Imitation Only Flatters The Imitated

Remember me? I used to recap and write about TV shows on this blog. Unfortunately life and the job that pays me have gotten in the way of that for the past several weeks but I'm back now, if only briefly. What's brought me back here are my mixed feelings about the penultimate episode of One Tree Hill that aired last night.

I think it's possible to enjoy the spirit and the intention of an episode but dislike the episode itself and such are my feelings for "Anyone Who Had A Heart."

The cheeky references to Dawson's Creek's finale and other CW shows, the revisited plot points from its own past, and the shifted focus to wrapping up story lines for characters who have become largely tertiary were all understandable but not terribly satisfying for me.

The season built drama around three (or four depending on your attachment to Chase and Chuck) main stories and after last week, they were all satisfyingly wrapped up. It was time to tie a bow on it all and send these beloved characters into the sunset to live on in our memories. But there were two episodes left in the season and so this week we killed time; treaded water; waited.

I don't mind that Julian is going to make Lucas's meta book about the show into a meta TV show about the book about the show. But I was there for the show and I was there for the book that relived the show and for the movie that relived the book that relived the show. I don't need to be there for the show that relives the movie that relived the book that relived the show that swallowed the fly. Perhaps I'll die. The entire episode was like a poor imitation of the final season of Dawson's Creek and I've seen that so I don't need to see this.

If that were the only flaw the episode had, my feels for the episode may have only been "meh," but Julian went and wrote himself into the show within the show and made himself a high school basketball star. He effectively replaced either Lucas or Nathan with himself in the story. That's nonsense on a level that insults all of my memories of One Tree Hill and, worse, insults the character of Julian who has never once exhibited this kind of ridiculous self-involved, myopicness before. To pretend his need to co-opt his wife's past could be charming, is much less than his character and the audience deserve.

I know all of that may sound like I'm mad at the show, but I'm not. I'm just disinterested in these developments and would have rather spent this extra hour hearing stories that faded into flashbacks and then ushered us into our final farewell. This will be an episode, like the entire Felix storyline, that my fond memories of this show shall ignore henceforth.