Phantom Rats

Ultimate Potato Soup

2012-01-14T15:29:00.000-07:00

1 - 1 1/2 pounds of bacon, chopped
2 - 3 stalks celery, diced
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
8 potatoes, peeled and cubed
4 c chicken stock (or enough to cover potatoes)
2 T butter
1/4 c heavy cream
8 oz cream cheese
1 T dried tarragon
1 T dried dill
salt and pepper to taste

In a dutch oven or large stock pot, brown bacon over medium heat until crispy. Remove bacon and set aside. Drain off all but 1/4 c of bacon grease.

Saute onion, garlic and celery in bacon grease until the unions are translucent. Add the cubed potatoes, toss to coat and saute for 3-4 minutes. Return bacon to the pan and add chicken stock to just cover potatoes. Add tarragon and dill. Cover and simmer until potatoes are tender.

Add butter, cream cheese and heavy cream. Cook until the cream cheese melts and serve.

A Funeral Wish. A Birthday Kiss

2012-01-14T00:22:00.003-07:00

Since I failed to recap the two previous episodes of The Vampire Diaries, I have to start by saying that while I wasn't a huge fan of the winter finale, the last two episodes back have been outstanding. Now, without further ado, lets talk about "Our Town," shall we?

We begin where all good shows should - with a hot guy in the shower. Damon looks pleased with himself as he rinses and, judging by the smile, recalls his recent smooch with Elena. Post-shower, he prances around his room in a towel. It is truly the pranciest prance I've ever seen. Damon is a world champion prancer.

Meanwhile, Elena hangs out in Alaric's apartment kicking the shit out of a heavy bag. Remember when Buffy would work out in the library or the Magic Shop and her tiny little SMG fists would hit the heavy bag like a mosquito hitting the windshield of a moving vehicle? Well when Elena works out, that bag knows she means business. It's pretty awesome.

Anyway, Elena and Alaric talk about how Jeremy is fixin' to leave town per the request the two of them cooked up and had Damon plant in his very pretty head. Then Elena forgets how to be subtle and is all "how many times can I make weird eyes and say Damon's name before you catch on to my double meaning?" Ric thinks it's going to be a few more times. All his deaths have made him impervious to extreme obviousness.

Damon and Stefan meet up with Bonnie at The House of the Witchy Mojo where she's trying to talk the Original Mystery Coffin into opening up and revealing the prize inside. I think Grams died before she could teach Bonnie that "please" is the magic word - seriously, has anyone just asked the damn thing nicely yet? The Salvatores find a hybrid skulking around so Stefan makes sexy eyes at him while Damon rips his heart out through his back.

Over at Mystic Falls High, Elena and Bonnie meet up to decorate Caroline's locker for her birthday. Elena tells Bon that she is sending Jeremy away. Bonnie is pissed.

Back at Stefan's House of Dead Stuff, Damon is trying to beat the Mystery Box O' Corpse open with a shovel. Damon does some Original Math to help me with my extreme confusion (Elijah, two additional siblings, and the Mystery Box Of It's Anyone's Guess) and then they reenact the first season for us with Stefan playing the role of Damon and vice versa. This time Stefan is the one who wants to kill things until he gets what his way and Damon is the one who wants to lay low and play it safe and not rock the boat. This current version of Stefan is my favorite - I like that he remembers his feelings and he still feels them deep down but he just isn't letting himself care. It's like he's season one Stefan minus the brooding with extra badassery and way more smirking and snarking. So Stefan wants to call Klaus's bluff and Damon strenuously wants to not.

Back at school, Bonnie is saying goodbye to Jeremy and dropping some fairly giant hints about how it isn't his idea even though he thinks it is. Jeremy is too hot to leave town. Denver is not ready for the kind of other-worldly beauty that resides in Mystic falls. You can't just unleash that shit on an unsuspecting city. There will be riots and swooning epidemics. The air in Denver is thin, swooning could be fatal. THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Caroline arrives at school and is very sad. Tyler catches her and wants to talk. She's mad at him for his most recent transgression of nearly getting Jeremy killed and wants to know what he plans to do about this sire bond bullshit. Tyler tells her that there's nothing he CAN do so he's just not going to try. They have a nice, sad breakup moment. He gives her a small gift, wishes her happy birthday and walks away. She tears up as she opens the bag and finds a charm bracelet. I'm going to be so sad when Tyler has to die, you guys, but we all see that that's the direction we're heading in, right?

House of Klaus. Special K is sipping liquor and gazing at his sister's deadness while pouting about how much he does not like to be beaten by his former flunky. Stefan stops in to flirt with his ex-brofriend. Ultimatum, hurt feelings, sexual tension, close talking, ultimatum, quip, quip, flirt, flirt, flirt, flirt, FLIRT, hoyay interuptus, hybrid decapitation, aaaaaannnnnddddd scene. I've never wanted Stefan more. Neither has Klaus. I can dig it.

After a short break to allow the audience to smoke a cigarette and take a cold shower, Caroline arrives home and is greeted by Elena, Bonnie, and Matt, in the cutest party hats of all time, jumping out to wish her happy birthday. Elena puts a tiara on Caroline and now part of me wishes THAT was the object that Bonnie had slapped the SPF spell on because if anyone could get away with wearing a purple fuzz-trimmed tiara around town every day, it's Caroline. Bonnie tells her their plan to take Care to The Falls and have s'mores ("and tequiiiillllaaa," Matt helpfully and ADORABLY adds), but Caroline isn't into it. She doesn't feel like celebrating a birthday when she isn't ever going to get any older. Elena exercises her newfound "thinking on her feet" muscle and concocts a plan B.

At the House of Klaus, a minion is tidying up the headless carnage Stefan left lying around when Tyler drops in wondering why he was summoned. Klaus explains that since his ex-brofriend broke up with him, he needs Tyler to fill that whole in his heart. It'll be an empty, meaningless relationship but it's better than killing alone. Tyler would prefer one of the other minions take care of this task because he's super busy wallowing in his own post-breakup self-pity. Klaus wants what he wants and what he wants is for Tyler to be a good puppy and kill Caroline. Tyler tries to get out of the task by arguing, then by trying to reason with his sire, and finally with some of that close-talking Klaus likes so much. Klaus acquiesces and allows Tyler to take his leave but he smirks when he watches Tyler leave so you know this isn't really the end of it. He can't let TWO of his boy toys sass him in the same day without consequences.

Over at the Founders Soiree of the Week, Ric is getting an update on the current state of affairs from Damon. When Ric asks if Stefan's humanity is "on or off," Damon says that his brother seems to be working with more of a "dimmer switch" which is an analogy I love so hard. They argue in that way they always do before they make out (shut up, in my head, that's what they do off screen after every one of these little quarrels), and then they mosey into the shindig.

Out in the woods, Elena welcomes her friends to a crypt for the Plan B Birthday Funeral. Birthdays are so last year, what Caroline needs to do is celebrate her deadness. They talk about all the stuff that Caroline is, then Bonnie lights the 18 candles on the tiny little cake with her mind and Caroline makes a wish. Other than the fact that it's a funeral for a vampire in a crypt, this scene is so full of normal teenager friendiness that it makes my heart ache for all the stuff these kids' lives should be but aren't. It also fills me with joy for all the ways they stick together to let each other still be teenagers sometimes.

Founders festivities in full swing. Alaric asks Damon what's up with Elena over and above what's always up with Elena. Damon says it's Stefan but Alaric doesn't look convinced. Damon is all Man Of The House announcing his plans to "get a drink, write a check, and then we're out." I love it when their relationship goes all Big Strong Provider and The Little Woman on us. I would sacrifice a goat to get just one scene of Damon opening a car door for Ric.

With Damon gone, Pretty Dr. Fell pounces on the newly available Alaric who makes with the flirty. She tells him she knows about vampires and then tells him how she was dumped on the Bridge of Death. Alaric brags about how his brofriend is "loaded" and Dr. Fell mentions that "some British guy" is also forking over a boatload of dough. The camera lovingly caresses Alaric's worried but really handsome face, as he wonders what British guy.

Elsewhere in the party, Klaus is making nice with Carol Lockwood when Damon stops by to challenge Klaus to a pissing contest. Damon tinkles: "he ruined your son's life." Klaus sprinkles: "that full moon business was SO HARD, I saved the poor chap from the horror of it all." Carol mentions how Klaus promised to protect Mystic Falls from harm if she just does what he tells her to do. Damon dribbles: "there'd be no need for protection if he and his hybrids went bye bye." Klaus piddles: "and if your brother gave me back my dead things, I'd kennel the puppies." Carol begs Damon to reign Stefan in so the Council doesn't have to intervene. Damon pees: "squint!" Klaus pisses: "come on, mate. Give peace a chance. GRIN!" Klaus takes his toity trophy and mingles with the nameless, faceless townsfolk.

Crypt of Tequila and Cake. Caroline texts Tyler and Matt looks sad. Elena scolds and then Bonnie bitches. The tension skyrockets when Bon turns the birthday dirge into a chorus of "stop trying to make my ex-boyfriend leave town." Matt has my back with a well-timed, "you know, you guys are ruining a perfectly good funeral!" If you can't understand why I love Matt the most, I can't explain it to you any better than that.

Damon is licking his wounds and complaining to the sheriff about what a meanie-pants Klaus is. Liz takes Damon's side but scolds him for playing party games that could end with many of the town's citizens all covered in pee. I really need to divorce myself from this metaphor now. Urine, you're out! (I apologize, that was uncalled for.) Liz wants Stefan to back off and thinks Damon can make that happen.

Dr. Fell is arguing with the medical examiner about something that she's doing that could ruin her career. Alaric intervenes and the scrawny ME is all "bitches be crazy!" Alaric threatens him. Dr. Fell takes her leave. Alaric flirts and looks SO DREAMY.

Stefan arrives, commandeering the giant knife someone left on a table. Sure, why not. He follows a hybrid who looks like a younger, taller, cuter Jamie Kennedy upstairs and stabs him in the gut. Before he can remove his head, Damon swoops in and tells him to keep his decapitations to a minimum at town events. Stefan wants to hold up his end of the ultimatum and Damon employs reason to try and talk his brother out of it. I can't believe I said it either. It's a world gone mad. Damon reminds his brother that as long as Klaus is around and hell bent on hybrid minions, Elena is his human juice box. Stefan claims he doesn't care about Elena now that he's no longer compelled to do so. Stefan calls him on his bullshit. Damon insists that if Stefan wants to beat the villain, he needs to be smarter. Stefan argues that he just needs to be a better villain. I'm sad to discover Stefan thinks "smarter" and "better villain" could be mutually exclusive. This is exactly why they need Elijah - he had so much left to teach them!

Out in the crypt, Matt, Elena and Caroline are drunkenly giggling when Tyler arrives. Matt immediately stands and flexes his protective muscle (DIRTY!). Caroline insists it's fine and goes outside with Tyler to talk. I know that Matt's the one who broke up with Caroline but it still breaks my heart when she's all girlfriendy with Tyler right in front of him. Elena's too, which is why she hands him the tequila and asks if he's alright. He takes a swig and tells her he just wants Caroline to be happy. In fact, he just wants all of his friends and their buckets of supernatural crazy to be happy. This conversation really emphasizes his last human standing status, it's exciting and sad and beautiful at once. Sometimes this show is perfect and this is one of those times.

Elena admits that she shouldn't have inflicted compulsion on her brother but she didn't know how else to protect him and she can't lose any more loved ones. Matt just listens, he doesn't judge.

Outside, Tyler is excited to tell Caroline how he stood up to the boss man and how, when it comes to his woman, Special K has no control over him. Caroline tries to be sensible but Tyler won't allow it because he loves her. They kiss, it gets passionate, and he bites her on the collar bone. "Oh no. Oh my God!" He gasps when he realizes what he's done. Caroline scolds the bad doggy and he runs away to freak out about this new discovery that he's always under the thrall so long as Klaus exists. Poor Tyler, this long death march of his is so incredibly tragic. Every time I think about how I know he's going to die this season I want to send Michael Trevino and his expressive eyes a box of cookies wrapped in a giant hug.

That's when Matt and Elena go out to find Caroline because Elena's worried she'll take Tyler back and also because they ran out of tequila. Stefan has had all the tender friendship moments he can stomach so he drops by to toss Matt head first into a brick wall and abscond with Elena. Oh Stefan, you dimmer-switched scamp! While speeding off with Elena in the Porsche, Stefan intercepts a call from Damon and tips his hand - he's going to kill Elena so Klaus can't make any more hybrids, thereby proving once and for all that he's the villainier villain. Elena and Damon do not like this plan. Stefan tosses her cell out the window and ignores her pleas to be let out of the car.

Damon alerts Klaus to Stefan's big plan and suggests that Klaus disband his minion army. Klaus is sure Stefan is bluffing because of his undying love for Elena but Damon is in full panic mode so he plays his trump card on Klaus by whispering his sweet nothings really close to Klaus's face. Klaus can NOT resist the close-talking. It is his Achilles heel.

Matt carries Caroline into her house and tells the Sheriff how she's hallucinating and none of their friends who know about this supernatural shit are answering their phones. Caroline cries in pain and apologizes to her mom and Matt. Thank God I believe in the extreme super-powers of Caroline's awesomness or I'd be VERY UPSET with this turn of events.

Elena and Stefan exposition fight in the speeding car. She screams and he turns the quiet menacing up to a million, "maybe I'll just turn you into a vampire." If you're wondering where they went, all the dirty thoughts in the world are running through my head right now. Stefan calls Klaus and gives him another chance to get the hybrids out of Mystic Falls. Klaus isn't interested. Stefan promises to drive Elena off of the Death Bridge if Klaus doesn't reconsider. "You won't kill her," Klaus taunts. Stefan force feeds her some of his blood and Klaus's feathers ruffle. He finally agrees to send the army on maneuvers elsewhere. Stefan scares the shit out of everyone by stopping at the last possible second.

Elena is pissed that he'd pretend to kill her in the same place she already almost died once. Stefan admits that he just needed her to be terrified so that Klaus would believe it. She wants to talk about what would have happened if Klaus hadn't blinked. I think if we're going to play the What If game, we should talk about how different things would be if Elijah weren't a pin cushion right now. Yelling, shouting, crying, reason, feelings, denial, awesome. Stefan's dimmer switch momentarily loses control of his face and it goes all "soulful old-school Stefan" before he pulls himself together, acts like he doesn't give a fuck and drives off, leaving Elena in the middle of Death Bridge covered in tears and blood. If there isn't an emo song somewhere with those exact lyrics, then I don't think our moody teenagers are trying hard enough.

Matt answers the door at the Forbes house to find Klaus looking faux-contrite. Matt's not having it. Klaus wants to help by healing Caroline and if the Sheriff will simply invite him in and promise to support him, he'll do just that. I won't even ask why Matt didn't just carry Caroline out to the porch for this. What kind of idiot invites Klaus into her home? Yes, that's right. The kind that's the sheriff of a vampire-, werewolf- and hybrid-infested town. As he walks past Matt, Klaus totally shoots him a "neener-neener" side-eye. Heh, what a bitch.

When Klaus finds Caroline in her bed, she asks if he's going to kill her. "On your birthday?" Klaus replies and I think he's really beside himself that she'd even consider it. Then again, he could just be playing her. He's very hard to read with all the crazy and evil oozing out of him all the time. He takes notice of her charm bracelet and talks her through the finer points of celebrating birthdays when you're immortal. He sits down on the bed for a heart to heart - he'll let her die if she decides she doesn't want to deal with it anymore, but if she's interested, there's a whole world of amazing things she could live to see and all she has to do is ask him to save her. The creepy, beautiful deal-with-the-devil vibe in this scene makes my cheeks flush and the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Caroline tells him she doesn't want to die. He picks her up and helps her drink from his wrist. "Happy Birthday, Caroline," he whispers. Yowza.

Damon brings Elena home (having...sensed that she needed a ride? Asking questions can only lead to more questions so I'm moving on). She tells him she'll be fine and he says that Stefan was kind of the hero today. He touches her face and looks into her eyes. "You can't kiss me again," she tells him. He knows but she seems way less sure. She says it isn't right and he says it is, "just not right now." They say goodnight and she goes inside. When he leaves she lingers in the doorway to picture him naked. We've all been there.

The next morning Elena is hugging Jeremy goodbye and telling him to be safe. He turns to go but Bonnie comes running up the porch. She wants to tell him that he's been brainwashed, that he shouldn't go, but instead she hugs him and says goodbye. He grabs his bags, turns to smile at Elena and Bonnie one last time as the soundtrack sings "you'll never say goodbye," and he's gone. I'm not sure if this is denial or a coping mechanism or both, but I refuse to believe that Jeremy is really gone. I think this is the writers putting the character on ice for now so they can bring him back later to save the day at the most unexpected moment. If you know something different, keep it to yourself. Hope is all I've got.

Caroline wakes to find a jewelry box and card reading "from Klaus." It's a diamond tennis bracelet which is what all the undead high school seniors are wearing this year. Some shit is about to go DOWN with Klaus and Caroline, y'all. I have too many thoughts to process how I feel about this development at the moment. Every time I try to wrap my brain around the possibilities it's like the screen inside my head freezes and I just get the message: buffering.

The Bridge of Death and Sadness. Elena is staring into the river when Matt finds her, "you're not gonna jump are ya?" She tells him that she's been thinking about his assessment of the gang as "stuck." That is how she feels, like she keeps trying to hold on to the normalness of the girl she used to be because she was the connection to her parents. He tells her it's ok to let go of that girl. He smiles and tells her that, as a guy who knew the other girl, this girl is doing a lot better than she thinks she is. Then he pics a few flowers from the side of the road, "here lies Elena Gilbert; a fun girlfriend...and an amazing friend." OH MY GOD, MAKE OUT! Elena smiles at him and he tosses the flowers into the river. I've spent the last 2 1/2 seasons wanting Matt to be with Caroline and therefore really against Matt and Elena having any sort of relationship relapse but that scene changed my mind. I still want Matt and Caroline to get back together in the long-term but in the short-term, someone should be kissing him and I'm perfectly comfortable with it being Elena. I mean, it's not like she has any other good looking men to make out with, right?

Mystic Grill. Dr. Fell stops in for some liquid lunch and small talk with our favorite alcoholic. She has a story about losing a patient. He's sad to have said goodbye to Jeremy. They're only having beer and his hair looks fine so it doesn't really even seem sad or tragic.

Liz is showing Damon the body of the medical examiner, who's presently lying dead in the woods with a stake through his human heart. Damon's like "why am I here? This isn't even supernatural." She tells him it was a murder. DUN! I feel like the only reason she'd invite Damon out to see a regular old human murder is as some kind of show-and-tell. "Look! We have normal grisly murders too! Yay!" You have to admire a woman who can make her own fun, I suppose.

Next week: partial nudity, chains, and family drama. Just another day in the salt mines.

The End Is Nigh...Again

2012-01-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

I have, for all intents and purposes, bid farewell to One Tree Hill more times than I can count. Some of those times were because I was sure the network would not renew the show for another season. Some of those times were because the network had already expressed its intent to cancel the show. Some of those times were because I lost interest in the show (I actually did quit watching for 1/2 a season several years ago but then had to start again because...well, just because). Most of those times, the show aired an episode that could function perfectly as a series finale so in addition to my acceptance of its inevitable end, I was given adequate closure.

I spent the entirety of last season ready and even anxious for that to be the last. Not because my affection for the show or the characters had abated, but because it was just time. The residents of Tree Hill go through some shit and it's because I like them so much that I think they've suffered enough. After 9 years of car accidents, heart attacks, weddings, babies, kidnappings, murders, and hairstyles I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, these people deserve to live out the rest of their days in boredom and peace. And it felt like the show agreed because for the most part, last season was a whole lot of not much that culminated in happy endings for all. Then the network announced it was renewed for one final, shortened season and I was like "I mean, I guess that's nice for them but, I'm out."

Who was I kidding? I have been here for 8 years already, I'm certainly not going to jump ship with 13 episodes to go. So back I came last night for the premiere of the 9th and final season and was left with mixed emotions.

What I liked about the episode:

I'm really glad Chris Keller is back because he's a very entertaining character who has always added something fun and enjoyably awful (yes, that's a thing, and if you watch this show you should totally get it) to the show. And while I didn't have these feelings in any of his previous appearances on the show, last night I was a bit overcome by how hot Chris Keller got. Tyler Hilton can get it, y'all!

The people I love most on the show were all there and most of them had something worthwhile to do. I'm disappointed that Nathan's role will be smaller this season but some James Lafferty is better than none at all so I'll roll with it. Brooke and Haley are busy being moms and running the newly reopened cafe and they have great husbands and cute babies so extra helpings of yay for all of those things. Victoria is back and as crazily fun to have around as ever and while I hate Dan more than words, he really is an integral part of the show and absolutely needs to be around this season. Plus, Dan being homeless and having to stay in Naley's guest room is so deliciously wrong it gives me a case of the snickers.

The set up of something that's clearly terrible at the opening of the episode is appropriately melodramatic and insane for One Tree Hill, even if it does seem to fly in the face of my wish that all of the denizens of The Hill end the series happy, healthy and living perfect, boring lives for the rest of eternity. (But for real, if Nathan is under that sheet in the morgue, I will kill someone.)

What I didn't like about the episode:

You guys, I do not care about Chase and Alex. I barely cared about them in previous seasons when their storylines were entwined with those of Haley, Nathan, Mouth, Brooke and Julian but when their storyline is only about them? No. Remember last year when Chase had an entire arc that was just about him and Chuck? CHUCK? Why is this happening? Last night Alex had one useful role to play - that of allowing Chris Keller to flaunt his Chris Kellerness - but spent, like, 10 full minutes of screen time wiggling her barely-clad butt in my face while Chase was like "bar manager, sex life, underpants, lip-purse." Nathan made phone calls from an airport and he was 3000 times more interesting then everything Alex and Chase did. Plus even with all of his clothes on, he was a million times hotter than they could every hope to be.

Quinn and Clay. I feel guilty about this because there was a time I genuinely liked these characters and thought their stories were worthwhile, but that time has passed and now I just zone out when they're on the screen and have thoughts like "how is that loose-ass, low-cut top not falling right off of her" and "what happened to Robert Buckley and has anyone put out an APB on his neck?" Even with their presence in the opening montage of sadness, despair and bad things, I still can't manage to give a rip what's going on in their lives.

My heart will not break if Millie remains MIA but that Chase, Alex, Clay and Quinn all got screen time while Mouth was completely absent is unacceptable. Obviously Skills is gone (Antwon Tanner's legal troubles and all) but Mouth? He's one of the core group! WTF, Schwahn?

Not enough Jamie. Jackson Brundage is C-U-T-E and Jamie adds a lot to the show. He's dependably great in scenes with literally everyone else in the cast so why did he only get 30 seconds of screen time last night? More Jamei, less Alex's panties, guys. Come on.

I'm in this thing to the bitter end of course, but I'm hoping the bitter end has a whole lot less Chase and a whole lot more of...well, pretty much everyone else. Except Chuck.

Month In Reviews

2012-01-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

I'm back! After an unplanned and very long hiatus for which my only excuse is "the holidays are hectic," because I'm not terribly original, I have things to say again. I watched a TON of stuff and I'm a little mad at myself for not dropping in to talk about any of it here. I can't remember all of the movies I watched and I'm not even going to try, but here are some thoughts about the TV shows I that've kept me company these last several weeks.

