leave no mark on you. When was it that you decided that I didn’t matter?

To say the silence hurts is an absurd understatement. My trial of silence is like Kafka’s in its unrelenting unreasonableness. Each non-word cuts into my flesh, and rips the muscles from my bones. My knees weaken out of fear of the ongoing silence, and I know that I can’t let this be. I need you to know this now and every second I wait feels like another second of waiting for your response. I’m not waiting any longer.

When I was a teenager I listened to emo music. This was in the middle age of emo. In the beginning emo was an outgrowth of hardcore rock which was explified by more emotional lyrics. Then somehow the soft acoustic music of Dashboard Confessional in addition to the pop-inspired rock of Jimmy Eat World became associated with emo. The story goes that early in their career Jimmy Eat World was an emo band and when their first commercial success, Bleed American, came around everybody called them emo despite the change in their musical style. Similarly, Dashboard Confessional was the side project of the lead singer of a band called Further Seems Forever who were a heavy punk rock band with emo sensibilities and so it seems likely the label simply traversed the chasm between the parent band and the side project. The middle age of emo was a mixed bag. A lot of it was simply duplicating the pop-punk Jimmy Eat World style rather than duplicating the lyrical style. But there were a precious few who wrote heartfelt songs about love and heartbreak. I should state here that when emo began it was not exclusively romantic in nature; the lyrics had to resonate emotionally with the listener but it could be about anything which came from the heart. The middle age of emo changed that of course.

In my eyes, the middle age of emo is not exemplified by bands or even albums but individual songs. Dashboard Confessional’s earlier works (essentially everything earlier than “A Mission, A Mark, A Brand, A Scar”) are the closest you can get to the prototypal emo band, but even then certain songs are more immanently emo.

Of course you can see where the path of emo went. It followed the path of the superficial pop-punk. And so now we have bands like Fall Out Boy who are considered emo. And thus the pejorative use of the word began. I don’t want to get into a huge rant about how the changing definition of emo has marred the works of the middle age emo bands I just want you to know that emo isn’t all bad. In fact, there are songs from the middle age of emo that I still listen to on a regular basis.

The real problem here is that emo has forgotten its origins. Emo was an offshoot of punk at first and punk’s primary philosophy is “Fuck You.” So in my eyes, which are tainted by my understanding of emo, emo is about guys saying yeah I’m a romantic and I’m not all about female conquest. I have meaningful discourse and don’t limit myself to what’s appropriate. I don’t care if you think I’m a pussy because I like cuddling. I don’t care that you’re a misogynistic douche and can’t understand guys who want co-operative and equal partnerships with their lovers. Fuck You.

And I’d like to think that if Coleridge and Wordsworth were around today, they’d be in emo bands. The good kind though.

Don’t wear the shirt if you don’t mean it. Of course it’s not your fault, vapid girls. The real problem is that the shirt should be saying something else, the thing you really mean: “I ♥ Nerds… If They’re Hot.” You’re not actually interested in nerds per se, you’re after what’s called a superficial relationship. Wow, you like hot people? Me too! Of course, my interest in that person is tempered by my interest in their personality but you don’t need to worry about things like that.

You see, what you’re really saying is that you care so much about looks and so little about the personality of your partner that a nerd “will do.” Nerds have a stigma as the guys who take whatever they get; if you’re a girl who can stomach our eccentricities and sit through our nerdly monologues we won’t care. Maybe if you were someone with actual ideas in your head you’d realise that having a cardboard cutout to talk to isn’t really the same as having an actual conversation.

Now I sincerely apologize to any interesting girls out there who happen to wear the shirt. This isn’t aimed at you. (Though if you’re really interested in the eclectic and quixotic characteristics we nerds imbue, you’d be wise to pick up a more subtle shirt like one of the great ones over at xkcd. If there’s anything that gets a nerd interested its obscure references.) I’m here simply to let girls know that wearing a shirt isn’t enough.

Wow, you ♥ nerds? Well I’m a nerd. What are your interests? Getting wasted at frat house keggers? Hmm… well I’m gonna go watch Babylon 5. Have fun.

See what happened there? Once you got my attention, you lost it. Now I’ve got a lot of t-shirts that are ostensibly there to entertain so I’m being a tad hypocritical, but at least my shirts are representative of my personality. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover but we do. The least you can do is be honest about who you are. If you’re an A&F girl who loves guys who pop their collar and drive Honda Civics then don’t pretend that nerds are of any interest to you.

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.