It's a good thing I'm done with this because I've clearly wrung "Carry on Wayward Son" for all the post titles it's worth.
So, both what I thought would happen and what actually did happen in the episodes "Changing Channels" and "The Real Ghostbusters":
The Trickster from the episode "Tall Tales" is actually the Archangel Gabriel
The prophet from "The Monster at the End of This Book" returns at some point towards the beginning of season 5 and the boys meet him at a fan convention
And that's it! I'm all out of spoilers and I'm now only three episodes behind being completely caught up on this show which means I won't have any idea what's going to happen until I watch it happening. What a truly novel way to watch a TV show.
I was in the shower earlier today and for some reason was thinking about something related to Zach Braff, but at the time, I couldn't remember Zach Braff's name (and was referring to him in my head as Dr. John Dorian). I listed off all of the stuff he's been in, the names of the other actors fromScrubs, the people he's dated, random things from Garden State, and I couldn't come up with it. After a while of just thinking about common men's names it occurred to me that his first name was Zach, probably immediately after I ruled out Jack. But then I had no idea about the last name. I listed off all the other famous people named Zach I could think of and it just wasn't coming to me. Eventually I just started going through the alphabet pairing letters together and trying to come up with something that sounded right. Finally I came up with Braff. So basically I spent an extra 15 minutes, at least, standing around in the shower trying to remember Zach Braff's name when I just as easily (although not so warmly) could have gotten out of the shower and looked it up. It's one of those things where I can't decide if it was a good brain exercise, one of those things that helps reroute neural pathways, or whatever, or just a big waste of time and water. And what's worse is that I no longer have any idea why I was even thinking about Zach Braff.
I'm really down to the end of what I've been spoiled for at this point. What I was expecting:
Dean jumps five years into the future at the beginning of season 5; this may or may not last for more than one episode
At some point, Sam is the vessel for Lucifer
And it turns out these things were both true and related. Zachariah (dick that he is) sends Dean five years into the future to follow his future self while he attempts to kill Lucifer, who by that point is using Sam as his vessel. He's also making Sam dress like a sketchy pimp, but I hadn't been aware of that prior to watching "The End."
2009 Christmas & New Years Specials "The End of Time"
Part 1 of this series did not make one spec of sense. Also, with the exception of the resurrection of the Master, nothing happened. io9 summed it up well. What The Hell Was That? indeed.
Part 2, on the other hand, actually had things that happened. Lots and lots of things. Those things all had to do with the elaborate history of the Time Lords and the Time War and the Doctor's history with the Master. Stuff I basically knew nothing about because I didn't watch the show through the first eight Doctors. So I can't even gauge whether anything that happened even made any sense or not, because I could barely follow what was going on.
That being said, the whole thing was pretty much worthwhile for David Tennant's last big scene. When the Doctor realizes he'll have to go into the radiation booth thing and die he basically has a giant angry/sad outburst and it is awesome. Tennant at his best. I really only needed those 5 minutes of show. Of course after those minutes of awesome, the ending kind of dragged on as Ten said goodbye to everyone he's ever hung out with in this regeneration. The Rose bit at the end was nice, though.
All in all my appreciation of this show has fallen steadily since the end of the second series. I really thought I might be done with Doctor Who with the passing of Ten, but the end bit with Matt Smith as Eleven had me a little bit intrigued about how he'll do and what Stephen Moffat will do with the show now that RTD is out of the picture. I don't know why I'm even kidding myself. I'll definitely be watching when the show starts back in...whenever Spring 2010 is. His companion is cute and Scottish! Cute and Scottish!
I never posted about the end of BSG because I didn't want to think about it. It was bad. Really bad. And I was just willing to forget about it and remember the earlier parts of the show that had been so great. But for some reason, with Lost starting back soon, I'm feeling compelled to post about why I hate Lost so much and it's weirdly tied up in my mind with the end of BSG, so I'm going to try to get this out first.
So I'm not going to talk about the suck. I'm going to talk about the two parts that I actually liked.