Wildfire - I don't know why it took me so long to discover ABC Family and their stable of original programming. I wasted YEARS not being obsessed with their shows when said shows are perfectly crafted to push every one of my TV soft spot buttons. Wildfire has joined Greek and Make It Or Break It at the top of the heap of ABC Family shows that I hate myself for not finding sooner.

Netflix had been recommending Wildfire to me for a while before I finally gave in. I'm not going to lie, I was less than interested in a show about a horse. But Genevieve Padalecki is so pretty and it I had a fair amount of TV watching time over the holidays so I decided to give the pilot a shot. I was hooked from the start. That damn horse made me sob on so many occasions. And Gen is a seriously good crier so she misted me up on more than one occasion herself.

But what I really loved about the show was Junior. Junior was Pacey Perfect which is my kryptonite. If you don't know what I mean by Pacey Perfect, I am sorry that your life is not as full as it could be, but allow me to explain: when Dawson's Creek began, Pacey Witter was the smart-ass, fuck-up friend of the introspective, blandly-broody, self-unaware leading man. He nailed his teacher and endured humiliations and was generally the anti-hero in a story where the "hero" was, for many of us, kind of an insufferable tool. But hard as the writers tried to make us think of Pacey as the second, less appealing banana, he was dreamy. He was funny, irreverent, smart, possessed of normal human flaws. He also had a way with women - making them feel beautiful and smart and funny and desired but never like they were objects. And it didn't hurt that he had Josh Jackson's face.

What I'm looking for in a TV boyfriend is a someone who seems like a real person and who the writers don't want me to believe is perfect. Junior was that guy. He started out as kind of a cocky schmuck with his overt come-ons, his rich kid swagger and his Porche, but after a few episodes it was clear that he was the one who was going to be a stand-up guy as a love interest for Kris, a friend to Matt and a brother. Every time he had to choose between Kris and someone or something else, he chose Kris. And while he pointed that out on more than one occasion, he never did it as a ploy to win her over, he did it because he loved her. I struggled to understand what the eff the writers were thinking when they hooked Matt and Kris up for a short time because Matt was definitely into Kris from the jump but she had no chemistry with him and was clearly in love with Junior all along.

As I mentioned on Twitter, ABC Family seems to have a Headshot Casting policy that does not require their actors possess any actual ability to act and this show was exhibit A in that argument but despite some terrible acting, it was a really infections watch. The characters were (mostly) really likable or really hateable as I like all of my TV characters to be (nothing worse than a character that is less interesting than an arm chair) and they wrapped it up with a satisfying fourth season and a really terrific finale. Now if you'll excuse me, I need a to go find a tissue for these flashback tears.

Downton Abbey - I am not going to do any sort of justice to this show or how much I love it. Since watching the entire first season in a day (via Netflix Instant, of course), I have implored everyone I know to watch and when they ask me what it's about I spend half an hour stammering all "period piece" and "British classism" and "dry wit interspersed with understated drama." They all just look at me like I've recommended they watch a Republican primary debate.

I can't sell this show. I can't explain what makes it the best show I've watched in a very long time, but it is. From the moment Mr. Bates arrived at Downton in the pilot I was in love. Full to the rafters with characters, there is not a single person on the show for whom I don't have strong feelings. Most of those feelings are warm, fuzzy feelings of love and steadfast devotion; some of those feelings are of vile hatred and burning rage (hiya O'Brien and Thomas!). But hard as I try to be like "and there's this really sweet valet who is in love with a lady's maid but they hardly ever talk to each other and they never kiss and it's all very chaste and heartbreaking," people are not seeing why that's interesting. I could tell them about the time Mary killed a diplomat with her lady parts but then if they do watch, that's a serious bummer of a spoiler.

The premiere of the second season last night was astonishingly good. I lost track of the number of times I shouted "fuck off!" or "ohmygod, MAKE OUT!" or "back up off Bates' woman!" at the TV. I probably scared the neighbors when I woo'd at the long-awaited smoochies. I'm sure the earth briefly stopped spinning when I actually, gulp, felt sorry for Thomas and then realized that I sort of LOVE that O'Brien has a crush on Mr. Lang. Fret not, much of my fiery rage has been redirected off of O'B and Thomas and onto the Evil Mrs. Bates. Anna and the Crawleys need to cut a bitch.

I am beside myself with glee that this show exists. If you haven't watched it yet, you really must. I know that I'm doing it no justice at all but trust me, I would not steer you wrong.

One Tree Hill (Seasons 1-4+) - A rewatch sparked by my friend Lisa's interest in watching the show for the first time. It had been ages since I did a proper rewatch of any part of this show and I don't think I've ever rewatched the post-high school years. This show gets some shit, and rightfully so, for being kind of cheesy and ridiculous (there was that time a dog ate someone's heart) but it doesn't get enough credit for being funny and sweet and cheesetastic, or for having the single greatest married couple on TV who are not Coach and Tami Taylor.

I am on record as having only lukewarm feelings for the show when it first premiered and it was shoving the "Lucas is the new Dawson" agenda down my throat. But once they stopped playing Nathan as the one-dimensionally evil brother and let everyone on the show have a personality that resembled that of a human being, things got a lot more interesting and Nathan became Pacey Perfect. Rewatching actually makes me enjoy the earliest episodes more - partly due to nostalgia and partly because it's fun to see how far they've come. I skipped a lot of season two on the grounds that no one should have to live through Felix and Anna twice, but I've especially loved reliving the 3rd, 4th, and what I've seen of the 5th season so far (next up for me: Lucas/Lindsey wedding ep).

Rewatching makes me love Brooke, Nathan and Haley even more but it also makes me hate Lucas more. I was a bit of a Peyton apologist the first time around and I still think Peyton is fine and occasionally likable for most of the first 4 seasons but man alive is she AWFUL in the 5th season. I don't know why either Lindsey or Haley never punched her square in the face. I also don't know why no one ever told her that all of her shirts she wears in S5 look like they're bodysuits that she forgot to snap the crotch on. What the fuck was THAT look all about? And speaking of awful, the scene between Victoria and Rachel reminded me that she's the female Dan and no matter how funny she can be, she's still just a hateful bitch.

This trip down memory lane also renewed my insatiable desire for a One Tree Hill spinoff featuring Nathan and Chris Keller having a love/hate bromance wherein Nathan punches Chris Keller in the nose at least once per episode. Tell me you wouldn't watch the shit out of that show!

It is not an exaggeration to say that I've spent all day wishing I were still sick just so I could go home and watch another dozen or so episodes of OTH without guilt.

Monte Carlo Dreams, Miami Instincts

2011-12-08T09:44:00.001-07:00

I interrupt the unplanned holiday hiatus here on Phantom Rats to bring you some thoughts on last night's Revenge winter finale.

Without question, this show has been great fun to watch from day one. It's the best kind of bat shit crazy and even the stuff I don't like about it (Declan), I don't like in a fun way. But last night was the weakest episode thus far in my opinion and while every show is entitled to an off week and occasional imperfections, I was sorry to see the show break for a month on a boring, sour note.

Tyler, while slimy and despicable, has been a fairly worthwhile foil for Emily since his arrival. I very much enjoyed Nolan taking over the plot to bring him down because Nolan is pretty great as Emily's sidekick but I was excited to see him get a chance to scheme on his own. Unfortunately, it looks like our Nolan has some capital-i Issues because he went and developed feelings for the little gigolo. Nolan sat back, knowing he was being worked and just...let him self get worked (DIRTY!)? What is that? I thought Nolan could play the vengeance game like a big girl. I thought he was deceitful and duplicitous and liked messing with people's lives. Turns out, he's just kind of a sad, lonely, self-loathing chap who thinks that a thieving man whore is good enough for him. Frankly, I blame Amanda.

Yeah, that's right, I can find a way to make the ruination of Nolan Amanda's fault. If she had left town when she was supposed to, Nolan would still be hanging around the bar trying to make Jack like him which would keep his loneliness in check so that he doesn't have time to mistake a decent BJ for a relationship. You guys, Amanda is ruining everything.

Have you ever had a conversation with a person that went like this:

Jack: It's weird Sammy doesn't love you since you were his first owner.
Amanda: I was? Oh, yeah. No, I totally was and I completely knew that but I just probably blocked it out because of how sad it is that my dad was arrested and stuff.
Jack: Totally. Let's get married.

No you have not because real people with real brains would never buy that sort of crap-ass lying. A real person would have heard that and been like "yeeeeah...so I'm pretty busy but we should do this again some time. Don't call me, I'll call you." And then change their number. I know those kinds of conversations happen on TV all the time so I'm not singling out Revenge here, but everyone doing it doesn't make it any less irritating. I admit that it's possible I find this particularly galling because I don't support an Amanda/Jack relationship. Amanda isn't good enough for him. Jack is already saddled with Declan as a brother, he doesn't need another poorly-accessorized idiot in his life. (Seriously, what is up with the Claire's clearance rack necklace Amanda always has tucked into her shirt between her boobs? If you're that desperate for people to gaze at your cleavage, why not just ask them to do so? It would be infinitely less annoying to look at.)

Jack and Nolan aren't the only people Amanda's presence is sullying. Emily's focus has been split by A's unexpected drop-in which is throwing her off her game. So now she has to take a refresher course in revenge from her Ninja Master who is, frankly, disappointed in what she's getting herself up to. He's particularly displeased with how she's got all these FEELINGS for Daniel who should be nothing more than an impossibly attractive pawn in the grand scheme to bring Victoria down. There was a time when I would have thought that Emily could easily shut down actual feelings to carry out her vendetta but I'm no longer sure. She hasn't busted out the red sharpie in weeks, she appears to be helping Amanda cozy up to Jack, and the scariest thing she did this week was get in Nolan's face and call his "boyfriend" a hooker. Compared to the Emily who duped a greedy bastard into getting arrested for insider trading, got a woman being thrown off a balcony, and kidnapped a shady shrink? Not so tough.

Overall the show was fine last night. I was entertained and even intrigued but I didn't talk to the TV once and usually I'm all "holy shit"s and "what the fuck"s. If I'm invested, I'm vocal. If I'm silent, I'm bored.

I continue to wonder why Declan exists, why no one will tell Connor Paolo to drop the accent, and why he wears so many rings. I still think Ashley is pretty but I can't care about someone who is less integral to the plot than a jar full of sea glass. This episode felt like so much filler which is a bummer note to go out on. Fortunately, the promo for the first ep back in January was 6 kinds of awesome so I still manage to look forward to what's to come.

As long as what's to come involves Amanda getting the hell out of the Hamptons. Forever.

Winter and Soup Make Me Happy

2011-12-05T08:57:00.001-07:00

I make good soup. I know that probably sounds braggy but it's true. I look forward to winter all year just so I can spend my weekends making and eating soup. Sometimes I follow existing recipes; sometimes I find recipes and tweak them more to my tastes; sometimes I make them up as I go along. Yesterday I made one up that was so good I had to name it and share it with everyone.

Italian Christmas Soup
(12+ servings)

2 pounds Italian seasoned ground Turkey or Italian sausage
1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 14oz cans diced Italian seasoned tomatoes
1 14oz can crushed tomatoes
1 48oz carton low sodium chicken broth
5 medium carrots, thickly sliced
2 packages cut frozen spinach
1 large zucchini, quartered and thickly sliced
1 1/2 cups dry orzo pasta
2 Bay leaves
1 T dried basil
1 T dried thyme
2 T olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

In large stock pot, heat olive oil over medium high heat. Add garlic and sweat for 1 minute. Add onion, salt and pepper; cook until the onions are just translucent. Add meat brown. Turn heat down to low, add carrots, tomatoes, broth, basil, bay, and thyme. Cover and let simmer over low heat until carrots are tender (approximately 2.5 hours). Add spinach and zucchini, cook for 20 minutes. Add orzo and continue to cook until pasta is tender. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve topped with a bit of shredded Parmesan cheese.

Weekend In Reviews

2011-11-21T07:43:00.001-07:00

The start of the holiday season means there are fewer first-run shows on TV and more time to watch whole seasons (or series) of shows you haven't seen before. I decided to get a jump on the holiday hiatus with a couple of marathon's over the weekend (which I justified by a) getting up early and walking half a dozen miles and b) being a little under the weather).

Firefly - I have long been a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. The work Joss Whedon did on those shows, particularly Buffy, made for some of my favorite TV moments ever and was in many ways groundbreaking and criminally under appreciated by the masses. Still, my affection for Whedon's work never led me to watch his later shows. With Firefly, I heard "space western" and my first thought was "way to combine two things I don't really care about into one thing I really don't care about!" I should have known better.

In the late nineties, there was nothing that should lead me to believe I'd like a show about a teenage girl who fights vampires and the forces of darkness so, while a space western doesn't sound like something I'd find interesting, I should've realized that Firefly isn't a show that can be so easily put in a box and dismissed. Like the Whedon shows that came before, at its heart this is a show about an unconventional family in unlikely circumstances.

The circumstances here are a world 500 years in the future. Earth has become uninhabitable and man has taken to space to colonize and terraform other planets in other galaxies. While the more industrialized planets near the center pushed for unification, the outer planets wanted independence. War is waged, rebels lose, Alliance is born, rebels become outlaws, yadda yadda yadda. Our particular band of outlaws resides on a Firefly spaceship called Serenity.

Our family here has the Whedon-y staples: father figure Shepherd Book (Ron Glass), kick-ass chick Zoe (Gina Torres), reluctant hero Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), wise-ass side-kick Wash (Alan Tudyk), quirky side-kick Kaylee (Jewel Staite), stuffy tight-ass Dr. Simon Tam (Sean Maher), cukoo mystery girl River Tam (Summer Glau), morally ambiguous tough guy Jayne (Adam Baldwin), and beautiful love interest Inara (Morena Baccarin). As the story begins many of these people have never met and have no loyalty to each other but when you're in the shit together, you form bonds pretty quickly.

The stories were predominantly adventures of the week as the crew of Serenity worked jobs to either help friends or make money but the central "mystery" or "adventure" revolved around the cryptic things that the Alliance had done to River to render her kind of nuts and the various ways our little family kept River and themselves from being captured by the Alliance. Because the show was cancelled rather abruptly, there was no resolution to that story. We also never got to find out about Shepherd's inscrutable past or see the further development of the romantic relationships between Mal and Inara or Kaylee and Simon.

The show had a lot of potential and I enjoyed the hell out of it but it wasn't perfect and even aside from the phrase "space western" I can understand why the audience may have been slight. For starters, that theme song was abysmal. It played up the "western" aspect of the story so hard it was off-putting. Like the sort of "tear in my beer" cheeseball country ditty that my grandpa would have sang along to in his most mocking tone, but with nary a hint of irony. The introductory exposition at the start of most episodes was fine, though the version narrated by Shepherd was preferable to the version narrated by Mal. Mal's version had him speaking in a far more slang-riddled, countryfied, dumbed-down manor than he ever used in the show proper which was a cloying choice at best considering Mal was never sold as an unintelligent sort.

Whether certain members of the cast were possessed of limited range or just strange acting choices, the result was that not all performances were of the same caliber and a scene or two suffered for it. The best actors in the bunch really sold the Whedony dialogue though and it was great fun (as it always is) to be along for the ride. I was particularly fond of Tudyk's, Baldwin's, and Fillion's ease with the snappy one-liners, Staite's Willow-y dorkish sweetness, and Glass's quiet, fatherly wisdom.

Despite any limitations in range or talent, I did care about all of these characters and enjoyed watching them very much. While the show ended abruptly with no finality, there is often a sort of perfectness to finishing something without ending it. As I've learned to love the way that My So-Called Life closed, I've come to see that open-endedness is sometimes more satisfying in the long run.

Serenity - Unfortunately, the open-end of Firefly beget a motion picture to satisfy the curiosity of the show's rabid fans. For me, the end that Serenity brought was far less satisfying than the openness of the series. I liked the show a great deal and hoped that the movie would stay true to the things about the show that made it fun and interesting but found instead that the movie set out to answer the River question at the expense of everything else that made the show worth careing about.

It was very clearly stated in Firefly that Simon did not know what the Alliance had done to River or why and as Serenity begins, we see him getting an entire presentation from one of the government quacks about what sort of weapon they're turning River into along with the how and why. That history re-write started the whole endeavor out on the wrong foot for me and it never really found its way back into my good graces.

We knew that Inara was going to be taking her leave of Serenity at the end of Firefly because she no longer wanted to deal with the fact that she was totally in love with Mal, but when the movie started and Shepherd was nowhere to be seen, I was pissed. He's living on some planet called Haven now? Why? Over the course of the series, Shepherd Book had become terribly fond and protective of his flock aboard Serenity and his unexplained departure from the ship really pissed me off.

I won't lie, the worst part of the movie for me was that not everyone made it out alive. Some of my favorites didn't survive the final fights of Buffy or Angel either (RIP, Anya!), but dying at the end of 5 or 7 seasons is a bit different than dying after 14 episodes and a movie. While one death was filled with melodrama and sadness after the character had been given short shrift through the entirety of the movie, the other came almost as the twisted punchline of a joke and neither was, in my opinion, a befitting end to the characters I'd come to adore from the television series.

While it was nice, I guess, to answer the burning questions of what happened to River and why, I think I would have found the movie more satisfying if those answers had come as a secondary plot to something more fun and more inclusive of the rest of the cast. I appreciate the way everyone banded together to help the Tam siblings, but the story marginalized the importance that other members of the family had played in the larger story by giving them little to do in this particular adventure.

In conclusion, I'm really glad I watched Firefly but I wish I'd skipped Serenity.

Weekend In Reviews

2011-11-14T09:28:00.001-07:00

Party Down, Season 2 - As much as I enjoyed the first season of Party Down, i liked the second even more. Taking nothing at all away from Jane Lynch or the Constance character, I thought Megan Mullally's Lydia was a terrific addition to the cast and I liked that Lizzy Caplan was given more to do and more opportunities to be funny in the second season.

It seemed like the entire enterprise blossomed in the second season with the chemistry between every member of the team coming off as slightly more effortless and real. The parties were by and large more funny ridiculous than monotonous backdrop and the energy was higher. I particularly enjoyed "Jackal Onassis Backstage Party," "Steve Gutenberg's Birthday," "Cole Landry's Draft Day Party," and "Constance Carmell Wedding."

Bad Teacher - I didn't like this movie so much that I was kind of mad at myself for watching it at all. The entire plot of the film rests on everyone who has ever met Cameron Diaz's Elizabeth to be so stupid that they can't tell she's a rude, gold-digging bitch. That might be an easier pill to swallow if the character had been making some effort to hide that about herself but she wasn't. She is openly hostile and inappropriate at every turn and yet an entire movie's worth of people are like "she's so great!"

No one in this movie even acted as if they were playing a human being. Everyone had it cranked up to a million like they were playing an over-the-top, giant caricature. It was like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade of acting. The notable exception was Jason Segal who resembled an actual person and one I might even not hate.

Bridesmaids - This may be a case of waiting too long to see a movie after hearing raves about how funny it was but I just thought it was ok. There were funny parts and it was a decent enough story but it felt very long and it wasn't as funny as I'd been led to believe.

The problem with hearing what everyone else thought before you see a movie is that sometimes you expect something the movie had no intention of delivering. I suppose I expected non-stop riotous laughter without the usual romantic girl meets boy angle. Oddly enough, while I didn't expect, want or need a romance in the movie, that was one of the best things about it for me. After the three or four scenes between just Maya Rudolf and Kristen Wiig. And the one scene between Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy.

I would recommend this to other people but I guess I'd advise them to temper their expectations lest they spend the bulk of the movie asking themselves, "yeah...but wasn't it supposed to be, like, REALLY funny?"

Thor - I don't know who this movie was aimed at or what that particular demographic thought of it but this movie was so many things at once that I experienced some kind of sensory overload that led to me genuinely enjoying the movie for no discernible reason.

It's completely ridiculous on its face and it is rather blatantly two completely different movies pasted together with spit and tape. The portion that takes place on earth is a sort of standard-issue American action blockbuster with fakey science, a desert locale, shadowy government agency types, and a fair bit of snarking. The portion that takes place in Thor's home galaxy is like someone beaming images directly from the imagination of a 12 year old boy.

I think I may have been hypnotized by Chris Hemsworth's face and body and rendered incapable of passing critical judgement because while everything about it says I should have hated it and yet not only did I like it, I'm pretty sure I'd watch it again. It's a world gone mad.

More Family, More Problems

2011-11-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

I've been especially busy this week and haven't had time to sit down and give a proper rewatch/recap treatment to the last episode of The Vampire Diaries. But I certainly can't skip it entirely so it's more of a review this time.

By now you know how I feel about flashback-heavy episodes - I'm not a big fan. I understand that we need to get the back story and so they're unavoidable, but they are never my favorite episodes. Bad wigs aside (though, for real, the mens wigs are SO BAD), going way back means there's no room for the right now folks and I'm never going to be thrilled with an episode that shorts me on Caroline. I've learned to live with Matt-less eps but I can't abide leaving Caroline out.

As flashback episodes go, this one was...fine, I guess. It started really slow but managed to pick up momentum at about the half way mark. The acting was great and it looked pretty awesome. But to be honest, the things about the episode I found especially irritating weren't my usual flashback episode issues as much as they were issues with uncharacteristically sloppy writing. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but it seems to me that in their rush to advance this Original story, they're putting the cart before the horse.

Here's the thing, if you're going to flash back to the origins of the Original Family, you need to cast the entire original family. Last week we learned, via Rebekah's memories, how the Originals came to be vampires in the first place. As the story unfolded we saw Rebekah, Klaus, Elijah, Mikael (whom, it turns out, is the Original father - BOOM!), their mother and a much younger brother I'm calling Tiny Tym.

The story, in a nutshell, goes like this: life kinda sucked for our Viking Originals back in Europe so they packed up the proverbial truck and moved to a random spot in America that would one day become Mystic Falls. They set up camp among a tribe of werepeople, 'cause why not? Everything was rainbows and puppies until one night, when the werepeople had taken themselves out into the woods to have their time of the month in peace, Klaus snuck out of the house with Tiny Tym to watch their werepals wolf out. But curiosity killed the Tiny Tym which sent Mikael into one of his patented rages. He and the Missus cooked up a plan to help the family protect themselves against further wereviolence even if brought on by their own stupidity.

How would they do this? Well, Mama was a witch. Which witch? The Original Witch. Yeah, awesome. So she whipped up a spell that transformed her mortal children and husband into immortal undead beings. She remained mortal because, as Rebekah explains, you can either be a witch or you can be a vampire but you can not be both. Take a note, that'll probably be important later.

Once they were transformed, there was blood lust and rage and Mama ended up dead. Klaus was all "daddy did it!" so Elijah and Rebekah cremated her on a funeral pyre and buried her remains somewhere nearby then swore eternal vengeance against their father. But wait! There's more to the story! Klaus's pants are so totally on fire because he's the one who killed Mommy, and Daddy damn well knows it. He won't rest until Klaus is the kind of dead you don't come back from, which he can do because before his kids set fire to the white oak tree that could kill them, he totally grabbed a branch and whittled himself his very own Mr. Pointy.

