Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

Fowler’s Toad, Bufo woodhousii fowleri
Robert Moses State Park, 2007-07-07

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Did you see the final episode of the Sopranos last night? Are you as confused and disappointed as I am? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before: a great series waits to the very last episode, and almost to the last minute of the last episode, to conclusively, utterly, and completely jump the shark.¹.
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BBC America is broadcasting season 2 of Hex now. What a mistake. British fans already know this, but season 2 is an absolute disaster. I’ve already watched it on imported DVDs I got from Amazon UK, and that’s 12 hours of my life I’ll never get back. What was a sexy, scary, mysterious and original show in Season 1 turned into a bad Buffy knockoff in season 2.¹. You remember how bad you thought Buffy the Vampire Slayer was going to be until you actually watched the show? Well, that’s exactly how bad Hex Season 2 is.

The departure of Christina Cole and then Michael Fassbender hurt badly. Laura Pyper and Joseph Beattie just couldn’t pick up the slack. However the real fault lay in the writing. Characters didn’t so much grow as careen madly from one personality to another throughout the season. The plot was incomprehensible and seemed to shift every couple of episodes. Every time it looked like the show might be going down an interesting path, it would back off and wander off somewhere else. Unlike the clear story arc of Season 1 (pioneered by shows like Buffy and Babylon 5) Season 2 felt like a random agglomeration of ideas. It was sort of like one of those writing exercises from freshman English where everyone in the class writes a paragraph of a story and then hands it to the next student to write the next paragraph. And the final episode was the absolute worst. I watched it less than a month ago; and I now couldn’t tell you what happened, who won, or why I should care.
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The latest episodes of Lost have strongly hinted that the survivors are, in fact, dead; and in some sort of afterlife. This is a red herring. They are very much alive and present on our Earth, in the present day.

The strongest evidence that they’re dead are the helicopter pilot’s claims that the plane was in fact found four miles down in the ocean, with the bodies on-board. However, there’s a very simple explanation for that, albeit one that is used frequently in real life and almost never in fiction:

Someone is lying.
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Yesterday afternoon after visiting my accountant (tax time, you know) I stopped over at FIAF for the Tuesday afternoon movie. It usually doesn’t matter a great deal what’s playing. It’s mostly just about practicing French, but boy did this one test me. If I didn’t have another event at 7:30 I might have left early. Apparently Eric Rohmer is not the only nouvelle vague director que je deteste. The poor sound quality in the print we watched didn’t help either. It’s hard enough to follow French without having to strain to hear every word.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way either. At least a third of the audience, most of whom speak much better French than I ever will, had left by the end of the film. That the audience is almost entirely composed of FIAF members who get free admission may contribute to that. Mostly it’s Francophone senior citizens who show up no matter what’s playing. Usually one or two people leave early, but I’ve never seen an exodus like yesterday before.

Still, I can’t help but think there was something more going on that I (and most of the audience) just didn’t get. The Don Quixote theme was apparent, but there were lots of hints of other things. I suspect this may be a deeply symbolic movie, but if you’re not clued into to the symbolism, it’s just flat-out incomprehensible. I’ve googled a little looking for further info, without a lot of success so far. Does anyone understand this picture?

I was fairly impressed with last night’s season finale of Battlestar Galactica. Spoilers after the fold.
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