One is the Kara and Lee flashback where they get drunk and almost have sex on the table at Kara and Zach's apartment paired with the flashback of the morning after where Lee tries to shoo a bird out of his apartment. It made me think about their relationship in a newish way. A way in which, for better or worse, I actually had to accept some of the divine plan/destiny stuff the last season was peddling. If you can accept the idea that whatever deity or deities might exist were specifically crafting a situation in which the humans and Cylons made it to a colonizable planet, then the fact that Kara and Lee's relationship was nothing but a long series of "near misses" actually seems purposeful rather than just superfluous relationship drama. Kara was created to lead the humans and Cylons to "Earth". Her crazy combination of parents and her horrible upbringing crafted that personality that made her a soldier who wanted direction but also a dreamer who was always searching for something, which basically combined to make her a pilot. And she had to be both parts because if she was just a soldier she wouldn't be searching, and if she was just searching, she would take off and never come back. She needed something that would keep her tied to humanity such that she would always come back and something that didn't satisfy her enough that she would stop moving forward. Hence Lee Adama. She ricocheted off of him in a way that made her fly off and find new paths and new answers, but she always brought the new stuff back to the fleet to keep leading them in the right direction. There are so many points where she could have left for good or stopped moving for good that would have prevented the fleet from ever getting to "Earth", but Lee was always around to inadvertently push her in the right direction. Even the love triangle between Lee, Kara, and Sam furthered their path towards Earth. If Kara had been able to settle with Lee she never would have found Sam. If Lee hadn't been around to screw up her marriage to Sam she probably wouldn't have flown off to her "death", where she found Earth. Anyway, maybe I just like the idea that their entire relationship wasn't pointless and was actually crucial in the salvation of human and Cylon-kind.
The other part I actually liked:
This one moment completely redeemed Gaius Baltar in my eyes. Throughout the entire series there were points where the show tried to convince us that the Baltar we were seeing was the actual, genuine Gaius. I hated those moments because I never thought they were earned. I never felt like I had any reason to believe that those moments were real, that Baltar wasn't just putting on another mask, playing whatever part was necessary to get him through the given situation. Particularly his sudden devout religiosity in the last season. It never seemed genuine to me. And this scene proved to me that I was right. After his years and years of piling bullshit upon bullshit to hide his emotions, it all fell away in that moment and there was the remnants of a real person under there.
So that's it. The two things I actually liked about the end of Battlestar Galactica. But the real reason I wanted to write this post was to say that the crappy ending doesn't matter. In the end, whether or not the conclusion was satisfying, or even made any sense, wasn't important. At least not to me. Because I cared about the world and I cared about the characters in it and that's why I enjoyed watching the series. All of the characters could've sprouted wings and flown away or decided on ritual group suicide in the end and it wouldn't have changed the fact that for several years I loved those people and I just wanted to see what they were doing, to know how they were feeling, to watch them be.
The husband and I have watched through the first episode of season 5. What I thought I knew:
Lucifer shows up at the end of season 4 and is played by Jacob from Lost
Bobby becomes paralyzed
Dean is very important in the grand scheme of good and evil (Based on recently being spoiled again, I'm amending this one to: Dean is the human embodiment of the Archangel Michael...and after some thought on the subject, I'm amending it to Dean at some point being the vessel for the Archangel Michael)
And in actuality:
Lucifer shows up at the beginning of season 5 and enters a vessel played by Jacob from Lost
Bobby becomes paralyzed either due to stabbing himself with Ruby's knife so that the demon possessing him wouldn't kill Dean, or because the angel Zachariah is a dick
Dean is the Sword of Michael, meaning he would be Michael's vessel if he would ever accept being so (this is not a euphemism)
Unrelated to what I did or did not know in advance: Ruby's dead! Castiel is not! Yay!
So I'm posting this quite a while after the fact, but wanted to at least comment before new episodes start back. I caught up on Vampire Diaries before the holidays while the CW was airing two episodes per night for a week. I had high (or low) hopes for this show, and it's not living up. Basically it's not amazing and it's not so horrible it's amusing. It's pretty much just okay.
The good:
The black vein-y eyes. Possibly my favorite ever version of "vamping". Way better than bumpy foreheads, mouths full of fangs, and your garden variety descending canines.
When I watched the pilot I found it so predictable that I was saying the characters dialog before they did.
Nina Dobrev and Paul Wesley are like black holes of charisma so the whole Stefan & Elena thing is really not working for me.
Having dead parents does not inherently make a person interesting. Other people thinking someone is interesting does not make them interesting. Elena is not interesting.
The whole Bonnie is a witch story started out amusing to me and then Bianca Lawson got involved and it all went downhill from there.
I'm pretty sure Elena and Stefan have already broken up and gotten back together at least once per episode. It's already tedious.
Vicki. Thankfully she's dead and presumably gone.
The things I don't give a crap about:
Aunt Jenna and her constant dating of people who might be trouble.
Elena's ex-boyfriend Matt, though I could start to care more about him now that he and Caroline are a pseudo-thing.