In case you're wondering how we know the real story when Rebekah still believes Klaus's pack o' lies, it's because Alaric, Bonnie, and Elena have been translating the Pictionary Wall from the Lockwood Cave of Really Old Secrets. Elena takes this new news to Beks along with pictures in Rebekah's native "language" and is like "ya burnt!" Rebekah does not react well to this news and runs off in a huff.

Meanwhile, Elena is tired of trying to fix her little Humpty Dumpty so she puts Damon in charge of putting his brother back together again. Damon thinks that what Stefan really needs is a drink so he busts him out of the dungeon and takes him to a bar where he lets him drink the waitress. They run into Mikael who sticks his hand in Damon's chest and feels up his heart, threatening to rip it clean out if Damon doesn't tell him where Klaus is. Turns out that his love for Elena is so not going to be what pulls Stefan out of his Klaus-induced meanness. It will be his love for his brother, which they kind of should have known since that same love kept him from killing Damon even when he thought Damon was going to kill Elena back in season 1. And also because this show repeats the theme of "family is most important" more often than I brush my teeth.

So what is my problem? We know that there are more Originals chillin' in coffins in Klaus's Family Storage Unit. We know because we saw them and also because last season when Elijah let his brother live, it was because Klaus promised he had not sunk the "bodies" of their family members to the bottom of various oceans but, in fact, had "them" all in one place. If the Original family only consisted of the members we met in this flashback then we'd be out of bodies because Elijah and Rebekah are already accounted for, Mikael isn't dead (and wasn't with Klaus), Tiny Tym was never a vampire so no body to keep around, and Mommy was not a vampire and her ashes were buried in Mystic Falls (probably under the House Of Dead Witches because that's totally how this shit works). So why didn't we see any of these other people? Why wouldn't Rebekah's story at least have MENTIONED them like "Mom turned the 6 of us into vampires" or SOMETHING?

Because they haven't written or cast the others yet. Yeah, I know. But that's my point. Don't open a can of worms if you haven't thought about which worms need to be in it. And while we're on the subject, I'm retroactively annoyed that Rebekah wasn't in the flashbacks Elijah laid out for us when he was telling Elena the origins of the curse story last season. She says she was with Klaus right up until he killed her in 1920 so she should have been around when Katherine was mucking up the works in the 17th century. That's slightly less annoying on the grounds that she MAY not have been involved in the planting of the Sun and Moon Curse shenanigans in which case she might have been around at the time but not germane to the story.

While we're talking about Elijah though, I was glad to have him back and he looked as magnificent as I remember (his hair is perfection in any century), I can't believe they brought him in and basically just had him stand around doing and saying nothing. That's a tragic waste of Gillies' talents.

Anyway, it isn't that I didn't like the episode, the reveals, the new information or the origin story itself, I just wish they'd either cast the rest of the family (even if it had to be extras who kept their backs to the camera the whole time) or at least given us a decent reason why we didn't see anyone new. The alternative comes off as sloppy in a way that is well beneath the writers of this show.

Weekend In Reviews

2011-11-07T16:07:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take much to make me happy. I like cold weather, warm clothes, yummy food, good books, and TV and movies of varying levels of quality. This weekend made me very, very happy.

Chicken Tortilla Soup - I make the best chicken tortilla soup in the world. You don't have to believe me but it's true. And nothing tastes better on a cold, grey, rainy day than a big bowl of soup. Thick with chicken, hominy, black beans, tomatoes, and corn. Spicy and hearty, topped with sour cream, cheese and tortilla strips. My mouth is watering just talking about it.

Mockingjay - If you haven't read the Hunger Games series of books by Suzanne Collins, you're missing out on something really special. I don't believe I've ever read anything that so captured my imagination and my heart. Collins' writing style is economically vivid and emotionally intense without being manipulative. Mockingjay, the third and final book in the series, was my favorite. It was a satisfying, if heartbreaking end to the story of Katniss Everdeen and the country of Panem as well as an exciting adventure in its own right.

Every book in the series brought me to tears but none more than this. With happiness, with grief, with worry and with relief I wept for these characters whose fates I genuinely cared about.

I read these books because the people who had read them before me seemed to love them so much. Because the casting for the movie had people so vocal. Because I have heard from so many different people how fantastic they were. That's the sort of buildup that can lead to disappointment. When you go in expecting something truly amazing it is often impossible for the product to live up to the hype. My every expectation was met and, in fact, exceeded. I will now recommend these books, above all others, to everyone I know.

Prom - I love me some high school-set romcoms. Actually, if you make a movie or a TV show that involves teenage romance in any way, I will watch it at least once. And the chances are solid that I'll end up loving it on some level no matter how bad it is.

Prom is not bad. Prom is just...not good. The movie follows a handful of random people in the weeks leading up to their senior prom. Nothing special about it necessarily. The main focus of the narrative is Nova (Aimee Teegarden), the head of the prom committee, who's somewhat obsessed with throwing the "perfect" prom. When the boy she likes asks her to go "as a friend" and then bails, she ends up falling for misunderstood bad-boy Jesse (Thomas McDonell).

Other stories include the nerdy stoner kid and the girl who doesn't believe he's bringing the "Canadian" "girlfriend" he's told her about; the prom queen finds out her king is cheating on her with a gullible sophomore and dumps him, going to prom alone, looking gorgeous, and showing teenage girls everywhere that you do not need a boy to be awesome. Especially if he's a cheating dickhead; the kid who never bothered to make friends in school who's determined to take this last chance and asks nearly every girl to be his date before taking his step sister; the perfect couple who end up fighting when she acts weird rather than just tell him that she isn't going to college with him as they planned; and the sophomore boy with a crush on the king's strumpet-on-the-side.

The movie had a metric ton of shit going on and it mostly did a fine job weaving it all together but it seemed to me like it all could have been more interesting if it weren't trying to squeeze it into the 2 hours a movie provides. This would have made a much more interesting ABC Family series than a movie.

Take Me Home Tonight - I guess it's a post-college, transitioning-to-adulthood, coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the mid-'80s but mostly it was one '80s pop culture reference and pop hit after another that made a fine 90 minute soundtrack to doing laundry and dusting.

Topher Grace is reliably cute and likable and Chris Pratt was funny, slightly douchey, and completely idiotic in that way that he has which is impossible not to enjoy. But Anna Faris was practically a non-entity, Teresa Palmer was blandly forgettable, and Dan Fogler was unappealing bordering on appalling.

The movie seemed to want to be a throwback to the Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Weird Science days but it only made me miss John Hughes, who didn't have to try this hard to be entertaining. Like the story that Faris and Pratt repeat several times during the film, Take Me Home Tonight is intended to be funny but comes off redundant and tired. Skip it and watch the three I just mentioned instead. Maybe throw Can't Buy Me Love in for good measure because who doesn't enjoy the African Anteater Ritual, you guys? Come on.

Something Borrowed - Where to begin? I don't recall ever watching a movie with such loathsome characters. From the very start of the movie, when Kate Hudson's Darcy is throwing Ginnifer Goodwin's Rachel a birthday party, I was filled with rage. Darcy is repellently full of herself, obnoxious, rude, and not at all self-aware. She repeatedly mentions how attractive she is and why she "totally gets" people loving her. When her best friend Rachel quickly falls into bed with Darcy's fiance, Dex (Colin Egglesfield), I didn't feel bad for Darcy at all but I also didn't think much of Dex for having dated and gotten engaged to Darcy in the first place.

In theory, I guess we're supposed to find Rachel the most likable because she's the self-deprecating, nice-girl heroine but...not so much. She has spent a lifetime humoring Darcy and letting her have everything she wants. Having horrible friends means you either don't think enough of yourself to believe you deserve better friends or that you're secretly horrible yourself. And she's been mooning over her best friend's boyfriend since before Darcy and Dex even met. That's not uncommon in romcoms but in this case, Dex was so obviously into Rachel (as we're repeatedly shown in flashbacks) but Rachel's non-existent self esteem made her believe that he could never like her over Darcy so when Darcy showed up and flirted, Rachel practically FORCED the two of them to date. Dex gave her numerous opportunities to pick up the hints that he'd rather be with her but she willfully ignored them all. It's hard to like someone who doesn't like herself at all.

Still, of the three of these people, Rachel might be the most affable because in addition to carrying on a years-long romance with a wretched beast of a woman he doesn't seem to even remotely like, Dex also doesn't have the balls to live his own life or make a single decision that his father doesn't dictate for him. I don't care what he looks like, I can't find a spineless man attractive. Especially not one who'd rather cheat on his fiance/wife forever than admit he doesn't love her, or want to marry her just to mollify his parents.

Once they've front-loaded the picture with the worst people you can imagine, you meet the secondary characters - Marcus (Steve Howey) is a douchey, frat-rat type who thinks "charming" and "vile" are the same thing. He's full of himself, too loud, and just plain too much. How does he fit into the picture? He's a friend of Dex's. Ew. Claire (Ashley Williams) is Darcy's friend who can not take the hint that Ethan (John Krasinski) is not interested in her. She is up in his face, she's all over him, she's gross and clueless. Ethan has been friends with Rachel and Darcy since they were all children though it's pretty clear that Darcy and Ethan merely tolerate each other the way you tolerate that awful cousin you are forced to see at family holiday gatherings.

Ethan is likable. He's funny and charming and normal when everyone around him is the worst kind of fake and put-on. He's the only person in the entire movie who deserves better. He deserves better friends, better love interests, a better life and a MUCH MUCH better movie.

It wasn't just that I didn't care what happened to these characters - whether or not Dex dumped Darcy for Rachel or married her and lived a miserable, loveless life; whether Rachel found happiness with Dex or continued believing that she didn't deserve love; whether Darcy ever learned how to love someone without making every bit of the relationship all about her - it was that I actively wanted terrible things to befall these characters. I wanted Dex to be alone, miserable and loveless forever. I wanted Rachel to settle for someone awful that she would never love who would never love her because that's all she thought she deserved. I wanted Darcy to be hit by a bus. I hated these people and even now, a day later, I am angry that this movie exists and that I've seen it.

And goddammit, if John Krasinski is cast in another movie wherein he does NOT get the girl, I'm going to fucking riot.

Party Down Season 1 - Like Veronica Mars minus the drama plus extra comedy and foul language, this show was a gem that's just different enough to be strange without being absurd.

The characters are sketches based in a darker reality than most comedies venture into and most of the humor comes from misery rather than levity. Adam Scott and Martin Star are outstanding straight-man comedic actors who can be in the middle of the most ridiculously humorous moment without ever cracking a smile, Ken Marino and Jane Lynch excel at being the wacky, insane butt of the joke, and Ryan Hanson is simply adorable as the well-meaning, good looking, semi-doofus. Lizzy Caplan, for my money, is perhaps the least compelling member of the cast but that might be because her character has the least to do. Sometimes being the love interest when everyone else gets to be funny is the worst job there is.

So far, nearly every episode has featured a Veronica Mars alumnus (or, rather, an additional alumnus besides the three that star in the show), giving me a burst of joy with every familiar face because Veronica Mars is a show that I love so much I literally want even the smallest bit players to be wildly successful. I look forward to laughing my way through the second season before being disappointed in the state of television that yet another terrific show was gone too soon. Sigh.

Ghost Stories

2011-11-03T14:09:00.001-07:00

If you thought the live (and undead) people on The Vampire Diaries couldn't get any better looking, you were wrong. Five previously deceased characters showed up last week in ghost form looking even more scorching than they did before they were unceremoniously bumped off. One ghost showed up looking...like she was played by an entirely different actress. There are obviously plastic surgeons in the afterlife.

The Mystic Falls Event O' The Week is some kind of festival that celebrates something founder-related by turning out the lights and hanging lanterns everywhere. There is literally no reason for this "annual" event that we didn't see at the same time "last year," except that the lanterns make the second half of the episode really pretty. There are worse reasons to have a festival.

In the interest of finishing this "recap" before the next episode airs, here's the deal: remember when Vicki duped her adorable, lonely brother into a little hocus pocus so she could rejoin the land of the living in corporeal form? Well she basically opened a door that every ghost with "unfinished business" was then able to waltz through, no questions asked. Which ghosts have business you wonder? I'm so glad you asked: Anna has that pesky love of Jeremy and terminal loneliness; Lexi has a BFF who's off the wagon and off the rails; Uncle Mason has an idea about how to kill Klaus, thereby saving Tyler which is all he ever wanted to do in the first place; Freddy and the tomb vamps are holding the mother of all grudges as they STILL have their sights set on killing the founding families; and Grams has a whole ghosty mess to clean up for Bonnie. Let's see what kind of closure these ghosts can find, shall we?

Before the ghosts showed up, Elena was all "Lexi was the only person who could fix Stefan. Jeremy, please make a person-to-person through the veil of death and ask her how she did it. Thanks!" Jeremy protested because he said that peeping ghosts was a whole complicated process where you have to be thinking of them just as they're trying to talk to you and since he and Lexi never even met, he's not sure that'll work. But since he just didn't know about the open door, it was a moot point anyway.

Anyway, Elena is all about getting Stefan better at any cost until Lexi shows up, knocks Stefan unconscious and locks him up in the dungeony vamp torture cell under the jail. That's when Elena started to waffle.

Lexi might have somehow compelled Stefan to feel like he'd been off of human blood for a couple of months and then started trying to hurt him physically and emotionally trying to get his humanity to break through. Lexi is a total badass and I love her the most of all the dead ghosts. Yeah, even Uncle Mason. Also, Lexi looks AMAZING.

Anyway, Lexi was showing Elena the technique she has used to put Stefan back together after his numerous tumbles off the crazy wagon over the years and Elena was like "um...well...poor Stefan. Don't hurt him!" and then she ran away. Sometimes Elena wants to be a kick-ass, take care of shit girl and other times she just wants everything to be easy and manageable with no effort at all. That's the kind of thing you come to expect from life when your hair is that shiny.

Uncle Mason spends a little time taking the piss at Damon's expense by chaining him to a chair and running him through with a hot poker and stuff. When Damon realizes who is behind this, he goes to ask his ex-BFF for some help but Alaric literally says "we're not friends. I don't like you anymore!" Alaric might have swallowed a third grader. Eventually Uncle Mason materializes and saunters up to the bar for a drink with the boys. If I could make this scene last forever, I would. Uncle Mason wants to help Damon with a thing but first, he'd like Damon to apologize for ripping his heart out. Damon confuses "apologize" with "flirt" when he says, "sometimes I do things I don't HAVE to do" while his eyebrows wiggle wildly. I know Damon wants Alaric back but this new tactic of trying to make Alaric Jealous by flirting with the even-hotter-than-when-he-was-alive ghost of Hot Uncle Mason right in front of him is not the way to do it. Maybe try flowers, Damon. Everyone likes to be wooed.

Mason laughs off the non-apology and is ready to get down to business so off the two of them head to the Lockwood Dungeon of Werewolves, Slaves and Conveniently Located Powerful Weapons. They break through a wall and have a heart-to-heart and generally bond over how very screwed everyone is with Klaus around. Damon is impaled by a couple of large stakes that shoot out of the walls and pin him in place so I think it's fair to say that the people who hid the powerful weapon here weren't huge fans of vampires. Mason rescues him and then finds something amazing while Damon remains trapped behind a mystical barrier. Either someone still alive lives in that cave at the end of a long creepy tunnel, behind a brick wall, off of a werewolf dungeon; or there is some witchy juju afoot.

Jeremy is having a hard time choosing between his women. On the one hand, he loved Anna and he lost her without closure and she looks completely gorgeous since she died. On the other hand, Bonnie is beautiful and risked everything to bring him back from the dead and is alive. Decisions, decisions. When he worries that this corporeal ghost business may not last forever, he decides to make out with Anna. In the women's restroom at The Grill. Jeremy's application for "The Brains of the Operation" just hit the recycle bin.

Elena happens into the bathroom and finds her brother with his tongue in a dead girl's mouth. If I had a dime for every time I wrote that sentence.... Elena has a much stronger reaction to this development than I expected. She's really just pissed at herself for not being able to let go of Stefan even after Klaus broke him. Elena takes this opportunity to tattle on her little brother the way all big sisters do (believe me, I'm a big sister, I know) when she gets on the phone with Caroline and is all "Jeremy kissed Anna! And other stuff that somehow makes this relevant to the conversation we're having about ridding the town of ghosts."

Jeremy isn't ready to hear arguments in favor of sending Anna back from whence she came but he also isn't ready to hear arguments about how he has a live girlfriend that is not going to be into this particularly creepy threesome. Basically, he's dealing with this by plugging his ears and yelling "LALALALALALA! I can't hear you!"

Bonnie is having a bit of a day herself. She's figured out that the shit that went down with Matt and Vicki has caused the barrier between the living and the dead to spring a leak. She tries to talk to Matt about it but Matt already forgot how great it was to have something to fucking do on this show and is like, "not my fault! Not my fault!" and runs away. My love for Matt is permanent and unconditional but on the real, he needs to get his shit together immediately. Since Matt isn't in the mood to help fix this problem he totally helped create, Bonnie and Caroline go back to the House of A Hundred Dead Witches to conjure up Grams.

For a full 3 minutes after Grams arrives I was PISSED that they were trying to pull one over on us by recasting Grams. I honestly said "what is this SHIT? If Jasmine Guy isn't available, Grams stays dead. PERIOD!" Then I realized that I was looking at Jasmine Guy who has just had some work done since season one. Don't get me wrong, she looked great (even if 2/3 of her face didn't move) but she didn't look the same, like, AT ALL.

So a newly refreshed Grams lays it out: door open, foothold, unfinished business, ghosts, boom. Turns out that the ghost of a the original Klaus-spelling witch helped Vicki so that she could...no, I totally don't get it. Whatever, she helped and now the answer to sending the ghosts back to the dead side and cleaning up the mess in Mystic Falls is Elena's necklace which of course we know originally belonged to the witch. Caroline delivers this message to Elena while Elena's on the phone in the bathroom bitching about her brother and all the dead people he kisses. Anna hears and seems interested.

Caroline is off to Salvatore Acres to get the necklace which is not where Elena said it would be. She tosses the place in a non-destructive kind of way, making sure to look extra hard in the soap bowl, obvs. When it doesn't turn up, Caroline calls Jeremy and is like "your dead girlfriend took the necklace, make her give it back." Jeremy is sure that couldn't possibly be true but...it is. Don't ever question Caroline, Jeremy.

Caroline and Bonnie are out trying to track down the necklace and get it back to Spell Central when they run into Freddy and the Tomb Dwellers who've just finished off another Fell and are well on their way to making a meal of Mrs. Lockwood. She dispatches Bonnie and stays to beat the shit out of Freddie and his lackeys because Caroline is awesome.

Anna confesses to Jeremy that she swiped the necklace because she doesn't want to go back to the land of nothingness where she's all alone. She just really misses her mommy and in lieu of seeing Pearl again, she'd like to stay with Jeremy forever. I'd like to be mad at her for this but you guys, Pearl was awesome, and Jeremy is really good looking. I see where she's comin' from. Anna hands the necklace over and they have a moment and then Jeremy saunters (seriously, he takes his fucking time walking that bauble over to the House of a Hundred Dead Witches while Freddy and his peeps kill off founding family members and try (futilely) to best Caroline).

Once Bonnie has the necklace back, she tosses it in the fire and then she and Grams do a thing. The necklace melts and one by one all the ghosts disappear. Mason pops out of the cave before he has the chance to tell Damon what it is he's found that somehow holds the key to everything. That old adage is so true: you can lead a vamp to the answer but you can't show him what it is. Freddy and his lackeys take a poof just as Caroline is kicking their asses in the street while Mama Lockwood looks on all "fuck YEAH my son is dating this BAMF!" Or possibly more like "oh...so now I feel like an asshole for that time I had her kidnapped, tortured and almost killed. My bad." Lexi goes bye-bye in the midst of trying to break through to Stefan just before she gives Elena the final "get your shit together and FIX HIM!" pep talk. This one seems to take. Anna's walking alone down the middle of a street when she spies Pearl walking toward her. They hug. I cry. They disappear. Grams looks at Bonnie and has emotions her face is no longer able to convey to the rest of us. Bonnie is sad. Grams vanishes.

Now that all of the ghosts are gone, Jeremy wants to take this opportunity to explain to his girlfriend why he experimented with necrophilia. Bonnie is not in the mood right now and doesn't plan to be in the mood ever again. She sends him away and then the necklace explodes in the fire and unmelts itself. Never trust magic jewelry, that's what I always say.

Elena gives Stefan a tender ultimatum and then leaves. I'm not entirely sure she got what Lexi was trying to tell her but I do hope this tactic works, for her sake.

Damon called Alaric who came running to the Lockwood Dungeon of Crazy Shit to yell at Damon for calling him and expecting him to come running. Alaric wants to know why Damon called him and Damon's like "this is a job for a human." Whatever, the point is, he's been looking for an excuse to need Ric's help and this was it. So Alaric wants an apology and Damon recycles the one he just used with Mason and then Ric's like "really? Really?" Damon flirts and says that he only really meant it with Ric and then Ric totally takes him back. Look, you all know that I want this couple together more than anything ever, but when you write it out like that, Alaric is kind of a battered wife and then I feel gross for encouraging their reunion. This show is always putting me in these moral quandaries. I'd feel a lot better if they made out.

So Alaric prances on into the Cave Of Convenient Discoveries located behind the Lockwood Dungeon of Crazy Shit and gazes upon the amazing thing that Mason gazed upon earlier. Damon is like a 6 year old on Christmas waiting to find out what they've found and then we see that it's cave drawings. One of those drawings appears to be Elena's necklace and it's incorporated into something that is either a rocket ship or a little girl in a dress tugging on her own pig tails. And now you know why I am not an anthropologist.

Next time: Flashback wigs. ACK!

Come As You Aren't

2011-10-28T13:14:00.002-07:00

Since I've been so full of criticism where The Secret Circle is concerned, I thought it was only fair to balance the scales by saying something nice about the show today. Here goes: I like the way this show kills people. Yep, I found the deaths of the never-before-seen witch and magic shop owner and Luke both appropriately grotesque and entertaining.

I think Jake's arrival and subterfuge add a much more interesting element to the show that it desperately needed but I'm still tired of waiting for the deets on what happened 16 years ago. It's doled out one vague reference at a time and since that seems to be oodles more interesting than most of the kids, it's just about the only reason I'm still watching the show.

I really don't know how much more of Phoebe Tonkin's labored American accent I can take. It feels like she has to chew on every word to get it out and when she finally does it's still tinged with Australia around every edge. On the other hand, her interactions with Jake last night were the most interesting thing she's had to do since the show began.

Finally, filed under the heading "irony is a bitch," I saw evidence of a connection between Adam and Diana for the first time and it naturally came after they'd broken up. Sigh.

Red Marker, Red Marker, Run Tyler Right Over

2011-10-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

If you aren't watching Revenge, you are missing out on easily the most engrossing, soapy, delicious show since the heyday of Dallas and Dynasty. Every time Emily destroys the life of another person who participated in the fall of her father, I get chills. Not just because Emily is a badass who can ruthlessly ruin a life while wearing casually elegant sun dresses and sipping champagne, but also because the way she takes them down is ever more befitting the role they played in the destruction of her father. I love nothing so much as a plan exhibiting patience above all else and Emily is the queen of laying groundwork for a year or more before finally springing her trap.

