Play My Cards Right

With Episode 4 it was just starting to hit a nice groove too. I can see why the masses didn’t like WonderFalls – Jaye’s horrible attitude, the general ‘quirkiness’. I enjoyed the show quite a bit though, and couldn’t wait to see just where it went. Oh well. Now I have the end of Angel and the quickly slowly-getting-worse Alias to watch.

Very sad news this. While I will admit that TechTV has been going steadily downhill for sometime- they’ve lost or fired almost all of their original personalities, almost all of their programming is recycled BBC, the shows they have are incredibly amateurish- the station still has a place in my heart. If only they realized just how much potential they have in shows like Call for Help, The Screen Savers and XPlay instead of trudging up trash like Wired for Sex, Invent This! and Body Hits. Unscrewed could be good if they actually hired some writers, but as it stands it’s just cheap laughs and cheap sex. Who knows what happens now, maybe by next this time next year I won’t even be able to get it (or whatever form it eventually takes) because Comcast won’t let DirecTV have it at any kind of reasonable rate. Sigh…

Update: Leo Laporte is no longer hosting the Screen Savers. I am both relieved and upset by this. On one hand, Leo is a jerk and a pervert who annoys me to no end. On the other, he was one of the few professional media people on the show who has experience on the air and decent knowledge of the subject matter. Honestly I think Kevin and Pat might work nicely together, but Leo was a host. Pat is too angry to be any good and Kevin just doesn’t have what it takes. We’ll see. I will miss his even-handed informative interviews though. I will not miss his incessant interrupting of his cohosts, or his weird, hardly veiled sexual innuendo and downright sexism towards his female hosts. Sigh…

Tonight’s local news advertising:

Viagra
Child
Life
Death
Shocked
Frightening
Scared
Dangerous
Gunshots
Fired
School-Children
Action
Weather

Of the many things I like about Alias (besides its buffy-lite mixture of action, espionage, empowerment, pain, suffering and continuity) is the score. Yes, it frequently uses lots of pop music during its we-got-this-show-on-the-air-with-the-promise-of-sexy-syd scenes, there is a theme, I’ll call it the Syd’s Suffering theme, that comes in and is always high crying strings. Its very distinctive for a tv show of any kind and is the perfect compliment to the unending torture Sydney Bristow gets put through every week. The strings, when mixed properly with Syd’s pouty lips, get me every time. They really help to communicate loneliness and isolation that Syd faces week after week that makes me scream out, “FOR GOD’S SAKE LET HER LIIIIIIIVVVVEE!” This week, finally, she cracked a smile.

Warning to those who are still catching up with angel, I am going to be slightly spoilery in this post, so let us say right now that you have been warned.

So I wrote this huge post about three hours ago that I accidentally broke before I got to post it. Now I’m going to try again.

Has anyone else noticed the sheer number of human beings that Angel and co. have killed this season? And is anyone surprised? They’ve killed honest-to-god people in almost every episode thus far, and they’ve done so quite remorselessly. To such an extent that people someone even questioned what they were doing (Werewolf lady to angel). Now I know that most of these people work for an Evil Law Firm, but since when is it okay for people in the buffyverse to simply up and start smacking down other people? I don’t remember much of how season 3 went, but I do know that in season 2 and 1 (souled) humans were spared at all costs. Until Angel “EMBRACED THE DARKNESS” of course. When Angel left the higher ups of Wolfram and Hart to be eaten by Darla and Dru, a very big deal was made about his willingness to let them die. Even last season, there was the whole deal with Gunn, Fred and Fred’s evil professor. And of course look at what happened to WIllow and Faith on buffy.

Now I know that since its inception Angel has very much embraced the grey areas of morality and right and wrong that Buffy really didn’t even start to until the Initiative came into play- with Demons very frequently taking on a whole new human side and the Fang Gang often trying to save them from something- Lorne’s family, Lorne’s bar from Gunn’s old gang, the half-demon hybrids vs. the Demon Supremacists, and so on. And we got to see that human’s weren’t always so good either- Principal Dewitt even showed angel the truth about hell in season 2, it was right here on earth and it was the evil that men do. But still, I maintain that human beings were held to some higher standard than demons- until now.

So where are they going? Last season ended with the revelation that even if you beat the system you can’t win because (just like in the Matrix) “most people aren’t ready to be unplugged.” I can’t help that ATS Season 4 was candidly a statement about life under the Bush Administration…but I digress. With saving the world having brought them nothing, the Angel crew join up with the ultimate evil, to fight the system from within. And what else happens when you work in the system than you succumb to it. Or at least you are tempted to do so. I guess the thing I’m amazed at is that while there are some loud overtures by Spike (and others?) that they shouldn’t be at Wolfram & Hart, the writers seem to be working in pretty subtly that the crew is slowly being corrupted. So subtle we aren’t really noticing. Or maybe they think its totally obvious. Either way, no one seems to be talking about it, so I thought I’d bring it up.

It could still be an interesting season, though I think they’d be better off without Spike. That show needs to pair down the damn cast in the worst way. I’m hoping they’re out of W&F by mid season.

Peter David brought up an interesting point in his blog that Spike was really a pretty innocent guy before he was vamped, and his soul wasn’t in his body while he was evil, so why on earth would be pulled into hell? Click here for more.

Exam tomorrow. Must sleep.