The group of townsfolk who know about vampires.
Katherine. Yeah, I said it. I don't give a crap about her. Nina Dobrev can barely do morose. She really, really can't do whimsically evil and manipulative.
That's it. I may post more about it when new episodes start.
So this is basically just to report that I watched an episode that I'd seen before. Here's what I thought I knew:
Everything revealed in the season 4 episode "The Monster at the End of This Book"
Lilith sometimes appears as a young woman
And what happened:
Well obviously everything that happened in "The Monster at the End of This Book", which pretty much breaks down to the presence of Archangels, Lilith trying to seduce Sam with a deal, Chuck being a Prophet of the Lord (in addition to being awesome), and the existence of Supernatural fanfic within the Supernatural universe
Despite normally appearing as a little girl, in this instance Lilith appears as "a comely dental hygienist from Bloomington, Indiana"
I was waiting for confirmation on one more spoiler before I did this post. It just took quite a long way into season 4 to finally get it. So, at 16 episodes in, the stuff I thought was going to happen:
Dean comes back from hell at the beginning of season 4
An angel named Castiel shows up and seems to be around to advise Dean; this may happen before season 4
Sam starts intentionally drinking demon blood to gain strength; Dean doesn't know about it
Lilith is opening some seals of some kind to try to raise Lucifer; the boys are trying to prevent her from doing so; Lilith sometimes appears as a little girl, sometimes as a young woman
Dean comes back from hell at the beginning of season 4
An angel named Castiel "gripped [Dean] tight and raised [him] from Perdition" because God commanded it and now shows up every once in a while to tell Dean what to do/crush on him
Sam has been drinking Ruby's blood to gain power to control and exorcise demons; Dean doesn't know about it, but basically everybody else does
Lilith is opening 66 seals to try to raise Lucifer; a group of angels is helping her; the boys and Castiel are trying to prevent the seals from being broken; Lilith seems to often inhabit the body of a little girl
I have one important thought at this point in season 4: Despite the fact that she's been "helping" them for over a year, Ruby is definitely evil.
I just watched the 100th episode of How I Met Your Mother, and in the words of Marshall describing the degree of hotness of MacLaren's new bartender, "Eh."
It was the so-called musical episode. "So-called" because it was not a musical episode. It was an episode with one musical number. Barney sang a song about suits in an elaborate JD from Scrubs kind of hallucination. It ended very similarly to "The Mustard" in the Buffy musical episode, with the triangle of people swinging the clothes around and spinning and with the timpani reminiscent of Also sprach Zarathustra. So yeah. I didn't enjoy it as much as "Let's go to the Mall" or "Sandcastles in the Sand". I won't be singing the weird suit song for days to come. Honestly, I'm not even sure it was as entertaining as tedmosbyisajerk.com. So, nice try show, but you may be losing your touch.
That being said, the episode was relatively entertaining. The other portions of Barney's desuitification plan and its effects on him were amusing. The Tim Gunn cameo was kind of funny. Ted dating Cindy was kind of nice. I definitely laughed out loud a number of times. Thinking back, I can't actually remember any of the reasons I laughed, which isn't really a great sign, but I did laugh which is more than I've done for some episodes this year.
I am wondering, now that we've gotten so close to a glimpse of The Mother, if the plan is to end the show either this year or at the latest next year. I feel like the ongoing story has gotten a little tedious and they really hit their stride with the funny in seasons 2 and 3 and have gone downhill to some degree since then (though this year's "The Scuba Diver" was pretty great). But despite all of that, I still enjoy the show, I still want Barney and Robin to be together, I still wonder what happened to Robin's dogs, I'm still looking forward to the last slap, I still hope someday Sandy Rivers will return, and I will most certainly watch this show to the very end (mainly because I suspect that's when the final slap will happen).
The boys keep Ruby in a Devil's Trap for a while during season 3
As a result of the crossroads deal, Dean gets dragged to hell by hell hounds at the end of season 3
And in reality:
The boys trapped Ruby in a Devil's Trap for about 10 minutes worth of airtime (roughly a few hours of actual time, I guess) during "No Rest for the Wicked"
As a result of the crossroads deal, Dean gets dragged to hell by hell hounds at the end of season 3. Not surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any peace now that he's gone.
There are a couple of other things related to spoilers that have come up already, but the actual spoilers have yet to be confirmed so I won't list them. I'll just say that Lilith is around already and the Trickster is still around and for some reason was focused on preparing Sam for life without Dean.