But we've reached the point in the series where we're seeing that Emily can't always win. Sometimes plans go awry or someone is smarter than you've given them credit for. She's nearly been found out two weeks in a row and the danger isn't over. First Lydia spotted her in a picture of an old party working as a cater waiter and was seconds away from finding out her real name when Frank came in and tossed Lydia off her balcony onto a parked taxi below. Emily and Nolan got a little cocky and shipped the surreptitiously obtained surveillance video to the Grayson's so they'd fire Frank but Frank is not new to the investigate-and-destroy game. He tracked the video to Nolan and Nolan essentially told him that it's Emily. Frank ain't the guy you want suspicious of you, Em. Eep! These developments amp up the drama and raise the stakes and that makes for an even better show.

Emily obviously doesn't have time to take her eye off of the vengeance ball even for a moment but she is really going to need to deal with the Tyler situation because, while I'm 100% Team Jack (Nick Wechsler, swoon!), I like Daniel too much to watch his character be sullied by his willing association with this creeptastic douche. Either Daniel was a truly awful person prior to the accident that got him off the sauce and back under his mother's thumb, or he's the stupidest person ever because those are really the only reasons he'd be friends with that guy.

So Tyler finally outed his intense sexual crush on Daniel when he roofied and tried to make out with our little prince and once he was rebuffed, he gave himself a head injury and told everyone it was from Daniel. He's so obviously the "if I can't have you NO ONE CAN!" guy who could have been the trigger man that popped off Daniel in the opening moments of the season. Yeah, it's early to speculate on that and Emily could very well destroy this little stain of a man long before the summer ends and Daniel is killed, but come on, you can tell that's totally his shtick right? I also suspect that Tyler's poor and has been pretending to be from money just like he's been pretending to be straight which is, again, where Daniel comes off as a simpleton because Tyler doesn't seem to be very good at pretending either thing and yet Daniel has bought it for a couple of years already.

This is why, even if Jack hadn't given the dreamiest speech about sailing I've ever heard; and even if Jack hadn't taken it upon himself to fix and relocate Emily's porch swing to just the spot her dad always wanted it; and even if I weren't super concerned with getting Joshua Bowman back on Make It Or Break It as Max the bisexual gymnast, I'd still be Team Jack. Daniel just isn't quite smart enough for Emily.

In other news, someone needs to make Connor Paolo tone it the fuck down with that accent. Do it by force if necessary but MAKE IT STOP.

Bonfire of the Tragedies

2011-10-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome back, seniors! The Vampire Diaries has officially let us know that they're working on a one season = half a school year timetable (thus prolonging the length of time their drivers-licence-having teenagers can remain in high school). This week we join them on the anniversary of the first time we met. What a long, strange year it's been. Is anyone else feeling nostalgic for the crow and the fog?

So what do we have going on this week? Let's see, we've got an original in town, a new hybrid running around, a vamp-hunting history teacher who's tired of being in an abusive relationship with his BFF, a vamp-hunting vamp who's a very sound sleeper, a doppelganger who's sad because her boyfriend is evil and his brother is hot, a witch who wishes her boyfriend would stop talking to his dead ex-girlfriend, and a really dreamy boy who misses his sister. Here we go.

Elena is feeling kind of broody about how Klaus broke Stefan last week (or, in the timeline of this show, last night) so she's doing what any teenage girl whose undead boyfriend embraced his inner murdering douchebag would do, she's getting up at dawn to practice killing him in the woods with her history teacher. We've all been there.

Alaric is being a hardass and taunting her into being tougher. Ever since the last time Damon killed Ric and Ric went all badass and forced his way onto the council, his hair has gone to hell in a hand basket. He is obviously enjoying his new found power because the Alaric Law of Conversely Proportionate Misery Hair is telling me that he's found inner peace. More's the pity from a strictly sartorial perspective.

But while Alaric and Elena are feeling good about their ability to protect themselves from Stefan and his new evilness, what they're failing to take into account is that Klaus doesn't want Elena dead. She's the only thing on earth that can make his plans for world-domination-through-hybridization a reality so he's left Stefan there to guard her against death and personal destruction. But he's also allowed Stefan to use his free time to piss of his brother, ruin the expensive carpets in the Salvatore Mansion, eat random women, and just be generally douchey so the rest of us are getting something out of this too.

Elena tires of new Stefan rather quickly but I kind of like him. She thinks that they can fix him if they lock him in the dungeon until Mikael comes to town and kills Klaus. Damon doesn't think that's going to work but I think there's some merit in the plan because if his current condition is due to Klaus's compulsion, it'll be reversed when Klaus dies. She's on to something.

Damon takes this opportunity to get kinda sexy with her when he tells her not to try staking a vamp through the sternum and instead to put it in the back, next to the spine, with an upward thrust. If you listen carefully, you can totally hear the Delena contingent sliding right off their chairs during that moment.

Anyway, the plan is that Elena will lure Stefan to a spot where she can drug him and then she and Alaric will take him to the cell where her dad kept her. Damon will distract Rebekah so that she can't rescue Stefan. Damon and Alaric have a tiff and Damon's like "please love me again." But Alaric is holding a serious grudge this time. I'm not going to lie, this breakup has been really hard on me.

Meanwhile, in GhostWorld, Bonnie is pissed that Jeremy KEEPS seeing Anna and he tries to explain it away by saying that he only did it because they needed her help with the Mikael situation. Bonnie would be more apt to buy that if he didn't see Anna right at that moment. Bon is crazy jealous of a dead girl right now which is making her seem the tiniest bit nuts.

Anna has important stuff to talk to Jeremy about though because she knows that Vicki is trying to pull some shit and now that Vicki can talk to Matt directly, the shit is going to be a lot easier to pull. So Jeremy spies on Matt and Vicki and reports back to Anna.

Vicki has asked Matt to be her anchor and do a spell to help her cross back into his world from the hellish place of nothingness in which she's currently trapped. Matt's gullible and he misses his sister and this is kind of his first time dealing with the supernatural forces directly so he goes ahead and does it, freeing Vicki from "the other side" and making her corporeal in Mystic Falls where she promptly tells him that the catch is, now she has to kill Elena because that was the deal she struck with the witch on her side. Matt doesn't love this development so she hits her brother in his beautiful face with a large wrench. There is really no way to quantify how much I want her to go the fuck away again.

At the back to school bonfire (which is, at BEST a small campfire), Elena's plan is set in motion. Damon makes sex eyes at Rebekah and feeds her roasted marshmallows while Elena gets "fake" drunk and "pretends" to try killing herself by falling off the top of the bleachers. Stefan saves her and then Alaric shoots him in the back with a couple of vervain darts. They hustle him to Alaric's SUV and before Alaric can get in the car with them, Vicki sets it on fire with gasoline. Elena and Stefan are stuck inside. Elena rouses Stefan enough for him to use his vampy strength to kick the back of the car open. Alaric pulls them both from the car before it explodes.

Then, rather than re-vervaining a still weak and groggy Stefan and completing the plan, they ditch it entirely and take him home. I honestly don't know what the point of that was. Once they're back at the mansion, Damon tends to Elena's wound while she gets all jealous about how he so convincingly came on to Rebekah. Before they leave, Damon says nice things to Alaric who just shoots him an angry side eye and leaves. This is like being a child of divorce all over again.

Meanwhile, when Matt regained consciousness, he went straight to Bonnie for help because Matt is not dumb. Bonnie and he whip up a spell to send Vicki back where she belongs. Matt cries a little because he thinks he's alone again but he's totally not.

Caroline has spent the day and night worrying about Tyler because he's in that stage of new vampitude where all of his personality traits are being put on blast and unfortunately it's mostly blasting all the awful traits that he had pre-wolfification and because he's wearing a do-rag. When the gang tries to enlist his help in Elena's plan and they mention that this is all the first step in the larger plan to kill Klaus, Tyler's like "you can't kill Klaus, Klaus is awesome. I love him the most." Turns out that he's suffering from Sire Syndrome wherein he develops uncontrollable hero worship for the vamp who sired him. He's Klaus's most loyal pet.

Tyler tries to play it off like it's no big, he can stop being a dick any time he wants. He and Caroline go back to his house and have sex on the couch in his dad's office and as she's leaving, Rebekah arrives with a pre-bloodied girl for Tyler to eat. And eat her he does. Either Tyler and Caroline had sex in the office while his mom was elsewhere in the house (ew!) or someone in quality control missed the part where Rebekah should have needed to be invited in by a living person. And while we're on that subject - she wasn't invited into the Salvatore house by the human owner (Elena) either. And I know, Elena died. But the thing is, Alaric has died several times and been brought back by the power of his magic ring yet he still had to invite Klaus and Damon into his apartment at the end of last season. But let's say the Alaric thing was the anomaly and death always negates the rule, allowing vamps to enter the house any time they damn please. That means that vamps should be able to drop in on the Gilbert house and Matt's without an invite right? I'd just like to get all of this straight so that I know which nits to pick and which ones to ignore from now on.

Anyway, Rebekah. She's enrolled at Mystic Falls High where she's joined the cheerleading squad and dropped a weirdly specific bit of foreshadowing about vikings being the original settlers of the United States. She also wears a feather extension in her hair which I contest she's way too cool for.

Out in the cemetery of sleeping vampires, Katherine is trying really hard to wake Mikeal up but he's in the mother of all REM cycles. She finally drips a little blood from a pretty girl on his lips and he comes to with an order to get bleeding girl away from him. Seems Mikael is a special kind of self-hating vampire who doesn't drink the blood of any living thing and instead, feeds solely of the blood of other vampires. Which we find out when he makes a meal out of Katherine. That reveal was exquisite, by the by. It raises a question about whether or not draining the blood of a vamp will kill them and if so, is that the thing that he can do to kill Klaus? I suspect it isn't because if it were, it seems that any vampire could do that. I think it'd be silly for vamps to be vulnerable to blood draining, but I guess we shall soon see.

Back in Mystic falls, the ghosty mojo that Matt performed seems to have opened the floodgates for all kinds of dead people to come back to town in corporeal form because Jeremy is presently in his room holding hands with Anna. My sis is steadfastly on Team Bonnie and is ready to throw down if he cheats on her with Anna. I've always loved Anna but I'm Team Jeremy so I think he should go with whichever girl makes him happy. On the other hand, I do think it'd be a little creepy if he dumped Bonnie for a ghost.

Damon's home, cleaning up the blood-stained rugs that Stefan's recent escapades have wrought. Vases and heirlooms are tossed around the room by an unseen force. He curses his brother as he bends over to pick up the shards - Damon is so domestic all of a sudden. Next thing you know, he'll be whipping up a casserole and darning his socks. Anyway, as soon as he's prone, he gets punched in the face hard enough to send him flying across the room. Whoever could be feeling this level of animosity for Damon, you wonder? It's none other than UNCLE MASON. FLOOD! GATES! I love this show so much.

Holding Out For A Hero

2011-10-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing that The Vampire Diaries has taught me, it's that the really good stuff is worth waiting for. It took a few weeks for the season to hit it's stride (in my opinion) but once it did, it never missed a beat. It took 2 seasons for someone to let Matt in on the monsterific truths of Mystic Falls, and then another hundred years (or 4 episodes, whatever) for Matt to come to terms with it but now that he has, he's more awesome than ever before.

So it's about time for school to start and the kids are celebrating with a Senior Prank Night. That means that Elena, Caroline, Bonnie, Tyler, Matt, Not Now Dana and a couple random kids are at school in the middle of the night setting mouse traps and saran wrapping toilet bowls. Do you know what happens when all or most of our principles plus an expendable tertiary character or two are in the same place at the same time? If you guessed mayhem and death, congrats! You've been paying attention.

We begin with Matt lifting weights in a tee shirt and hoodie because apparently we can only have one glorious scene of partial Zach Roerig nudity per season and the rest of the time he's gotta be bundled up like a Winchester in a rain storm. He runs into everyone else where they have an awkwardly written conversation as they all pretend to be teenagers and friends. Then they split up into smaller groups to prank every classroom in the school and Elena runs into Klaus who's all "oh hello person I killed. You're looking mighty alive this evening."

Turns out Klaus and Rebekah have brought their little slave boy Stefan to Mystic Falls High to teach him a lesson about what happens to bad minions when they try to double cross the crazy boss man.

Tyler macks on Caroline, Caroline worries about Matt, Tyler gets jealous, Caroline is awesome (duh) and Rebekah shows up to menace them.

Matt and Bonnie hang and Bonnie tells Matt that Jeremy finally came clean about the ghost sitch. Matt's glad and is reminiscing about when he was a lifeguard. This show flashes back for all kinds of stuff and when there's a story about the time Matt was SAVING LIVES WITHOUT A SHIRT ON, we get nothing? Formal protest. Vicki follows her brother around the school trying to get him to see her but he can't.

Special K and Beks round up our principles in the gym where Klaus lays it out for them. He is miffed because his hybrid army plan has been a spectacular failure and he suspects it's because Elena is still alive and that Bonnie's witchy mojo ruined everything. So he feeds Tyler some of his blood and then snaps his neck and gives Bonnie the order to figure out some magical way of fixing the problem before Tyler wakes up and dies of the dreaded bloody tears.

Bonnie and Matt are off to figure out a way to complete hybridization and Rebekah drags Tyler's corpse off to wait in a safe place.

While all this goes down in Mystic Falls, Katherine has Damon off on a road trip with an unconscious Jeremy in the trunk. She tells Damon about Elena's necklace, which she now has, and about Jeremy's fun new pastime of chatting with the dead and Damon's like "Dammit, woman! I will NEVER get Elena to make out with me if she finds out I had her brother in the trunk!" Katherine wants Damon to talk less and listen more. She tells Damon about how Pearl once blabbed that there was a vampire who knew how to kill Klaus but then went mum because Pearl was way too smart to trust Katherine with useful information. Aw! How much do we miss Pearl, you guys?

So Damon doesn't know what good this is since Pearl's dead and the one person she told (Anna) is, you know, also dead. That's when Jeremy wakes up and is like "finally! I'm useful!"

Stefan arrives at the gym for no good reason and Klaus has him kill the nameless and tertiary. No, not Not Now Dana! Aw, RIP Dana. No one ruined a moment quite like you. Sniff. Special K then leaves Stefan in the gym with Elena and 20 minutes on the clock. He compels Stefan to eat his girlfriend when the clock runs out. Romantic little scamp, isn't he?

Bonnie and Matt frantically text Jeremy but Katherine is holding his phone hostage until he can whip up an Anna encounter. Damon looks bored. Anna pops up and doesn't want to help because she's not a huge fan of Katherine and Damon. Damon starts beating up on Jeremy to incentivize Anna to help. Out of this we get the name Mikael. He's a vampire-hunting vampire who will kill them all. Anna's like "don't wake him!" and Jeremy's like "uh...what do you mean 'wake him'?"

Rebekah keeps busy during her tedious babysitting gig by creeping through the pics on Caroline's phone. That's when she finds a pic of Stefan and Elena and notices Elena is wearing her necklace. No girl likes to find out her ex-boyfriend has given his new girlfriend her shit. She tries to find out where the necklace is and Elena says Katherine stole it but Rebekah's all pissed so she takes a quick nibble out of Elena's neck.

Matt follows a trail of his clothes to the pool where his keys are resting at the bottom of the shallow end. He begins to undress in preparation for retrieving them when Vickie texts him that she'll totes help if he'll just SEE her already. He puts his thinking cap on and realizes that he'll need to die and then come back for that so he calls Bonnie and is like "Bon, I'm going to help by killing myself. Come to the pool and save me. Thanks." Then he jumps in the pool chained to a heavy weight. With his clothes on. Formal protest.

At Vampire Rest Stop, Damon finds all the texts from Bonnie. He puts Jeremy in charge of watching Katherine and getting to the bottom of the Mikael thing while he heads back home to help the masses deal with Klaus's latest shenanigans. Katherine's like "this plan is stupid. The Damon I knew wouldn't have been so dumb." To which he replies "I wouldn't have done it for you." I love how the only thing that ever really cuts Katherine to the quick is a Salvatore loving Elena more than her. Poor Katherine, always a doppelganger, never a soul mate.

Bonnie races into the pool, pulls Matt out of the water and gives him mouth to mouth. Vicki comes to Matt in his current non-aliveness. She tells him to give Bonnie a message and then he gasps back to life.

In the gym Elena's like "Caroline's dad can resist compulsion, maybe you can too." Yeah, because I'm sure that didn't take any kind of practice or mental training at all. Mind over matter, Stef. Stefan yells at her because sometimes she says really dumb stuff. He reverses his "ew, Elena cooties" position from a couple of episodes ago and is like, "I love you more than anything except blood. It might be a tie."

Science lab. Tyler wakes up and Caroline gives him the skinny.

The clock in the gym winds down. Stefan begs her to run away from him. She does and he fights with himself to resist killing her. She is so slow on the uptake and tries to hang around having a moment before she actually runs for her life. He struggles against his nature and appears to be in excruciating physical pain. Paul Wesley is KILLING IT. He stakes himself in the gut with a mop handle and Klaus comes in with Elena. He's touched that Stefan's love for Elena is somehow helping Stefan fight his craving for blood and the compulsion. I mean, he's not so touched that he's going to let it continue. He whips up a super sized does of compulsion and declares that he fixed Stefan but I'm looking at Stefan's face and I assure you, he is not fixed. He's really super broken. Klaus broke Stefan.

Klaus strolls into the science lab with news that the original witch told Vicki to tell Matt to tell Bonnie to tell Klaus (go ahead, take a minute to diagram that gossip chain) that the problem is the doppelganger should be dead. Rebekah is thrilled that they can kill Elena but this isn't Klaus's first time at the rodeo. He's like "if the witches want me to think that Elena has to be dead for hybrids to survive, then surely the truth is that Elena's blood is the key to the whole thing." So he feeds Tyler a vial of doppelblood and the hybrid transformation is finally successful. This is not going to end well.

Elena's at the hospital where a compelled nurse is taking out a bunch of her blood for Klaus. Outside, Rebekah realizes that Klaus's main problem is he needs extensive therapy. That's when Damon arrives and keeps Klaus from killing him or taking Elena by throwing a little news about Mikael in his face. Then Klaus vanishes and Damon goes to rescue Elena and make tortured "I love you" eyes at her.

Caroline is worried about Tyler but he's like "no need, this is awesome!" Oh no, this is going to be SUCH a problem. Caroline's face tells me she knows it too.

Bonnie gives Matt a talking to about how he was reckless and stupid. She wants him to be a "normal person" unlike the rest of them. Bonnie goes to wait for him outside and he sees Vicki and smiles. Ok, it's time for everyone to let Matt be part of the plans from now on because he's awesome and he's ready.

Damon gives Elena back her necklace and she tells him about how Klaus totally broke her boyfriend. Then her boyfriend comes in and acts like a crazy-haired douche. Douchey Stefan is fun. He can stay a while.

At a cemetery somewhere, Katherine and Jeremy break into a crypt where they open a stone coffin containing one chained, very grey Mikael. Here we go, folks!

O Brother

2011-10-21T13:36:00.002-07:00

I never read the books that The Secret Circle is based on and so I have no pre-conceived notions about what should happen or how characters should behave. I am going into this show with only the expectation of being entertained and on paper, that seems like it should be a slam dunk. Do I like TV shows about teenagers? Yes I do (see: Dawson's Creek, Everwood, One Tree Hill, Roswell, Veronica Mars, My So-Called Life, The O.C. and dozens upon dozens of others). Do I like shows about supernatural stuff? Yes I do (see: Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Charmed, etc.). I am predisposed to like this show without much effort on its part. And yet....

The quality of the storytelling and the acting is all over the place and I'm not sure what to think about any of it. A few of my friends are really enjoying it and I want to like it so that I can talk to them about it, but more often than not I'm barely able to care what's happening with the story because I'm too busy being overwhelmed with feelings of ambivalence. Frankly, I've seen little evidence that the writers care much more than I do about these people. The vast majority of the characters lack dimension, depth, humanity, interest and even the most basic likability.

I cut the show some slack when the characters all seemed generic and cardboard in the pilot because I thought there was potential for things to develop into something more intriguing as we got to know them more. It seemed impossible for Melissa and Nick not to get more interesting since both were barely more than extras in the pilot, but five episodes in Nick died and pretty much the only character development he ever got was a scene an episode later when Diana told us a story about when Charles took them sailing as kids. Waiting until a character is dead to tell me anything interesting about him is not the way to win me over. Melissa spent episode six sitting in a booth, staring into the middle distance, having "emotions" over the death of her boyfriend. "Emotions" we were only made aware of when she told Faye she was having them.

Faye simpers and mean-girls her way through each episode as if simply being pretty and making vaguely menacing eyes and/or comments is the same as being interesting. It isn't. Cassie's primary personality trait appears to be "staring agape" and she's working that for all it's worth. Apparently the boys in town find that (as well as her low-cut tops and miniskirts) far more appealing than do I because she's the Joey Potter of TSC (that is: universally beloved by members of the opposite sex for no fathomable reason other than because the writers say it's so). Adam's received the lion's share of the character development having been allowed to get angry, be concerned, and make sex eyes at two different girls.

I saw such potential in Diana when I thought that her boyfriend's OBVIOUS attraction to the new girl would lead this over-nice alpha witch to become a closet vindictive bitch but sadly, she remains sweet to the point of blandness.

With Nick dead and a hole in the circle that the entire show is named after, the writers brought in his older brother Jake, played by Chris Zylka, who is either a MUCH better actor than most everyone else, or the writers just managed to give him more qualities in one episode than everyone else put together. Either way, he's the most interesting thing that's happened to the show so far, by a country mile. Is he on the side of good? Bad? Neither? Both? Will they let him into the circle? Will he double cross them? Will he kill them all? Will Grandma Jane crush him like a bug (you know she could)? These are questions his character prompts me to ponder. The other characters usually just prompt be to wonder if I remembered to water the lawn and what I'll make for dinner tomorrow.

I really think the show could be better than this. The people could be more interesting and the plot could be less boring and I could care more about all of it. So who needs to do what in order to fix it? I have no insight into what happens in the writers' room or on the set so the best advice I can give them all is simply this: make it better. Make it a lot better.

I'm Sorry...So Sorry

2011-10-21T09:42:00.001-07:00

I was lax in my recapping duties last week and I failed to put up a recap of "The Reckoning" before "Smells Like Teen Spirit" aired. I apologize. I have set aside a large portion of my weekend to recap both so I will have some Vampire Diaries thoughts up for you to read soon, I promise.

In the mean time a sanity check - do we think Mikael can kill a vampire by draining their blood or do the usual rules still apply (steak in the heart, decapitation, sunlight, fire)?

Hot Stuff

2011-10-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

Heat equals sex. I know because nearly every show in the history of television has done an episode where a heat wave comes through and kicks every one's libidos into high gear. Last night the residents of Bluebell, Alabama joined the long list of TV characters who've gotten hot, bothered and unbelievably sweaty in the service of demonstrating to the world that when the temperature rises, we should all have sex.

Hart of Dixie is an adorable, mindless show and I thoroughly enjoy it despite some issues. I know a lot of people have been all "Rachel Bilson is not believable as a doctor!" and while I don't disagree with them, I don't really care that much. Frankly, I'd be happy as a clam if they buried the doctor thing in the fine print and did away with the medical emergency of the week, focusing all their energy on the fish-out-of-water story of her trying to fit into the town full of southern crazies. My big problem with the show is Lemon. Sweet sweaty Jesus, she is not even tolerable!

I expected that they'd tone her bitchy, prissy, queen bee attitude after the pilot. Instead, they've kept the bitchiness and added layers of insecurity and whineyness stripping away any possibility that I might ever like her. In fact, not only do I not like her at all, the affection George and Lavon have for her is starting to make me wonder why I still love them so much. She's 100% solid awful. And for the love of Burt Reynolds, she MUST stop wearing yellow. It's way too on the nose to put a blond girl named Lemon in a constant parade of yellow frocks.

George's parents came to town for dinner last night and George's mom was hateful to Lemon. The woman clearly hates her future daughter-in-law as much as I do. My friend thought that George's mom's behavior made Lemon seem more sympathetic but I strongly disagree. I relished every mean-spirited jab George's mom took and when I found out that Mom ordered duck for dinner I wanted to jump into my television and high five the old bat. Perhaps the writers intended for her meanness to humanize Lemon, but I just thought Lemon was getting the much deserved taste of her own medicine.

The one thing that almost succeeds in humanizing Miss Sour Citrus is Lavon. He loves her y'all. Lavon is funny and sweet and down to earth and sexy and interesting and played by Cress Williams and if he sees something good in girl than I almost believe there's something good to see. Almost.

But back to the heat wave, it seems that when Bluebell boils, the whole town sees it as an excuse to be on their worst behavior. Cue the barrage of sister-beating, teenage Kama Sutra induced bug bites (yeah, that was a thing), and hot dudes in various states of undress. Apparently this was the ep where the audience at large was like "oh, HELLO, Wade!" but I was like "yeah, that sure is a chest all oiled up to look sweaty." I'm all about Lavon and George guys. Even when George is made to wear a pair of ill-fitting belted chino shorts. And his shirt was tucked. Into the belted shorts. BELTED.

If you haven't seen the episode yet, run home and watch it because you do not want to miss the worlds most asinine (I mean that as a compliment!) montage when Zoe tries out hair styles and accessories in the mirror before heading out to demand sex from her neighbor. Plus, this is a show where a girl heads out to demand sex from her neighbor and that doesn't really even seem weird. So there's that.

Not Like When I Was A Teenager

2011-10-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'll grant you that I haven't been a teenager for a very long time and even when I was, I had no super powers so the comparison might be the tiniest bit askew but still, I didn't know anyone in high school who was having as much sex as the kids on The Secret Circle seem to be having. In fact, at 35, I know few adults having as much sex as the kids on The Secret Circle.

Last week I saw a marked improvement in the interestingness of the plot but this week I felt a bit of a back slide. Louis Hunter was the weakest acting link in the show and his character, Nick, was the least interesting to me by a lot so it didn't surprise me that they killed Nick off of the show. It didn't even bother me since I didn't feel he was adding much to the story anyway. But, if I'm being honest, it felt cheap. It felt like they were copying The Vampire Diaries and I didn't enjoy it at all.

There were some good things happening last night. Jessica Parker Kennedy was great in the episode and I was glad that Grandma Jane finally had something to do. Gale Harold was terrific and it seemed to be a real growth moment for the Charles character, indicating he may not be as one-note-menacing as he seemed in the pilot while Natasha Henstridge continues to be an enigma in the best way (is she good or evil? I really can't tell). But on the whole the episode didn't hold together.

The stuff between Adam and Diana felt out of place. It's clear the writers are trying to build up the Adam/Diana relationship so that it seems less tepid in comparison to the wicked-hot chemistry he's got with Cassie but was this really the episode for that? The tone was so off from the rest of the action in the ep that it was like watching an entirely different show. And it came out of freaking nowhere to boot.

The exposition about how you deal with demons should have worked because it makes sense for Grandma Jane to school these newbie witches on shit like this but the way they all just stood around agog while she laid the knowledge down came off as clumsy and uninteresting.

Right now the entire show feels like the 8th grader trying desperately to be as cool as her high school senior sister...and failing. This is the Danielle Chase of shows.

Chili Is For Losers

2011-10-13T18:36:00.001-07:00

I know I've complained a lot the past three weeks about how The Vampire Diaries' third season wasn't filling me with joy, but that didn't mean I had lost faith in the show or the writers. I haven't. I knew they'd bring all the pieces together eventually, I just didn't enjoy the wait as much as everyone else did. But the wait for things to start gelling came to an end last week and I loved every second of it.

Unfortunately liking the bejeezus out of it didn't translate into making a whole lot of time to recap it and I'm down to the wire. As I sit down to write this I have exactly 2 hours until the new episode airs in my time zone. So I'm going to make this particularly quick.

Stefan, Klaus and Rebekah are still chillin' in Chicago and Rebekah doesn't want to walk around in that lovely beaded number from the '20s so the boys have taken her shopping. She tries on gonorrhea dresses (those are the ones that are so short, if she sits down in public she's very likely standing up with a communicable disease) while Special K and Stefan drink champagne and complain. Shopping! Am I right, guys?

Stefan heads out for some "air" and runs into Katherine on the street who's like, "listen to me, I know stuff." Stefan, who is doing a spot-on Damon impression, tells her that he's in mid-plan so she should go away.

The Windy City Wackadoos head over to Gloria's to see about locating the necklace which Gloria does with the help of some mojo but she plays it off all "vague feelings" and "more of an art than a science" talk and then Stefan suggests that the Wackadoos go get some dinner while Gloria puzzles the puzzle of the missing necklace.

After they've eaten their tourists, Stefan makes some excuse and heads back to Gloria's where he tries to pull a Damon again and it doesn't work out so well. Gloria ties him to a table and tortures him a little. What we find out is that Gloria isn't interested in helping Klaus, she's interested in getting the necklace back to keep Klaus from getting what he's after. Stefan still loves Elena. The doppelganger is still alive (duh). And also that Gloria is a fucking badass. Unfortunately, Katherine is like "one badass chick per town, honey" and stabs her in the neck. RIP Gloria.

Katherine figures out Stefan's plan of being Klaus's BFF to steer him away from Mystic Falls and Stefan fills her in on how he has a past with the Special K and Beks. Katherine wants to play the game with him but he doesn't think he needs help. Damon never thinks so either and he's always wrong too. Sigh.

Stefan goes to the Warehouse of Original Corpses where he flirts with Rebekah who's like "smoochy smoochy...yep, you're lying." She tattles to Klaus that Stefan is playing them and Klaus is less than pleased. Big mistake, Stefan. You're not going to like Klaus when he's angry.

Back in Mystic Falls, Damon is hanging around Elena, annoying her about chili and suddenly asking why she's wearing the necklace that he himself gave back to her on her birthday. Oh Damon, do shut up. Alaric is like "tired of you now, please leave." Turns out Alaric thinks Damon shouldn't be hanging around Elena so much. Damon thinks Alaric should mind his own bees wax. Damon makes sure Ric's wearing his ring and then snaps his neck because the only thing he hates more than having feelings is being called on his shit. Once Ric comes back to life, he and Damon have a spat.

Damon also tries to compel Bill Forbes to forget that Caroline is a vampire but Bill is like "some people are REALLY good at MIND CONTROL" and Damon refuses to get it and is then SHOCKED when the compulsion doesn't take. Damon is cracking under the pressure of trying to be like Stefan, you guys. That's probably why the mullet.

Caroline is still trying to come to terms with the shit with her dad and her preferred method of dealing involves rolling around in bed with a partially nude Tyler. This is why no one ever asks why Caroline is my favorite. It's just obvious.

Unfortunately, the festivities are interrupted so that Caroline can go save her dad from being eaten by Bill and then kicking Damon's ass. Caroline is more awesome than all of the Originals put together. For real.

Elena wants Damon to be more like Stefan and Damon really doesn't want to. They fight. Whatever.

Bonnie is busy trying to figure out what's the what with Elena's necklace suddenly going all kerflooey (sorry to throw technical jargon at you) while her boyfriend is up to his beautiful shoulders in the ghost of girlfriend past as Anna has found a way to carry on a convo with him and now doesn't want to leave him alone. Malese Jow looks ridiculously pretty and she and McQueen have the most insane chemistry so every scene makes me want them to make out even though I don't want Jeremy to cheat on Bonnie and Anna is dead anyway. It's a very complicated situation.

Jeremy tells Bonnie about the ghosts.

Katherine, dressed all up in her best Elena suit, asks Bonnie for "her" necklace back and while giving it to her, Bonnie tells her how Jeremy sees dead people. Katherine is very interested in this and vamp speeds away leaving Bonnie agape thinking her BFF just ditched her. So apparently when the witches nicked her powers they took her common sense with it. Swell.

Bill leaves but takes one last chance to be a dick before he does.

Alaric goes to Interim Mayor Lockwood and Sheriff Forbes and is all "I'm joining the council." They're like "um...no, I don't think that's going to work for us. But thanks for asking." Ric is all "not asking. Telling. See you at the next meeting." My "Alaric For Mayor of Mystic Falls" buttons should be back from the printer on Tuesday.

Katherine shows up at Salvatore Acres with the necklace, a story to tell and a plan that involves leaving town.

Klaus and Beks roll into Mystic Falls with a truck full of Original Corpses and a busted Stefan, ready to fuck shit up but good. For the record, no one in the world has a better bat-shit crazy smile than Joseph Morgan.

"Sasha stole my sizzle."

2011-10-13T14:21:00.001-07:00

You've probably noticed that my posting has been particularly light this week and that I'm way behind on getting my Vampire Diaries recap up. I have a really good excuse for this, are you ready? Make It Or Break It was so fun I had to spend every free minute watching that. Here's how things went down in the second season:

The girls go to France where Lauren arranges for Emily to see Damon who's on tour opening for Green Day. No one remembers that every time Lauren does something nice it's only to trick you into turning around so she can stab you in the back. Lauren arranges for Ellen Beals to catch Emily breaking the rules, that gets Emily benched and Lauren competes in her place. Emily and Damon break up but decide to meet up again in two years after she's had her chance at the Olympics.

Austin Tucker, the biggest star in US Men's Gymnastics, meets the girls in France and then promptly joins The Rock. He's smug and ridiculous a pain in the girls' asses.

Sasha helps Payson transform herself post-surgery from a power gymnast into an artistic gymnast and his faith in her and his face lead to her developing a crush on him. One night, with the practice camera rolling, Payson kisses him and he immediately rebuffs her advances. Embarrassment, agony, contrition, Sasha being awesome, everything is hunky dorey.

But Lauren finds the tape, edits it to make it look like Sasha was makin' out with Payson, and sends it to Ellen Beals. Ellen uses that to help Steve Tanner win the election as president of the parents' board.

Austin throws a party and expresses an interest in Kaylie. Try as I might, I can no longer resist the charms of Austin Tucker.

Austin helps Emily with her gymnastics.

Emily and Damon get back together and are happy for 2 seconds.

Both Austin and Sasha see that Kaylie has developed an eating disorder and both go to her and her parents but the entire Cruz family is all "we know everything, you know nothing." Kaylie competes to make the Worlds team and passes out on the balance beam because she hasn't eaten since season 1.

Emily, who has elevated blaming her mother for everything to an art, throws a hissyfit when she finds out that Steve Tanner is the one who's been secretly funding her scholarship. She blames Chloe. Chloe gets a second job - as a bartender at a local strip club - to help pay the bills.

But her second job means that she isn't home when Brian starts having a seizure one night and so, rather than calling 911 like a normal person, Emily runs out to the drug store where she steals his medicine. Her legal troubles pile up until she's arrested at the tryouts for the Worlds team.

Sasha continues to be gorgeous and a rather perfect boyfriend to Summer who is finally overcome with lust and rips his shirt off. But Sasha is all "we can't do this because I don't want to be responsible for you breaking your vows of celibacy until marriage just because I'm ridiculously sexy."

Summer goes to church to yell at God for sending her a sexy Romanian stud and then expecting her to keep it in her pants. Then she asks him to show her what to do. Steve walks in. UGH.

Ellen Beals does evil things.

Sasha blames himself for the many troubles that the girls have gotten themselves into so he quits The Rock and becomes a boxer in Denver. The things he lets them do to his face make me sad.

The fact that he's gone at all makes Payson sad.

Kaylie goes to rehab to treat the eating disorder she won't admit she has where she meets a model who teaches her how to game the system. I mostly want to punch Kaylie in the face.

The Rock gets a new coach who is a 25 year old new age bubble brain as a coach.

Carter goes to train in Denver and might be hooking up with Kelly Parker. I throw a party because Carter was kind of the worst.

Austin recruits his friend Max to train at The Rock. Max takes an instant shine to Payson, who totally flirts with him, but before anyone has time to blink, Lauren already has her claws out and a plan for getting Max into bed. Lauren is really hard to take.

Emily is put on probation by the NGO and as a final farewell to her relationship with Damon, she has sex with him.

When Kaylie gets out of rehab and still isn't allowed to go back to The Rock, she must find a hobby. Since having a bad attitude doesn't count, she takes up the hobby of letting Damon use her mom's recording studio. That's not a hobby, you say? Try telling that to Kaylie.

Damon and Kaylie become friends when her annoying model friend dies of an anorexia induced heart attack. He goes to the funeral with her. It's very sweet.

Then Damon helps her deal with her feelings by writing a song with her and then having her perform it with him at the Pizza Shack. Emily sees this and is sad.

Austin helps Payson with her gymnastics because Austin is not just cute, he's also the most helpful guy ever.

Damon is an idiot and kisses Kaylie. Kaylie rebuffs him.

Emily is sad.

The girls go to Hungary for a meet.

They take a detour to Romania to try and convince Sasha to come back. They fail but Summer succeeds.

The gang is back together again. Sasha is coming home. I love Sasha the most.

The Hungarian doping police tell Emily and Sasha that they found something in her urine test. She swears she isn't doing any drugs and the Hungarian is all, "yeah I know but you are pregnant." Emily tells her mom and they are both sad.

Emily tells Damon about the baby and that does not go well.

The girls go to talk to Emily but Chloe tells them that she's run off to Las Vegas. This news looks like it may cause vomiting.

Summer gets engaged to Steve Tanner and agrees to adopt Lauren.

Max continues to be torn between how much he really likes Payson....

...and how much he'd really like a hand job which Lauren is probably giving out by the dozens.

Austin remains hopelessly and sweetly in love with Kaylie but won't do anything about it because he doesn't want to hurt her recovery.

So instead he helps her train for Worlds.

Max does gymnastics.

Max is a photographer.

Lauren wants Max to take her picture.

Austin thinks Lauren should back up off his buddy because he's so not the kind of guy who falls for Lauren's brand of bullshit. See how lovable Austin is?

Max and Payson get a dog together. Max names the dog Phoebe. Phoebe is the most adorable thing in the world.

Summer finds out that it was Lauren who sent the kissing tape to Ellen Beals and that Steve knew Lauren did it and did nothing. She breaks off the engagement and breaks up with both of the Tanners. I hope she goes back to Sasha and they get married so that she'll get him undressed again. I enjoyed that. Also, it's a damn shame to think that someone as good looking and awesome as Sasha is sleeping alone every night.

Lauren throws herself at Max. He turns her down. Payson tells Max she loves him and he runs away. Austin goes looking for him and finds him drunk and complaining about how he just turned down two beautiful girls. Austin's like "well what the fuck, dude?" Max answers that question by kissing Austin. Seems his problem is that he's bisexual and he's afraid to tell either girl for fear they won't like him anymore. Austin's like "well I'm straight and you just kissed me fairly inappropriately and I still like you so stop being such a baby." I [heart] Austin a lot.

Then Lauren gets into a car accident wherein she suffers two bruises while Max gets a broken collar bone. While Max is all doped up he asks the nurse to get his girlfriend. She gets Lauren but then when Lauren is in there holding his hand and calling him honey, he calls her Payson. Oops.

Kaylie and Kelly become friends and then break up.

Lauren, Payson, Kaylie and Kelly Parker go to Worlds where they kind of suck. Sasha locks them in a room to deal with their shit. Lauren complains that Sasha stole her sizzle and instantly makes that my favorite line of the series.

All the girls sort of forgive Kelly and start to like her because they realize that she's only awful because her mom is the meanest manamomster in history.

The girls go out and win Worlds because this is TV and shit like that totally happens on TV.

Sasha is happy.

Max tells Payson he loves her but she stops him before he's able to say "and also, I like boys" because once a boy that cute tells you he loves you, you don't really need to know any more stuff.

Kaylie and Austin finally become a couple.

And now I have to wait until next summer to find out what happens next. This is going to be excruciating.

Weekend In Reviews

2011-10-10T13:00:00.003-07:00

Stricken with an ugly case of eye leprosy (or possibly something less heinous sounding but I name my ailments based on what they actually look like so: eye leprosy) over the weekend, I was mostly home-bound which gave me a terrific opportunity to spend many, many quality hours with my TiVo and Netflix Instant.

Kyle XY - I had heard of Kyle XY plenty of times but never had any desire to watch it. But as you know, I've been binging on ABCFamily programming of the past and present recently and since Kyle XY was available on NetFlix Instant, I gave it a try. It took some time to get off the ground. The first several episodes were extra heavy on Kyle narration and extra light on interesting character or story developments. I was content to watch about one episode a week at most until last weekend when I watched the 8th episode, "Memory Serves," and things started getting really good.

That's when the bromance between Kyle and Declan really started to blossom and when the interpersonal relationships between all the various members of the cast started to gel. From there on out, I was content to ignore some of my new TV and focus all my attention on finding out what would become of Kyle, Jessi, the Tragers and Declan. Mostly Declan. That kid is adorable.

The show has some problems - the acting is spotty at best, several members of the cast are distractingly in need of orthodontia, the made up organizational names sound ridiculously made up (Zzyzx? Latnok?) making the whole escapade seem vaguely cartoonish, and there was maybe a bit of an over-reliance on the nefarious science-y groups over the slightly more entertaining regular problem stories. But the show was funny and had an honest, interesting way of dealing with things like illness, death, sex, family, finances, friendship and young love.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the scene between Andy and Josh where they discuss whether or not he should be trying to feel her up while making out, was one of the sweetest, funniest, truest scenes I've ever seen on television. If you haven't see the show, I'm sure you're dubious at that claim, but if you have seen the show, you understand. Andy has cancer and she's about to start chemo treatments and has decided that she and Josh should break up before they make her sick and unpleasant to be around. As a last hurrah, she's come over for a good make out and heavy petting session. But Josh doesn't want to break up with her and he doesn't especially want to spend any time touching her boobs now if he can't be with her to touch them tomorrow and all the days after that. It's a conversation about how caring about another person means being there for them when they're sick and sometimes it means letting someone be there for you even when you're scared. It's a conversation about deep and serious matters that's also a conversation about boobs.

The show is at it's best when the characters are just talking to each other because when you strip away the silly science experiments and the mysterious nonsense, this is a show about family and friendship and the nature vs. nurture debate. And Declan and Kyle are the cutest brofriends since I don't know when.

Make It Or Break It - Having seen the movie Stick It, I never thought there was any point in watching this show. The movie was a bit of a non-entity - the story of an unrefined, tomboy, playground gymnast who gets a scholarship to attend a prestigious gym as an Olympic hopeful - and Make It Or Break It was clearly about the same thing. But like I said, I've recently discovered that ABCFamily original series are kind of awesome so I had to see if the show had managed to be more interesting than the movie.

Still the story of a poor playground gymnast brought into an elite gym full of spoiled rich kids and girls who've been training their entire lives to make the Olympic team. But what MIOBI has that Stick It didn't, is compelling stories for the parents as well as the girls and I'm seriously in love with the moms on this show (I think of Summer as a mom because...she kind of is). Love triangles, affairs, devastating injuries, financial problems, divorce, dating, a hot coach (Neil Jackson), politics, overbearing parents, drugs, super cute boys, mean girls...there's something here for everyone.

I don't understand why anyone would be fighting over Carter but Lauren's inability to not be a treacherous bitch where he's concerned certainly keeps the drama up. I was really enjoying the potential that existed between Nicky and Payson and was pretty bummed when he was shipped off Denver. Every time I think I know who I want Emily to be with another suitor does something to win me over. Leo is adorable and smart and sweet, but Razor is funny and weird and cute, but Damon is so perfect on every level. Yeah, ok, I pretty much just want her to pull her head out of her ass and be with Damon.

Speaking of people who need to pull their heads out of their asses: if Summer doesn't abandon her religious beliefs and get naked with Sasha immediately, I'm going to cry real tears. What is WRONG with that woman? Ahem. The Cruz marriage, the Keeler money troubles and the relationship between Chloe Kmetko and Steve Tanner round out some fairly terrific stories going on for everyone on the show. I'm only at the end of the first season so I'm sure there's a lot more crazy in store for me. I hope Nicky comes back. Payson deserves better, and cuter, than Ike.

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

2011-10-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

I've been lukewarm on The Secret Circle thus far because I didn't find the story terribly compelling and, frankly, the uneven acting was difficult to overlook when the plot wasn't grabbing me. But last night, things got quite a bit more interesting.

Turns out that whatever happened the day of the fire that killed 1/2 of the Circle's parents, also resulted in "evil" itself crawling up inside of non-witch Heather (Camille Sullivan). So Cassie's mom whipped up a Tupperware spell to seal evil inside Heather. But all these years later, Cassie's curiosity has gotten the better of her so she and Faye do a spell that breaks the seal and lets the freshness out.

So a newly crazy Heather tracks them down at Cassie's house where she beats them up and trashes the house and tells Cassie about the evil crawling inside of her and now she's possessed by a demon and blah blah. The smackdown brings all the witches and Heather's brother Ben Cotton to the yard where they all watch her get hit by a car and killed. Sad faces. What they don't all see is the tiny black garter snake of evil that crawls out of her, down the street and up into the pocket of Nick's leather jacket. Uh oh!

Other things that happened: Diana went to therapy where they apparently did not work on her lack of self esteem because she continues to willfully ignore the fact that her boyfriend kisses her like I kiss my grandma while cranking the sex eyes up to 11 when they're pointed at Cassie. Not only does she not seem to have an issue with the insane sexual tension between her boyfriend and the new girl, but she keeps INSISTING that Adam help Cassie do things that require the two of them to be alone together. And this week is no exception with the sex eyes, the close sitting, the sexual tension, the lingering touches and more sex eyes.

Faye tries to convince Melissa to not waste her time with Nick and then Nick starts to act like he actually wants to have a regular relationship with Melissa which drives a bit of a wedge between Faye and Melissa until Nick saves Faye's bacon at Cassie's house and then Melissa and Nick head back to his house to have the sex and spend the night together because apparently their guardians learned all they know about parenting from TVD's Aunt Jenna.

Oh yeah, and then the tiny black garter snake of evil demony badness crawled out of Nick's jacket pocket, onto the bed, up his arm, over his pillow and right into Melissa's ear. I'll meet you at the drug store in the ear plug aisle.

An Affair To Forget To Remember

2011-10-04T16:13:00.001-07:00

The third season of The Vampire Diaries is flipping skirts all over town. My Thursday night Twitter feed is a non-stop barrage of "best thing EVER" with not a single "meh" in the mix. But I'm firmly in the "meh" camp and I keep rewatching thinking that maybe I'm missing something but watching again never makes me love it any more. I still just feel like it's 3 very separate stories that aren't coming together into a cohesive show. I like the pieces of the story but I'd like it a lot more if they came together into a complete picture rather than splintering the group into these separate and un-related factions. But none of this is telling you want happened last week is it? So let's get to that.

After his dream of captaining a hybrid army into a battle against good and crazy is crushed, Klaus does what all good vampires do, he goes to find a witch so she can fix it. This particular witch is in Chicago running a bar that used to be a speakeasy, because she has exactly enough swagger to pull that off. Also because there has to be some impetus for Klaus to regale Stefan with stories from his past.

It seems that in the '20s, Stefan spent some quality Ripping time in this very speakeasy. There he met Rebekah, the lovely and charming sister of one Mr. Nicklaus Original. Rebekah was smitten with Stefan the first time she smelled human blood on his breath (despite the fact he was sporting another in a long line of hideous, and in this case particularly unnecessary, flashback wigs) and who can blame her? Nothing sets my loins a burnin' like the scent of a man's last meal wafting out from between his teeth. Like her brother Elijah before her, Rebekah took Klaus's side in the family squabble that ended in death for everyone who chose differently. Things we know about Rebekah so far: she likes pretty boys and she's not stupid.

Over the course of what seems like a weekend, Rebekah and Stefan fall madly in like with each other and Rebekah introduces Stefan to her brother who was, during the roaring '20s in Chicago, going by the name Nick. I wonder if Elijah ever switched it up and went by Eli. That's the flashback I want to see. Anyway, Nick thinks Stefan is keen the way he's always killing people and making human men drink the blood of their loved ones out of old school champagne glasses and stuff. Nick's like, "My real brother never wants to do creepy shit like that, you're FUN!" and the two become BFFs. But there's always a mysterious someone hunting you down for mysterious reasons on this show so naturally the happiness of this threesome is short-lived.

One night the speakeasy is raided by a mysterious someone after Nick and Rebekah for mysterious reasons (and this someone knows they're vamps because he's using wooden bullets in his tommy gun. Of course he is) and Nick and Rebkah must head for the hills. Stefan wants to come too and thinks that their trio would kick ass on a road trip but Nick doesn't think the time is right for him to get tied down so instead he compels Stefan to forget him and Rebekah. That's when they scamper off into the night, accidentally leaving Rebekah's necklace on the floor of the club in the rubble...where Stefan picks it up AFTER he's been compelled to forget everything. What necklace, you ask? Oh, just that necklace that he kept for the better part of 90 years before giving it meaningfully to the woman he loves. And why wouldn't he do that with a necklace he found on the floor of a club where he has no memory of anything special ever happening?

While Klaus is busy telling Stefan this tale, Damon and Elena have come stumbling into town with not so much as the germ of a plan between them. What these two lack in brains they more than make up for in the sheer force of will it takes to fail to recognize your own shortcomings at every possible turn. Bravo! So they not-so-gingerly break into the apartment Stefan has apparently been paying rent on since Warren G. Harding was president which makes me wonder where the fuck he gets all his money. Either he has the world's best stock portfolio, or there is a mattress somewhere stuffed very full of cash he pillaged, bootlegged, and pilfered his way into before he became a bunnytarian.

Damon shows Elena around the digs a little - here's where Stefan kept his bow tie, here's where he slept, here's the wall he wrote the names of all his victims on - and then leaves her there to read up on Stefan's prohibition days in his diary and to come up with a plan, while he goes out to do some shopping on Michigan Avenue. As you do.

While she's alone, Klaus brings Stefan back to look at his scrapbook, er, death wall. Elena hears them coming and has only seconds to hide so she hides in the moonshine closet where Stefan sees her and makes eyes at her and then pretends she's not there. Stefan and Klaus leave. When Damon returns, Elena tells him what happened and Damon comes up with the following plan: they'll go to the bar where he'll distract Klaus so she can talk to Stefan and convince him to come home.

In reality that plan looks like this: Damon finds Klaus at the bar. They snark at each other. Klaus kicks his ass. Gloria the bar witch tells them to keep it in their pants. Meanwhile, outside, Elena asks Stefan to come home and Stefan says, "no, go away, I don't like you anymore. You have cooties."

With Damon and Elena once again on their way back to Mystic Falls, Stefan and Klaus head over to the Warehouse of Dead Originals where Klaus un-kills Rebekah and uncompells Stefan and everyone catches up on old times. Until Klaus asks Rebekah what she has that Gloria the bar witch needs to fix the hybrid army snafu and Rebekah is like, "oh, just my necklace that is missing because you killed me 90 years ago and didn't bother to notice my super important magic necklace was gone."

Don't you love how everything on this show somehow finds a way to revolve around Elena? Like, good fucking thing Stefan never gave that necklace that held no sentimental value to him, which he picked up off the floor for no reason at all, after losing a woman he didn't know he ever met, to Lexi as a birthday present because then the damn thing would be gone completely with no hope of retrieval.

But that's really neither here nor there because what we really need to talk about it something I completely forgot to be bugged by at the end of last season, which is the "rule" that in order for the dagger and ash to kill an Original, it has to be used by a human. Remember that rule? And then remember how Klaus - not at all a human - used the dagger and ash to kill Elijah? Well he totally did it to Rebekah and, I'm guessing, all his other family members too. So...is this just another rule that Originals are immune to? Or was that rule made up to keep other vampires from getting thoughts in their heads? Or did someone on the writing staff just completely forget that that rule ever existed in the first place?

The sub-plot to this whole Chicago ordeal is that Kathrine is also in Chicago, keeping tabs on Klaus and Stefan and she keeps calling Damon to sort of tell him things and sort of find out what he knows but mostly just so she has something to do. As usual, it's clear she knows stuff but it's not at all clear which team she'll join in the service of bettering her own life.

Back in Mystic Falls, Caroline's dad is holding her hostage in another of the many, many, many dungeons in and around the town. Masonry was a thriving enterprise in Mystic Falls in the 1860s. Daddy Dearest takes off her SPF ring and then spends the day taunting her with a blood bag and then burning her with sunlight in an attempt to change her very nature. He wants to "reprogram" and "recondition" her to not be what she is. The entire escapade is revolting.

Fortunately, one person in town has thought to miss Caroline while she's been gone for a couple of days. So Tyler, having gotten the skinny on who has his woman from his vile mother (I assume), goes to talk to the Sheriff. The two of them show up in the dungeon to rescue Caroline. The Sheriff wins me over for good by letting her husband have it and by "it" I mean the business end of a gun. Tyler breaks her out of her shackles, puts the ring back on her finger, and scoops her up out of there.

Back at home in bed, her mom feeds her some blood and tries to make her feel better about how her dad tortured and could have killed her. Then she and Tyler share a nice moment in the hall before he comes in and holds her while she cries about how her dad hates her. You guys, I have just reduced this story to 3 paragraphs but I assure you, this is where all the emotional heft of the story was for me. Candice Accola is the bees knees and I worship the ground she acts on.

Next week: People will probably continue to interact only with a very limited number of other cast members and experience no crossover between stories. Yippee. My kingdom for a group number!

Rollin' With The Yuppies

2011-09-29T14:50:00.001-07:00

Did you watch Suburgatory last night? If you didn't, you probably didn't laugh as much as you could have - as much as you should have. I expected to like this show because the critics were incredibly complimentary; I expected to adore Jeremy Sisto because he's Jeremy Sisto; I expected to like the snarking and jokes at the expense of Real Housewife-types. I didn't expect to worship the ground Cheryl Hines walks on. She's funny and oblivious but so genuine. And God dammit if I didn't drop an "awe!" in the mix when she brought over that pretty pink bra.

Watch this show. It's what your life is missing.

Where the Hart Is

2011-09-27T11:45:00.002-07:00

I am acutely susceptible to a certain brand of wacky sentimentality. That's why I loved Gilmore Girls and Everwood, and why the funny episodes of Felicity are my favorites. If you can make me laugh and cry at the same time, if the best way to describe your show is with the words "cute" or "charming," and if you've stacked the deck with silly tertiary characters, quaint events or pets with adorable names, I will almost certainly love it. That's why Hart of Dixie seems tailor maid for me.

Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson) is a driven, emotionally stunted woman who has big plans to follow in the footsteps of her father and become a cardio thoracic surgeon working at a top New York hospital. But her dad is cold and distant, her mom is bossy, withholding and controlling, and she has no bedside manner at all. Bye bye New York CT fellowship.

Fortunately, there's this old guy from Bluebell, Alabama who's taken an interest in her career and who's been courting her via post card to come work in his practice for 4 years. With no other options left (or, at least with no easy ones that just pop up in front of her and wave their arms around in her face) she relocates to Bluebell to learn how to treat people as a general practitioner.

The cranky town doctor (Tim Matheson), a bossy assistants (Nancy Travis), a former football hero for a mayor (Cress Williams), George, the dashing attorney (Scott Porter) and his snotty belle fiance named Lemon (Jamie King), a host of other small-town, southern characters and a pet alligator named Burt Reynolds. Zoe likes George and George likes Zoe but he's engaged to Lemon who has a secret past with the mayor that might not be as over as she hopes. The mayor's groundskeeper likes Zoe but she appears to be indifferent. Lemon's dad, Zoe's partner in the practice, is anxious to be the only doctor in town.

It doesn't really matter what transpires to keep her in Bluebell (it jerked the tears out of me) or why the doc left her his practice when he didn't even know her (sniff!). It just matters that these are actors I adore playing characters I like, in a town I find enchanting and I am completely won over by the show.

Fly Away With Me

2011-09-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

This TV season has not impressed me much. There are a couple of shows I really like and some that I think I might grow to like but mostly there are just a lot of shows that I'm indifferent to. That trend made me start to worry over the weekend that my high hopes for Pan Am would not pay off. After all, I hear non-stop raves about Mad Men and I didn't care for it, so the kind words of critics about Pan Am would not necessarily equate to me enjoying the show. I needn't have worried. I adored Pan Am.

The show as more going for it than I anticipated. A newbie stewardess (it was ok to call them stewardesses back then. Also to smack their tushies to make sure they were wearing their girdles. And to require they wear girdles. It was a different time) running away from the life she was supposed to have as a prissy wife to follow in the footsteps of her rebellious and worldly sister. A French stewardess who might be a bit too free and easy with her married passengers. An early style douchebag co-pilot. A mysteriously disappearing stewardess involved in a spying plot I totally didn't see coming. Mike Vogel as the world's dreamiest pilot and Christina Ricci whose character I'm not yet able to pin down into a particular plot.

I want to know what becomes of Bridget, how Kate does as a spy, whether Laura can keep her shit together and be a decent stewardess, if Collette and Dean will hook up, and if Maggie will ever get something to do. Mostly, I want to live in this world of glamorous world travel, espionage, love, sex, and pillbox hats for one hour a week.

I'm all in.

Parents of the Year

2011-09-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

For the second week in a row I only have time for a summary of The Vampire Diaries rather than a minute by minute recap of the action so let's get right to it.

Previously: There was the thing with the rock and the stuff. Oh, Elijah! I miss that dapper bastard! Jeremy saw dead people, Matt pouted, Stefan confused vampire with zombie and gnawed the flesh off a girl's neck. Elena said some stuff and Damon did a thing, Stefan killed Stormy Weather (RIP Stormy!), Alaric drank and felt sorry for himself and rocked a Bieberific coif as only sad Alaric could. Caroline and Tyler had hot monster sex and then Mrs. Mayor shot her all full of vervain. If anyone's going to have an orgasm in her house, it's going to be her, dammit!

We have three fairly distinct stories this week that have little or no crossover with each other which is my biggest beef with this episode. The show has historically been fantastic at keeping many, many balls in the air but having the action involve nearly everyone working together. Now, we're suddenly in these fractured groups and no one knows what's going on with anyone and it feels disjointed and not at all like the tight, cohesive show I'm used to. Anyway, I'll start with the lamest plot first.

It's a new day in Mystic Falls and Elena has stopped by the Salvatore house to crab at Damon for not answering the phone when she calls to crab at him. She catches the news report about Stormy Weather's untimely demise and then tells Damon how Stefan called her and she had a touching hear-to-heart with his quivering chin. Damon's like, "blah blah I don't care."

Elena tires of Damon not doing what she tells him to so she goes to Alaric's place and rouses him out of a drink-induced shirtless stupor. Elena speaks right to Alaric's bare chest when she asks for the deets on the haps in Tennessee. Alaric is like "shiftless alcoholic!" and Elena's all "Damon and Alaric, sittin' in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G." I'm not sure what the point of that was, but it worked. They argue, she hatches a terrible plan, he fails to cover his chest the entire time and she continues staring at his nipples.

Elena goes to Tyler for help tracking Stefan and Klaus who are tracking werewolves. Tyler, having been a werewolf for 10 whole minutes, is suddenly an expert on where werewolves in the Smokey Mountain region hang out, so he Bings Elena a map and sends her on her suicide mission...er, way. Sends her on her way.

Meanwhile, in the only forest on the side of that one teeny, tiny hill in the Great Smokey Mountains where all the werewolves hang, Stefan and Klaus are returning a temporarily dead Simon Camden to his furry little friends. Klaus is chatty, Stefan is bitchy. I'm skimming over it, but it was pretty fun to watch. Special K makes kibble of the wolves turning them all into werepires so that he'll have an army and no one will mess with him. Because everyone's been tripping over themselves to mess with him up 'till now. The more we find out about Special K's plans for world domination, the more he seems like Special Ed.

So now we have an army of blood-crying werepires and a few hours to kill before the full moon. Why do they cry blood? Don't know. In situations like these, when logic completely fails us, the best thing to do is assume the answer is "magic" and move on. (Though, honestly, I always suspected that in order to make a werepire, you'd have to turn a human from a wolfy bloodline into a vamp and then have that vamp activate the wolfy curse. I would've guessed that turning an already wolfed wereperson into a vampire, when he's already poisonous to himself, would just fail to work on a grand scale, but whatever.) Elena and Alaric have followed the crack directions Tyler Binged for them and ended up in that one spot in the only forest on the side of that teeny, tiny hill in the Great Smokey Mountains were all the werewolves hang.

Elena brought water and the death-defying family ring. Alaric brought a map, a compass, a couple sets of brass knuckle-handled stakes and a wolfsbane grenade. They swap, he'll wear his old ring temporarily to shut her up, if she takes the grenade. I love it when this show gets sentimental. Oh, THAT'S the other thing Ric brought, Damon. Elena and Damon do more of that thing where they argue with each other like a couple of 9-year-olds who learned everything they know about arguing from PeeWee Herman ("I know you are, but what am I?") and then the three of them proceed to tromp through the woods loud as you please on the hunt for a couple of vampires with super powered hearing.

Speaking of that fancy power, Klaus's ears must be on the fritz because while Stefan hears the Mystic Falls All-Stars, Klaus is all "my doggies won't hunt. FIX THEM!" Simon Camden bites Stefan, Klaus won't heal him until all the puppies are rounded up and housebroken. Simon stumbles upon Damon, Elena and Ric and a fight ensues during which Elena detonates a wolfsbane grenade in Simon's face. They tie him to a tree and then watch him turn into a wolf and that's when Elena's like "these mountains are no place for us, we gotta go!" So even Elena can no longer pretend this isn't the worst plan she's ever had. Through the forest they run until they encounter a wolf. Damon gets the wolf to chase him and Elena insists they try to save him since it's her fault Damon is in danger but Alaric's like "it's MY fault he's out here. God, Elena, not everything is about you. Our love is real and I hate the way you're always marginalizing it!" They run.

Somewhere in a clearing, Stefan rescues Damon by ripping out Simon's wereheart. Bye Simon. Tell Ruthie I said rot in Hell!

The blood-crying werepires wander around all creepy and then die. Klaus is a sad puppy. He whines about how it all should have worked because the wolf died and the vamp died and the doppelganger died. Ooops. Magic! Since Stefan is his only friend, Klaus cures him of his wolf bite.

Alaric tells Elena he's going to stop being pathetic and keep the ring. I knew the hair was too good to last. So Alaric moves back into the Gilbert house where he'll be sleeping in the bedroom of dead parental figures. And Damon has dropped by to promise Elena that he'll help rescue Stefan. He forces her to admit that she decided to run because she was worried he might get hurt. She gets all pissy because she doesn't like having to admit to liking him. He tells her that when he brings Stefan back to her, he wants her to remember how she felt about him while Stefan was gone. That's fair.

Thus endeth the hybrid plot from hell.

Back in Mystic Falls where plans suck ever so slightly less, Jeremy is looking to get to the bottom of his dead girlfriend infestation so he implores a gloriously shirtless Matt to help him out. Hold on a sec...yeah, sorry, I just had to watch that an even 300 times. So Matt's like "dude, you're dating a witch and I'm a total supernatural-phobe, can you please go lay your weirdo ghost problems on Bonnie and leave me out of this?" You know I love Matt more than anything (except Caroline) but he needs to get the fuck over it because I'm tired of him not sacking up to be part of the team. Jeremy protests that his current girlfriend might be a little offended at having brought him back from the dead just so he could spend all his private time with his dead exes.

Jeremy's plan requires that he and Matt go through all of Vicki's old stuff and round up some mementos, like a gray tank top, her pot pipe, and a picture of her and Matt when they were kids. Matt chickens out and gives Jeremy the boot and then stands around in his garage looking 10 kinds of hot in his second blue shirt of the episode. Then the picture magically sets itself back up and he has thoughts.

He packs up Vicki's most cherished possessions (tank top, picture, pipe) and a six pack of Hesler's Apology Ale and takes them over to Jeremy's. The boys bond and look ridiculously hot (seriously you guys, Steven McQueen is a kind of hot that's about to set my lady parts on fire. The entire cast seems to get hotter every damn season - save for Somerhalder's, hair of course - what the hell do they put in the water on that set?).

That's when Vicki shows up and asks Jeremy for help coming back from the dead. Just when he's about to tell Matt that story, Anna shows up and is all "don't trust Vicki." I'm not playing favorites (I totally am) but if I were going to pick a dead girlfriend to believe, it would be Anna before it would be Vicki. I'm just saying.

Dead girlfriend plot: fin.

Finally, in the plot I care the most about, Mrs. Lockwood has spirited Caroline out of the house in the night and then gets all kinds of weird with Tyler the next morning. She spikes the coffee with vervain (while she drinks her morning scotch, neat) and gives him some. He wrinkles his nose up at the taste but does not scream in gullet-burning agony so she knows he hasn't been vamped. She's like "next time you sleep with a girl, can you please ask her not to sneak out in the middle of the night like a prostitute?" And even though I usually use these moments to embellish and make it sound worse than it was, Mrs. L seriously called Caroline a prostitute. To Tyler's face. It was the worst thing ever.

Tyler has apparently gotten his rage issues under control (more's the pity) and apologizes and is actually nice when he's like "Caroline's not a prostitute." Then he gets all sad that his woman snuck out. Later, at The Grill, when he's telling Elena all about all the other werewolves that he has intimate knowledge of, he "casually" asks if she's seen or talked to Caroline today. Nope, why? No reason.

Later still, Tyler remains at The Grill, shooting pool alone and frantically checking to see if Caroline will answer his texts. Matt brings him some coffee with a side of attitude. Tyler asks Matt if he's seen Caroline and Matt's like "more attitude, on the house!" I'm sorry...I'm going to have to stop summarizing temporarily because this scene is the single greatest thing about the entire episode. So Matt says, snotty as all get-out, that he no longer keeps track of Caroline's comings and goings. Tyler gets serious and sincere, "look man, I never meant for me and her being friends to be a problem for you." That's a totally fair sentiment and I'm on Tyler's side with this because Matt dumped Caroline and forfeited his right to be a butt head about her personal life, but Tyler does leave out the part where they aren't really just friends anymore. Matt replies coldly, "it is what it is." He turns to leave but changes his mind. He mentions that he knows it's a full moon tonight and that Caroline usually helps him when he wolfs out. "Do you uh...is this like the kind of thing you need another person for?" Matt asks. When he's all adorable like that, I kind of forgive him for being such a supernatural-phobic baby. Tyler thanks him for the offer, but assures him he'll be fine and then takes a sip of the coffee Matt poured him and makes a hilarious face. "What is up with my taste buds today?" Matt laughs and tells him it's the vervain that the Sheriff has him slip into the coffee from time to time. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a random spot check to see if there are more vamps in town than we already know about or if she's trying to keep the locals all vervained up so that no visiting vamps have anyone to snack on.

Anyway, Matt notes that people usually can't taste it in the coffee but Tyler stopped listening a little while back because he's been doing the math in his head and he's just figured out that his mom vervained him.

Speaking of Mrs. Interim Mayor, she's chatting with a mysterious man I think we can all agree would be better to look at if he were wearing horn rimmed glasses. No one knows he's there, Caroline is a vampire, the council hasn't been told, he gets a name (Bill), she can't get her hands dirty in this mess, he's more than willing to kill Vampire Barbie. I don't like Bill.

Tyler arrives home later and lays it all out. "Let's skip the part where we pretend we don't know about the vampires in this town." He wants to know why she did the vervain vamp test on him this morning. She says it's because she thought that Caroline vamped him. He feels like this is the right time to go back to playing dumb so he's like "Caroline? Why whatever do you mean?" Mrs. L goes full throttle bitch and Tyler gets his hackles up as he starts to realize that it's no coincidence Caroline is missing. Mrs. L tells him he can't be with her because she's a monster and he's like, "Hahahaha! I'll show you a monster!" And then he takes his pants off. I kid (kind of).

Really he's kind of taken aback and realizes she doesn't know what's up. So he wants to educate his mom on his wolfitude which makes sense. But while he could just whip out the video of Hot Uncle Mason and get this shit sewn up with a quickness so they could mobilize a Caroline rescue party while the sun still shines, he's like "come with me to the woods. We've got plenty of time." He locks her in the cage in the Lockood dungeon and has her watch while he chains himself to the floor. Then he turns into a wolf while she screams in horror. The next morning she sits in her cage and stares at her remarkably well-built and completely naked 17-year-old son until he wakes up. Because that's not creepy.

When he does wake up, he's all "so? Seen any good nudity lately?" His mom promises to make sure nothing bad happens to Caroline. Then she calls Bill and asks him to back up off of Vampire Barbie but Bill's not having it. When Bill sets his mind to something, he's like a dog with a bone. Off Bill goes to another dungeony locale where Caroline is tied to a chair and just coming to from her overdose of vervain. When Bill opens the door, Caroline takes one look at him and..."Daddy?" Oh Jesus! Can I PLEASE get someone to make Caroline's rescue a top fucking priority next week? And by "someone" I mean "everyone." Thanks!

Week In Reviews

2011-09-26T16:14:00.001-07:00

In case you don't already know, I have a job that has nothing to do with watching television or writing about it on this blog. Occasionally it keeps me so busy that I don't have time to either watch television or write about it on this blog. Last week was one such time. But I put my weekend to good use and got caught up so let's talk about things shall we?

Two Broke Girls - This is a decently funny show. Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs are winningly funny separately and a great combination together. The supporting cast is less than useless and there are definitely some cringey things happening overall but the laughs out number the cringes which is enough to get it a season pass at my house.

How I Met Your Mother - I'm still watching this show but I don't think I'll be discussing it here. My problem with the show is that after 6 years, it still wants to be about Ted and the title of the show despite the fact that I doubt we'll ever actually meet the freaking mother and Ted is intolerable. I love Marshall and Lily and Robin and Barney but I can't take Ted. So I'll keep watching but then I'll keep my annoyed opinions to myself.

Ringer - The second episode was a vast improvement over the pilot but I'm still not entirely sold on the show. There remains a significant delta between what the show thinks it is and what it's actually capable of being. I will give it another episode or two to find it's footing but it's position on my fall schedule is far from safe.

Free Agents - If I like Suburgatory when in premiers this week, I don't think I'll keep watching Free Agents. I adore Anthony Stewart Head and Kathryn Hahn but the show isn't that funny or that interesting.

Up All Night - Remember how I said I liked it but it wasn't that funny? The second episode was pretty funny and now I really like the show a lot. Though the Maya Rudolf character seems sort of shoe-horned in and while she's funny, I'm not sure she's completely necessary. Still, this show is a keeper.

Modern Family - The thing I like about this show is that the interactions are mostly kind and they're all exactly how families act...but funnier. The third season started strong with two funny episodes and I look forward to more all season. And I love Phil Dunphy most of all.

The Big Bang Theory - I thought Priya was gone but the Skype technology has decided to ruin everything for us. Fortunately everyone else on the show is awesome and there's still hope that Priya will be gone for good soon enough.

The Secret Circle - There is a truly unfortunate difference in the acting abilities of the cast on this show. As with Ringer, I'm going to give the show a few extra weeks to win me over but so far I'm underwhelmed. And the sex eyes that Thomas Dekker is throwing off are starting to make me uncomfortable.

Nikita - I was a little worried about how the show would deal with Alex teaming up with Division against Nikita and Michael but it seems like it's going to be a great twist that opens up a lot of good stories. And somehow, being out of Division has made Birkhoff tolerable. It's a Nikita miracle.

Supernatural - So far so good. I don't mind where the sho went over the past few years but I haven't been a fan of how it got there, this episode seemed like a bit of a return to things that I liked about the show previously. Then again, I'm not sure I buy that Dean, Sam and Bobby would take the "wait around for something to happen" approach to Castiel going off the rails. Even if he is God. I love Death and I hope he drops in a lot more often this season and Leviathan Cas seems like an entertaining fellow, but overall it was only a mild improvement over the past few years.

The Good Wife - When this show gets steamy, it usually does so without showing us anything at all. Last night Alicia had what appeared to be some very satisfying sex with Will in the full upright position while we saw them only from the shoulders up from which angle they appeared to be fully clothed and it was one of the hottest sex scenes I've ever seen on television. And meanwhile Peter seems pretty intent on showing Alicia who's boss in the courtroom so there will clearly be all kinds of additional drama cropping up this season. This show is so fun.

Felicity - I watched about 1/2 of the second season over the weekend and so did Claire though we didn't watch together this time. We had the following conversation via text last night:

Claire: THE BOX.
Me: Did you love it?
Claire: I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it seemed really random. Like really REALLY random. I wish they'd have given more explanation. I NEED to know what's in the box! I'm also thoroughly enjoying the new counselor.
Me: Dr. Toni Pavone! She is my very favorite non-regular character on the show!
Claire: She is awesome, just like the music she always plays in her office. On a related note, did Felicity just consider dropping out of college or is my hearing off?
Me: Your hearing is fine. Don't worry, Dr. Pavone will fix it.
Claire: Thank God. And if Ruby is pregnant, i will not be a happy camper. This show gives me stress.
Me: All the best shows do.
Claire: It's true. Ugh. I don't know what I'm going to do if this show ends badly.
Me: 2.16 right now at my house. Two people I won't name just got into a fight. It was glorious.
Claire: Stop torturing me. I'm only on 13.
Me: Sorry. Keep an ear out for my favorite Ben quote of all time.
Claire: Will it be profound or noticeable?
Me: It will involve him calling someone a dick. I think you'll know it when it happens.
Claire: RUBY IS A SLUT. Noel deserves so much better! Like Felicity. Or me!
Claire: That was a great quote. "63% of me thinks you're a dick!" I was impressed.
Claire: That was the stupidest/best fight ever. Ever.
Me: I know. And after it's over it somehow gets even more amazing. Those two are really entertaining as friends.
Claire: I've noticed that. I love this show.
Me: That makes me ridiculously happy.
Claire: I'm so glad you showed me this. And that it lasts longer than My So-Called Life. So much more to love. It feels like it'll be complete.
Claire: I like that Meghan has sworn to kill Felicity over Greg.
Me: Aw! Giving Meghan more to do was the best thing about Greg! I love Meghan.
Claire: Everyone should love Meghan.
Claire: I love that Felicity had no boyfriends in high school and now has been involved with 5 guys since she started college a year and a half ago.
Me: She really blossomed in college.
Claire: She did! I loved the Star Trek reference from Richard. I love Richard.
Me: Hee! Me too.
Claire: OMG, AWESOME: "The thing about Ben is that he's this sweet, dumb guy. But the twist is: he's not dumb at all." Javier just summed up how I feel about Ben.
Me: And that's why I love both Ben and Javier. Well, that and everything that happens in 2.21 (The Aretha Theory).
Claire: Your goal is to make me too curious about upcoming episodes thereby depriving me of sleep tonight, right?
Me: Sorry.

The second season has gets a little maudlin here and there. Some people are given too much screen time and others not enough. Bad romantic choices are made. Fashion atrocities committed. But I love Felicity's short hair, I love Ben and Noel being friends, I love "The Aretha Theory" and I love this show.

You Missed The Cake

2011-09-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

Previously on The Vampire Diaries: everything happened.

I've got a time crunch this week so I've got to go with a condensed recap. Ready? Let's go.

It's Elena's 18th birthday. Caroline is giving her a party. Sheriff Forbes is giving her leads on where to find Stefan. Damon is giving her her vervain necklace back, a full view of his birthday suit, and the run around regarding the whereabouts of his brother and Klaus. Tyler is giving her a hard time about Damon liking her. Alaric is giving her an invitation to his self pitying soiree. Jeremy's giving her a headache by getting stoned again. Matt's giving her a drunken kiss on the cheek. Stefan is giving her agita by being gone and also killing a lot of people. Bonnie apparently doesn't give a shit because she's out of town.

Pre-Party

Stefan and Klaus are road tripping through Tennessee. Seeing the sights. Getting a taste of the locals flavors.

Damon takes the tip from the Sheriff (who has apparently decided to accept the vampires as her friends and help them, which is something I'd like to see happen but...alas) and Alaric and heads to Tennessee where he finds the bodies of two of Stefan's latest victims. It seems that Stefan likes to disassemble and then reassemble. Stefan and I both find jigsaw puzzles relaxing. Before Damon covers his brothers enormous and revolting tracks (guys, at one point he literally took a bite out of one girl's neck and chewed on it. So. Gross.) by setting the place ablaze, he discovers a cellar decked out with chains and shackles. All the better to hide a werewolf, my dear.

Jeremy is still seeing the ghosts of girlfriends past here and there and everywhere but he's not telling anyone because he just doesn't know how his nearest and dearest would react to the news that strange things are afoot in Mystic Falls.

Matt still knows the score but isn't ready or willing to accept and embrace the truth about how everyone he knows is kind of magic or magic-adjacent so instead he's pouting and avoiding waiting on Caroline and Tyler when they're at The Grill. He's also kind of bonding with Jeremy because they work together and he's out of options unless the show wants to cast someone else to be his friend. Which they don't.

Alaric is pouting because of how all the ladies he sleeps with end up really super dead. Sidebar: remember when Alaric first came to town and he was all sad and angry 'cause his wife was a vampire and he had really good hair? Then he met Damon and fell in love and started dating Jenna and he was happy and his hair looked like deep fried ass? But now his girlfriend is dead and he's got this drinking problem and he feels sort of useless and really, really sorry for himself and his hair is all emo and really quite hot on him. You guys, the hair math tells me that the attractiveness of Alaric's coif is inversely proportionate to his inner pain. What I'm saying is, the next time his hair looks like something you might pull out of your bathtub drain, we should kill someone he loves. Problem solved.

Caroline and Tyler are BFFs now. They're both horny and several people think they're doing it. They're not but their sexual tension is like a character all by itself right now. In fact, I think I heard it ask Jeremy for an Arnold Palmer.

Stefan and Klaus have tracked down Simon the Werewolf at a bar where they torture him with vervain darts because Klaus has some weird plan about turning a bunch of werewolves into werepires just for fun. Special K needs so much therapy. Anyway, then Klaus hears that Damon has cleaned up another of their messes and he's decided it's time to kill Damon a little but Stefan like JUST got done ruing everything to save Damon's life so he'd rather that life last longer than a minute so he skips off to have a chat with his brother.

Party

Damon and Alaric drink. Alaric makes sad noises about how pathetic he is for attending a rager at his students' house. He has a point and his hair looks fantastic.

Jeremy is tired of seeing dead people so instead of trying to get to the bottom of why Anna and Vicki are haunting him, he's decided to get high. Matt is tired of seeing live people that he loves making sex eyes at each other so instead of telling his ex-girlfriend that he loves her no matter how alive she's not, he's decided to join Jeremy for a toke. Once they're both good and high, Jeremy starts to confide in Matt that ever since Bonnie mojo'd him back to life, he's been seeing some crazy shit. Then Matt's off to be awkward and drunk with Caroline.

Caroline and Elena find a map and some other investigative clues in Damon's closet. I would have guessed actual skeletons or, like, ladies underwear but I don't judge.

Tyler is rubbing up against "Slutty Sophie" while Caroline watches jealously. Matt drunkenly confronts her for...being friends with Tyler and then leaves. That gets Caroline in a bit of a snit so she compels Sophie to leave. Then Tyler is like "woman, I have been wanting to do dirty, sweaty things to you since that time you awesomely risked your life to comfort me when I turned into a werewolf. If you are into it, fucking tell me already because lifting cars is way to damn easy when you've got super-human strength." And she's like, "um..." and then sticks her tongue in his mouth. Good call, Care. Good call.

Stefan tracks down Stormy Weather at the TV station where he uses her phone to text Damon and request he pick her up. Damon, ever the chivalrous fake boyfriend, arrives to find her compelled to stand in the rafters by his brother the Ripper. Stefan politely request that Damon back off, then has Stormy Weather kill herself which is really sad for Damon and for me. RIP, Stormy Weather.

Post-Party

Jeremy tells Matt that he's being haunted by his dead girlfriends. Matt kind of thinks it's a metaphor. Matt walks home with a pint of ice cream and no spoon. Matt is going to be very hung over and very sticky tomorrow. Aaaand there are the dirty thoughts.

Damon arrives home to a lecture from Elena. She's pissed he's been tracking Klaus's kills this whole time and didn't tell her. He's like "woman, are you NEW? I'm tracking STEFAN! And also, why are you wearing a nightgown to your birthday party? That's just weird!"

Klaus turns Simon Camden into a werepire.

Stefan calls Elena but lacks the balls to say anything. She still knows it's him though so gives him a pep talk that sets his chin to quivering. The entire audience cries like we just lost our puppy. We kind of did.

Caroline and Tyler go back to his place to get seductively naked with each other and have the hottest PG13 sex allowed on the CW during the 8:00pm hour. Once he's asleep, she slips out of the bedroom and down the stairs only to be confronted by Mrs. Interim Mayor who has sprinkled vervain over Caroline's purse so when she reaches for it, it burns her hand. Then Mrs. IM shoots a few vervain darts into Caroline.

Mrs. Interim Mayor is public enemy number two with me now. The CW Promo Department is number one for putting together a promo for 3.02 that is entirely about werepires with no mention at all of Vampire Barbie's fate.

A Boring Tale

2011-09-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

When first I heard they were making a show set in the flagship Chicago Playboy Club in the early '60s, I was kind of excited because I am a pretty big fan of the 1985 made-for-TV movie A Bunny's Tale. Never heard of it? It's the dramatization of Gloria Steinem's undercover expose of New York's Playboy Club staring Kirstie Alley, Delta Burke, Joanna Kerns, and a host of others '80s TV staples. It's all bruised rib cages (those outfits are too tight!), demerits from the bunny mother (don't lose your tail!), and women in abusive relationships (Joanna Kerns gets the shit kicked out of her, y'all!). Kirstie Alley keeps her note pad and pencil rolled up and stuck in her cleavage. It's amazing.

The Playboy Club is not amazing. It's not fun or interesting or entertaining. It's not empowering to women. It's not not A Bunny's Tale.

The show focuses most of it's attention on Amber Heard as the new cigarette bunny. She is nearly raped in the store room by some mob-boss key holder and when she accidentally kills him with a stiletto to the throat, Eddie Cibrian, former mob lawyer and current states attorney, is there to help clean up the mess. Why is he there? He was impatient for his cigarettes. How is Eddie Cibrian a lawyer? Some questions never get answered.

From the commercials, I was under the impression that Cibrian was playing some kind of cleaner or hit-man because it was all body dumps and Cibrian faces but I guess the show thought that if someone wore a nice enough suit we'd all just believe he passed the Bar. The show was wrong.

But Cibrian and Heard aren't the only people on the show of course. There's also Brenda the "chocolate bunny," Alice the fake married/secret lesbian bunny, Janie the bunny dating the bartender who turns out to be married and running from her husband for some reason, and Carol-Lynne the bitchy bunny who becomes the bitchy bunny mother when the club manager fires her for stealing employee files. Oh, plus the club manager who's married to a former bunny whom he denegrates to others as often as possible.

I'm dropping this show from my schedule because it just makes me sad that A Bunny's Tale is not available on DVD.

Up For It

2011-09-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

I like when funny, talented people are on my TV. Christina Applegate, Will Arnett and Maya Rudolf are funny, talented people and I loved having them on my TV last night on Up All Night.

This is a sweet, slice-of-life show and I enjoy that. Applegate's Reagan and Arnett's Chris are recognizable people. I know those people. They're friends of mine. I don't know anyone like Rudolf's Ava personally, but we're all used to seeing that character on TV and in movies and it's a fun character to watch. The entire show is full of moments that are fun to watch, but you know what I didn't think the show was terribly full of? Big laughs. Or, really, laughs at all. Maybe it's because I know before it happens what the "punchline" is, or maybe I was just too tired when I watched it. I liked it. I liked the jokes. I smiled several times. I just didn't laugh. Not once.

The one thing about the show that's giving me pause isn't even about its ability to make me laugh. It's that Will Arnett doesn't really have much to do. He's such a funny guy, I hope he isn't overshadowed by the slightly more crackling repartee that's happening between Reagan and Ava in the office. I hope he gets to do more than hold the baby, be understanding, and shop for normal cheese.

It gets a season pass at my house because even if it doesn't make me laugh out loud, it makes me smile. I like the show.

Two For The Price Of One

2011-09-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Judging a show on its pilot episode can be tricky. It's hard to win people over with heavy exposition and that's basically all pilots are. They're giving you the back story you need to understand what's going on so that everything can unfold from there. The more complex your story, the more exposition you need. The more exposition you have, the more ridiculous your story can seem. I've seen pilots for some very complex shows that were so fantastic they could have been stand-alone movies. The Veronica Mars pilot comes to mind here. By the end of that pilot we were set up with two central mysteries - who killed Lily Kane and who raped Veronica - and were familiar with the personalities and interpersonal relationships of every character on the show and none of it even felt like exposition.

I've also seen pilots I didn't care for turn into shows I loved. A poorly executed pilot doesn't necessarily mean the show won't be good. It does mean you've got an uphill battle to fight to win viewers over though because a rough pilot can deter people from tuning in again. I think Ringer is fighting just that kind of uphill battle.

The story they're trying to tell is very complex. Bridget is a recovering addict who witnessed the head of the Wyoming mob (yes, really) commit a heinous murder. The FBI wants her to testify against him but she fears for her life. She runs away to see her twin sister Siobhan who's an ice cold bitch married to a wealthy man and living in Manhattan. Siobhan takes her sister out for a boat ride, waits until Bridget settles in for a cat nap and then fakes her own suicide, thoughtfully leaving her wedding ring behind. Bridget slips the ring on and steps into Siobhan's "perfect" life only to find out that her sister's in an unhappy marriage, with a step-daughter who hates her, having an affair with her best friend's husband and is 4 weeks pregnant...by someone. Oh right, and while the crazy-eyed Wyoming hit squad is out to kill Bridget, someone else entirely is trying to kill Siobhan.

That's a lot of story to tell in the pilot so if my problems were just the heft of the exposition, I'd have easily gotten past it and been prepared to really like the second episode. But exposition was the least of this show's problems. The show looks cheap. The special effects are anything but special as it never looks like Sarah Michelle Gellar is in the same county as another person, let alone talking to someone else when she does a scene where she's supposedly talking to her twin sister. I know it must be hard to splice two takes of the same actress together to make it look there are two separate people in the scene but it can be done more convincingly than it is here (The Vampire Diaries does it on a fairly regular basis). The green screen work during the boat scene was the least convincing green screen I've ever seen in my entire life. There was even a scene during some kind of auction where the camera cuts to a shot over SMG's shoulder and the perspective is so jarring I thought for a moment that I'd accidentally been drinking vodka all day instead of water.

Plenty of shows look like they are made on a shoestring budget. The first season and a half of Buffy, the special effects looked like something my high school art teacher had is 2nd period throw together on the theme of "nightmares" while he listened to Pink Floyd records (my high school art teacher always played Pink Floyd on vinyl during class. Public schools were a lot more comfortable hiring stoners in the early '90s). But the show itself rolled with it. The writing was top notch and sometimes they even poked a little fun of their own FX shortcomings so the audience could say "yeah, they don't have any money, but they do what they can with what they've got and they make it work for them." Unfortunately, Ringer seems to be taking itself pretty seriously. (Man oh MAN, does this show think it's CONSTANT use of mirrors is clever.) They don't seem to realize that their reach far exceeds their grasp which makes me wonder if they'll be able to pull it together and tell me a good story without it getting lost in its own sense of self seriousness.

I'll give it another episode to convince me but if it can't win me over on episode two, it won't get a third chance to change my first impression.

Crazy Witches Shouldn't Play With Matches

2011-09-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Secret Circle pilot went up on iTunes yesterday for free (go, now, go) so I gave it a gander. I wasn't overwhelmed by it, I thought it was decent and the acting is solid. I found the instant, intense attraction between Britt Robertson and Thomas Dekker very believable and took an instant creeping to Gale Harold even before I saw his face. The dude spills water and lights matches with an unsettling intensity.

I know none of that sounds like a particularly great review and I guess that's appropriate. If I recall correctly, I was only lukewarm on The Vampire Diaries after its pilot episode as well and look how that turned out. I went into this show with little or no expectations, which I find is the best way to keep from being underwhelmed, and that worked like a charm. In fact, I would say that thus far I'm right exactly whelmed by The Secret Circle.

I'm interested to find out where the story will go once everyone accepts their powers and binds themselves together or whatever. Once the kids find out that they're pawns for some of the less well adjusted and creepier parents. Once there's more to the story than introductions. I think there could be good stuff here and I'm willing to give them some time to prove me right. Not the highest of praise but a respectable impression for a pilot to make.

My Love/Hate Relationship With ABCFamily

2011-09-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

After becoming quickly addicted to some of the recent ABCFamily offerings and realizing that the network knows a good teen soap or silly comedy when it sees one, I decided to catch up. With the help of NetFlix Instant, I'm slowly making my way through some of the series I missed the first time around.

This week I watched 10 Things I Hate About You in its entirety. That show was adorable. It was funny and goofy and just similar enough to the movie to fill me with nostalgia and enough of a departure so as not to simply rehash what we've all already seen.

Most importantly, the show was my introduction to Ethan Peck who is so cute. Impossibly cute. I've decided to start a letter-writing campaign to have him cast in everything from now until the end of time because his cuteness must be put out into the world so that it can heal the sick and incite peace and bring happiness to everyone.

For real, he's the cutest thing I've seen in many years.

There was more to the show than Ethan Peck, you say? Yes, you're right. The show seemed to be firing on all cylinders and even had a good plot involving Leslie Grossman as the guidance counselor dating the girls' dad but then it was cancelled with things hanging there totally unresolved. Papa Strattford walked in on Kat and Patrick in bed, naked, post coitus you guys, and then NOTHING. That's it. The network saw that and was like "eh, it's run it's course"? What is wrong with the people at ABCFamily? Why would they do this to us? Ethan Peck was naked!

Ahem.

If you have NetFlix Instant and you enjoy light comedies and cute boys, you should watch this series. Twenty episodes at roughly 21 minutes each makes for a quick trip through the entire run of the show and I think you'll like it. I sure did.

My Fall 2011 Schedule

2011-09-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

I know that not everyone takes their TV viewing as seriously as I do. I do my homework on this stuff. I read up on every new show to determine what it's about, who's in it, who writes it, who produces it, what certain critics I tend to agree with thought about it, and what all of those things mean for my interest in it. Once I know what shows look interesting, I lay out the night-by-night schedule and painstakingly make my own spreadsheet of not only which shows I'll keep watching from last year and which new ones I'll add, but also which of my 2 DVRs I'll program to record each show based on when I will likely watch them. Setting my new fall schedule is serious business and sometimes I still miss things I end up really liking. But this is what I'm starting with this year:

Sunday

Once Upon A Time - (New) 8:00pm/7:00pm Central, ABC
I'm not even sure I can accurately tell you what this is about. There's a thing with a woman who goes into fairytales and maybe is a character in one herself but doesn't know it. Yeah, it sounds ridiculous. And the early buzz I heard was all kind of "eh, it's dumb." But then they brought in some good consulting producers - Jane Espenson, Liz Tigelar and Damon Lindelof - and the reworked some stuff and then critics were like "ok, I mean, it's not terrible. There might be something here." I like Jennifer Morrison (despite the fact that I have strongly disliked two of her most identifiable characters) and Ginnifer Goodwin and now David Anders is filming episodes. He may have been a son of a bitch on Vampire Diaries, but he earned a lifetime of goodwill as Sark on Alias. If he whips out a British accent on this show, I will watch to the bitter end.

The Good Wife - (Returning) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, CBS
The marketing campaign would like me to know that their spicing things up this year. They're working the sexy angle extra hard and I have no complaints about that. Particularly if the sexy angle will involve Alicia and Will having a lot of sex. I'd also like to see Cary get some action this year, as long as we're cranking up the steam. Other things I'm looking forward to: Diane and Will scenes which just make me happy; Kalinda and Alicia mending fences; Cary becoming Kalinda's substitute BFF; Eli.

Homeland - (New) Showtime
Claire Danes working Homeland Security is a thing I did not know I wanted to see. But as it turns out, Claire Danes doing almost anything is something I want to see because the more times I watch My So-Called Life (I'm well into double digits now), the more I wish she were back on my TV every week. I'm glad for the trend that's bringing actors and actresses to the small screen over the big these days. I absolutely believe television is where most of the quality roles and stories are so it just makes good sense for quality actors to be there.

Pan Am - (New) 10:00pm/9:00pm Central, ABC
The part of me that expected to like Mad Men, really wants to love this show. I love the aesthetic and the nostalgic quality of a show set in the '60s. But while Mad Men lost me by focusing a whole lot on a dude sitting in his office smoking and thinking, Pan Am should keep the pace of things moving a bit faster just by virtue of being about the world's busiest and most glamorous airline (at the time). Bolstered by a likable cast that includes Christina Ricci, Kellie Garner, and Mike Vogel, and a Tommy Schlamme directed pilot, and I'm hopeful.

Monday

How I Met Your Mother - (Returning) 8:00pm/7:00pm Centeral, CBS
I don't care if I ever meet the mother and I'm now actively hoping that Ted gets hit by a cab, but there could be a return to the fun chemistry of the early Barney/Robin romance and Marshall and Lily will almost certainly be funny and adorable through some of it so I'll keep watching. Unless Jennifer Morrison's show is cancelled and they try to bring Zooey back in which case I'm out.

2 Broke Girls - (New) 8:30pm/7:30pm Central, CBS
Kat Dennings is great but there's no way this would have made my schedule had it not gotten fairly good reviews from so many critics. A few season's ago I'd gotten away from nearly all half hour comedies but they've been creeping back onto my schedule recently. I'm not terribly confident they'll all have staying power but Monday's aren't too crowded so this one may not have to make too big an impression to get a pass.

Hart of Dixie - (New) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, CW
The adorable Rachel Bilson reteams with her OC showrunner Josh Schwartz and already I'm in. Add Scott Porter and Cress Williams to bring that touch of Friday Night Lights, and Jaime King who I just think is adorable, and there's really no way this show wasn't going to get an automatic season pass at my house. Whether or not I'll buy Bilson as a doctor is debatable but I never bought Chad Michael Murray as a novelist and I kept watching One Tree Hill so I don't think a silly thing like believability will deter me here either.

Hawaii Five-0 - (Returning) 10:00pm/9:00pm Central, CBS
I like bromances and the one between Danno (Scott Caan) and McGarrett (Alex O'Laughlin) is particularly fun. They argue like my grandparents, you guys. I'd watch an entire show of the two of them driving around arguing in the car. Also, Danno has the shortest fuse and the biggest temper for a guy I could fit in my pocket. I love it.

The Playboy Club - (New) 10:00pm/9:00pm Central, NBC
Like Pan Am, this one has the period setting going for it. It's set in the flagship Playboy club in Chicago in the '60s and will focus mainly on the bunnies, the club manager and one particular key holder whose day job appears to be as a cleaner for the mob. Jeff Hephner was originally supposed to play the key holder but apparently a crossroads demon got involved and now Eddie Cibrean is the key holding enforcer and with that casting change, my interest waned. I'll still tune in for the pilot, but now I'm pretty sure that'll be as far as it goes.

Tuesday

New Girl - (New) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, Fox
You already know I enjoyed this pilot a lot. There's much to recommend it including a pleasant cast, an adorable sense of humor and a premise that doesn't button-hole them into recycling the same jokes for years. I hope it does well because I'd like to see this show make it.

Ringer - (New) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, CW
Sarah Michelle Gellar returns to TV where she has always belonged! My excitement and anticipation for this show were insane from the moment it was picked up last spring. But over the past few weeks, as it's premiere has approached and more critics have seen it, I'm starting to worry that I will not enjoy this show. The consensus seems to be that it's a bit of a try-hard which is not something I usually respond to. Also, they are continually casting new roles on the show and so far they seem to all be men. How many love interests does one show need? I'm getting the distinct impression that it's bloated and all over the place and I'm less and less hopeful that SMG has the ability to pull it all together with her own tiny little hands. Even if those hands did used to save the world. A lot.

Wednesday

Up All Night - (New) 8:00pm/7:00pm Central, NBC
This wasn't on my original list but Mike asked me to watch it since he plans to and I'm a good friend (also he let's me make him watch stuff so I owed him). I like Will Arnett, Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolf a lot so I want it to be good. I have heard next to nothing about it though so I don't know what to expect. Perhaps I'm in for a pleasant surprise. If not, it's only 30 minutes a week, I can spare that to make my friend happy.

Free Agents - (New) 8:30pm/7:30pm Central, NBC
On the other hand, I've heard quite a lot about this show and none of it is good. If you're wondering why I'd watch it anyway, I can answer that in three words: Anthony Steward Head. I can't let Rupert Giles return to television without at least saying I tried to watch. As further incentive, Katherine Hahn is the female lead. Yes, this show is like the many things that Judy Greer keeps being cast in which are well beneath her talents, but until someone gives them something befitting their brilliance, I've got to do my part to help them earn paychecks.

Suburgatory - (New) 8:30pm/7:30pm Central, ABC
Many critics have touted this as their favorite comedy of the new season and I'm intrigued. When I first read that Jeremy Sisto was playing the father of a teenage girl in this comedy, I was offended on many, many levels. Remember when he was rolling with the homies in Clueless? Or dating Joey Potter? Who said he was old enough to have a teenage daughter? He is TWO YEARS older than I am. I hate everyone. Ahem. But good reviews are good reviews and Jeremy Sisto, while not as old as they'd like us to believe, is still Jeremy Sisto so I'm in.

Modern Family - (Returning) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, ABC
If you need me to tell you why I'm watching this, I guess you haven't been paying attention the past two years. It's a sweet, funny, silly, smart show that the whole family can watch and appreciate. The entire cast is outstanding and I like the way they mix things up by pairing up all different combinations of people for stories each week - as it would be in a real family.

American Horror Story - (New) F/X
Did you notice that Glee isn't on my schedule this year? That's because Ryan Murphy has a way of turning a fun show into something TERRIBLE with little or no effort at all. Yet, I am going to set myself up for another round of disappointment because Connie Britton is awesome. Still, I fully expect to hate this show - if not immediately, then eventually.

Revenge - (New) 10:00pm/9:00pm Central, ABC
I love this show. I told you I loved it last week and I wasn't kidding. The cast is amazing, the story is soapy and intriguing. Kyle Valenti and Amy Abbott are totally going to hook up (power of positive thinking!) and the only thing better than two WB legacies hooking up is...no, there's nothing better than that. This show is the exact right mix of everything I like about TV. Now everyone needs to watch it so that it isn't cancelled. Seriously.

Thursday

The Big Bang Theory - (Returning) 8:00pm/7:00pm Central, CBS
When the show added Bernadette and Amy last season, I was initially skeptical. But both Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik have been great and fit in beautifully. The same can not be said for the Priya character so I can only hope Leonard gives her her walking papers sooner than later. It's still a fun show and I will never stop loving Sheldon.

Parks and Recreation - (Returning) 8:30pm/7:30pm Central, NBC
I don't know if I've said much about this show but it's delightfully funny. There is endless comedy in reaction shots. Everything in the show seems small but it produces huge laughs. If you haven't seen the show before, you need to seek out the season 2 episode "Hunting Trip" immediately. If Leslie's interview with the park ranger doesn't make you laugh, you might not understand comedy.

The Vampire Diaries - (Returning) 8:00pm/7:00pm Central, CW
Do I really have to tell you why I'll be watching The Vampire Diaries? Are my EXHAUSTIVELY detailed recaps not hint enough that I like this show kind of a lot? You want specifics, fine, here goes: amazing acting, the most intricately woven and meticulously complex plots I can recall ever seeing on television, and the most physically attractive cast anyone ever assembled. If none of that seems like something you'd like to see, we really have nothing left to talk about.

Person of Interest - (New) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, CBS
I've taken most of the procedurals off of my schedule because I've got so many serialized shows that I have no time left to worry about the ones I could catch up on during the next holiday weekend marathon on the USA network. But this show seems like something a little more interesting. A former hit man and a scientist trying to prevent crimes before they happen adds just the tiniest touch of Alias and Fringe to the crime procedural genre and I might just be interested in that.

Secret Circle - (New) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, CW
I watched the pilot last night (thank you, iTunes!) and I see promise in the show. I'm not sure I love it yet but Brit Robertson and Thomas Dekker have good chemistry and Gale Harold is blowing my MIND with his creepiness. I'm not entirely sure I see how this story goes long-term but I wouldn't have guessed all the places they'd take The Vampire Diaries either and that's worked out very well so I'm giving this a little runway to get off the ground.

Friday

Nikita - (Returning) 8:00pm/7:00pm Central, CW
My first impression of this show was less than stellar but I gave it a second chance to win me over last spring and ended up really enjoying it. They seem poised to change things up quite a bit this year with new allies and new enemies. And I'm sure they'll still blow things up and kick people's assess and stuff just for good measure so that should be fun.

Grimm - (New) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, NBC
I have heard some truly bad things about this pilot. I believe one critic said (via Twitter) that it looked like a particularly low-budget Canadian show from the '80s and that certainly paints a grimm picture. (See what I did there?) Still, I have a sense of morbid curiosity for it because David Greenwalt is executive producing and Silas Weir Mitchell is in it and I kinda dig Silas Weir Mitchell. He can really bring "weird" to life.

Fringe - (Returning) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, Fox
Here's where I have to admit that I haven't watched the last 6 episodes of last season yet. I know, I now. But I do really like the show and I have every intention of catching up and keeping it on my schedule. I mean, I heard that they killed Peter which is UNACCEPTABLE, but Josh Jackson remains on the show so I guess I can get over it. Dammit, I really need to get up to speed on this show immediately. Cough, cough...maybe I should go home sick right now. Hmmm...

Supernatural - (Returning) 9:00pm/8:00pm Central, CW
My patience with the brothers Winchester has been wearing ever thinner over the past few seasons because I miss when they adhered to established personalities. Also, I miss when Dean used to be funny. Now they've gone and made Castiel a God who's drunk with power and I remain skeptical that this development will somehow bring back the fun show I used to so enjoy. Still, I keep watching because even a downer Dean and a robo Sammy are better than having no Winchesters to ogle at all. Being shallow is a bitch.

Special K - The Breakfast of Champions

2011-09-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

After not having a chance to recap the second season finale of The Vampire Diaries back in May, it seemed just as appropriate to wait until the week before the new season as a way of refreshing our memories before all the shit once again hits the fan.

Previously: Klaus performed his ritual - which included killing Jules, Aunt Jenna, and Elena - and brought out his inner wolf. Elijah was just about to kill him but then Klaus was all "if you let me live I'll show you where I hid the bodies of our brothers and sisters and parents and then totally double cross you and kill you." Elijah is usually so smart but apparently he has a previously undiagnosed condition that renders him really super deaf to the incredibly loud subtext that comes out of his brother's mouth. I guess it's true - nobody's perfect. So Elijah and Klaus zipped off into the night leaving Team Awesome to clean up the carnage in the woods. Their first order of business was to bring Elena back to Witch Manor where she came back to life and John died (magic!). They buried the rest of Elena's parental figures while we all cried. Then Damon hipped Stefan to the love bite he got from Tyler and Stefan furrowed his pretty, pretty brow.

Presently, Elena watches Jeremy sleep. Jeremy sleeps in a wife beater with one arm up, the better for the audience to appreciate his biceps. Elena moves across the hall to look around Jenna's room sadly and then runs into Damon in the hall. He's there to beg for her forgiveness for the whole forcing her to drink blood thing. She needs a lot of time which he pretends to think is fine even though he'll be dead later today. Sad.

Damon goes home and pours himself a glass of the the good stuff while Ingrid Michaelson ratchets up the melancholy on the soundtrack. He takes a look at his arm's increasing infection and opens the heavy curtains in the sitting room. As the sunlight streams into the room, he stands in front of the window, removes his ring, and waits to burst into flames. Just then, Stefan tackles him to the ground and then throws him into the ever more useful Salvatore dungeon while he vows to find some way to keep Damon from dying.

Out in the woods, Klaus wakes up covered in dirt smudges and nothing else. Elijah tosses him a pair of pants and tells him that he was a wolf for about 2 days. Klaus is like "it's nice not to be bound by all those pesky rules of either werewolfism or vampirism. Yay me!" Elijah lets Klaus know he's been cleaning up the mess of bodies Special K left in his wake and Klaus reminds us that he is not afflicted with his brother's impeccable manners as he doesn't even bother to say thank you. Elijah helps Klaus on with his coat and then they discuss the family reunion that Elijah was promised. Klaus is in no rush to fulfill that promise. I know, you're SHOCKED.

Mystic Grill. Alaric is stealing a bottle of liquor from the bartender using only the power of his sad face when Stefan calls. Stefan needs Ric's help but Ric is all "sadness, self pity, anger, alcoholism, self pity, dead girlfriend." Stefan knows the way to Alaric's heart so he doesn't waste time with a pep talk. "Damon's dying," he says. Alaric is like "OMG, not my BFF! What can I do?"

Mystic Falls never misses a chance to celebrate a day that ends in Y and today's shindig is Gone With The Wind in the park, which Elena is trying to convince Jeremy to enjoy with her. She's having no luck until Caroline arrives with a picnic and persuades him to go along with it by being awesome. Caroline is a superhero. Her cape is made of awesome.

Return to Witch Manor. Stefan and Bonnie are asking the dead witches to help heal Damon. Emily takes over Bonnie's body and is like "girl, PLEASE!" I for one think it was pretty classy of her not to laugh in his face. Emily vacates and leaves Bonnie with this: Klaus. Of fucking course.

Mrs. Interim Mayor stops into the Sheriff's office to get an update on the vamp "situation" and level threats about what might happen if it isn't brought under control with a quickness.

Park. Stefan briefs Elena on Damon's arm hickey. Stefan is determined to find the cure as a way of apologizing for forcing Damon to become a vamp in 1864.

Speaking of 1864 - Damon is currently having one of those fun hallucinations that comes with a werewolf nibble. Katherine is throwing herself at him just before he heads off to war when Elena comes in and tells him he should have said no to her. I wonder what vampires who don't know Katherine or Elena hallucinate about when they've been werekibble. Alternate endings to Lost maybe?

Stefan stops in to Alaric's apartment where Katherine is still compelled to remain. She's in a snit because Klaus isn't dead so she's still stuck inside all by herself and you know how sad it makes her not to be able to rub up against anyone. Stefan wants to find Klaus who arrives just then with Elijah. Stefan mentions that he needs Special K's help for Damon but Klaus is less than concerned and mentions that he's in the middle of helping his own brother now and he has a strict One Brother At A Time policy. Elijah remains the most well mannered vampire ever so he crosses right to Stefan to explain his earlier double-cross. It's all about the importance of family. Klaus likes to put a button on moments like these so this is when he chooses to run his brother through with the dagger and ash and make noises about reuniting the family. I've seen Elijah die 4 times now, and this one has clearly pissed him off the most.

Upon returning from the commercial, Special K is poking holes in Stefan's delicious torso with pointy wooden sticks. Stefan promises to do whatever Klaus wants if he'll just fork over the werenibbles cure. Klaus sips on some blood and tells Stefan that, in his present condition, he's fairly useless.

Salvatore Dungeon. Alaric has come to visit his BFF. He's brought liquor and Damon's ring with him. Damon is a complicated fellow and he finds it hard to be liked during his darkest times so he tries to make sure Ric hates him by being all "Jenna's death was my fault and, hey, 'member that time I killed your wife?" He makes his way over to the window and grabs Ric by the throat, begging him "kill me. Please." Ric is not falling for Damon's ruse, he knows their love is real and he won't be fooled into killing his brofriend. He stabs Damon in the arm and watches him crumble to the floor asking for Elena. "Elena's not here, Damon."

Actually, Elena is arriving at that very moment but she's snagged by Sheriff Forbes. Damon asks for blood and Alaric goes to get him a bag from the fridge. The Sheriff locks Alaric in the fridge room, against his protests, then she and a deputy go to get Damon but he knocks them out with the dungeon door wide open. Liz fucks EVERYTHING up.

Gone With The Wind in the park. Alaric calls Jeremy's phone and Caroline uses her super hearing to listen in. Damon got loose, is looking for Elena and the cops are after him. He's hallucinating and in bad shape. Bonnie wants Jeremy to let the women folk take care of this crisis while he sits down and doesn't worry his pretty little head about it. Jeremy is like "stop acting like only people with super powers can do stuff in this town! Your super powers didn't keep my aunt alive anyway!" See girls, Jeremy isn't just a pretty face, he can make a convincingly righteous speech too.

Alaric's apartment, squatters' rights. Special K is telling Stefan how much he liked the stories about Stefan's days as "a true Rippah." That's the sort of talent he's looking for. He bites Katherine's arm and she panics her ass off because no one looks forward to death by werenibbles. Then Klaus feeds her his blood and her nibble goes away. His blood is the cure. Dun dun dun!

Gone With The Wind in the park. Damon is wandering around, wild-eyed, pale, sweaty, and breathing heavily. He is not his best self. He hallucinates Katherine before running into Jeremy who tries to help Damon by getting him out of the park, into the grill and calling someone for help. The Sheriff arrives and takes aim and fires at Damon who dodges the bullet which then hits Jeremy right in the heart. He collapses to the floor and Liz calls for help just as Caroline and Bonnie arrive. Caroline thinks he'll be ok because of the ring but Bonnie reminds her that Liz is human so the ring won't work. Caroline bites her wrist and tries to feed Jeremy her blood but he won't drink.

After the commercial, all three women kneel over Jeremy's dead body on the floor of The Grill, crying. Alaric walks in and sees what's happening. Bonnie orders Alaric to pick Jeremy up and come with her. The Sheriff protests, Caroline tells her to shut up and let them go.

Meanwhile, Elena is busy busting out of the Sheriff's office where she's been locked up. If you're keeping track, these are two more situations to add to the list of things Liz has ruined. She's a ruiner.

Alaric's House of Squatters. Klaus has just finished dripping some of his blood into a handy bottle and is daydreaming aloud about leaving town with Stefan The Ripper as his wing man. Stefan insists he isn't like that anymore and Klaus begins to pour the blood down the drain. Stefan stops him. At Special K's request, he polishes off a blood bag. "You do everything I say, and I save your brother. That's the deal," Klaus tells him. Klaus scares me. One bag down, Klaus tosses him another, smirking the smirk of the clinically cuckoo all the while.

House of the Witchy Woo Woo. Alaric lays Jeremy out on the floor while Bonnie tells him that there is a spell that will bring him back, if only the dead witches will allow her to use their power to perform it. She holds his head and chants. The witches decline. They don't appreciate how often she asks them for shit. They inform her that there will be consequences for this sort of thing. Alaric shouts, "well he's just a kid, tell 'em to shut up!" I like when Alaric gets snippy. Bonnie chants, the room shakes, the candles shoot flames, Alaric looks around, Bonnie bleeds from the nose, the witches whisper creepy shit, Bonnie cries and begs for Emily to help her. Alaric looks defeated. Bonnie strokes Jeremy's hair and tells Emily that she loves him. The wind whips through and blows the candles out as the shaking stops. Bonnie sobs. Alaric begins to cry. Jeremy wakes up. Alaric looks like he might vomit, Bonnie thanks Emily.

Atlanta is burning in the park. Elena finds Damon who has never looked grosser. He's hallucinating a sexy game of 1864 tag in the woods with Katherine where he is schmoopily asking her to feed him her blood. In the present day, he's calling Elena Katherine and drinking her blood while she begs him to stop. He pulls away, realizing what he's done, and falls to the ground. She holds him and her neck and looks around for help.

The Grill. Caroline hangs up with Bonnie and tells her mother that Jeremy is alive. Both women cry with relief. "I thought I killed him," Liz says. Caroline confirms that she did. "I explained it to you once but...I had to make you forget because I was so scared of what you might do," Caroline confesses. She says she doesn't want to lie this time. She isn't going to be afraid of her mom and she doesn't want her mom to be afraid of her anymore either. She hugs Liz and tells her she's still her little girl. Liz cries and finally hugs back. I will not be as quick to forgive her because there are still so many things she could ruin. But I am reminded of the time the Roswell aliens finally let Sheriff Valenti in on their secret and that worked out really well so I guess I'll be cautiously optimistic about this development.

Back at the Gilbert abode, Jeremy is curled up in bed with his best friend, Bing. You know how much he likes those on the nose searches. Currently he's asking the internet what it can tell him about being "back from the dead." Fortunately, before we are treated to a bunch of lame answers, Bonnie Skypes her boyfriend. He tells her that he feels different and weird. She says "you can thank me tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. Hee hee hee." She's being very "I love my boyfriend" cutesy right now but he's working a more "I'm ridiculously hot and also smoldering and serious" vibe. It's a valid choice.

Alaric stops by Jer's room just then to check on him before heading back home to...share a bed with Klaus? What is his plan here? If that's it, I'm both intrigued and saddened because I know that would break Damon's heart. Jeremy says he's fine and then Alaric remembers that there are two evil vampires cooling their heels at his place so he asks if he can stay there tonight. I think by "tonight" he means "until you go to college" and the answer is yes either way. They do a little thing where Jeremy thanks him and then Alaric teases him about Bonnie's "and the day after that and the day after that" bit. Jeremy throws a shoe at Alaric. They both smile and I start to feel all warm and tingly inside.

Elena has managed to get Damon home and in bed where he is exhibiting a clamminess that can only be described as icky. He winces and writhes and groans. She climbs into bed and holds him, telling him it's ok. He takes these final moments of his life to confess that he really fucked up by loving Katherine and being a dick. He asks her to apologize to Stefan for him.

Speaking of Stefan, he's hip deep in empty blood bags right now. Klaus's influence is going to be murder on Stefan's girlish figure. Stefan and Special K make a deal - Stefan will join Klaus's band when they take the show on the road, and Klaus will give Katherine the cure so she can take it to Damon and make him all better. Stefan worries that Katherine will never take it to him.

Damon lies in bed telling Elena that he deserves to die. She disagrees. He loves her, she forgives him. She snuggles up to him and cries. She tells him she likes him just the way he is and then kisses him. He is too weak to kiss back but he thanks her. That's when Katherine arrives with the cure. She feeds it to Damon because, as she says, she owed him one. Elena asks after Stefan and Katherine tells her that he's playing on Team Klaus now as payment for curing Damon. On her way out, she tells Elena that it's ok to love both brothers because she did. She tosses Elena what's left of the Special K blood, and bails. Damon sits up in bed and looks worried.

In a warehouse somewhere, Klaus speechifies to Elijah's dagger-ridden corpse in a casket before packing him up in a giant crate with the rest of their family. Stefan gets a text from Elena that Damon is ok and asking after his whereabouts. Klaus exposits that he knew Katherine was on vervain and then mentions that the two of them will track her down. Klaus makes Stefan eat a scared girl and then they're off to go wreak havoc on the third season.

Gilbert Abode. Jeremy is sleeping when he hears something mysterious and gets up to investigate. He wanders the house calling for Alaric. We see Vicki follow him down the stairs. In the kitchen, he comes face to face with Anna. He looks back and sees Vicki. If there's one thing we learned from Buffy, it's that people who come back from the dead, sometimes bring all kinds of scary shit with them. DUN!

Served Just The Way I Like It

2011-09-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

My friend just asked me to tell her why she should watch Revenge this season and she wasn't going to accept "because it's really good" as an answer. So I thought it over and here's my answer: because it's like Veronica Mars, minus the comedy. Fine, that may be over-simplifying the situation a bit but it's a legitimate and fair comparison.

Emily (Emily VanCamp) is a mysterious and rich twenty-something who's out to exact her own brand of justice on the people who ruined her father's life - it's that simple. Or is it? It takes some fairly powerful and devious people to orchestrate a frame-up that involves embezzlement and funding terrorists so underestimating her opponents in this story would be a mistake. But she doesn't seem to be looking for the quick victory here. She wants them to suffer. She wants to destroy them, take away everything they have, the way they destroyed her father and took away her childhood. She's got time.

While she's busy taking them down, she has a potential ally (or additional foe) in Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann) who made several fortunes in "the internet" with the help of her father and remained loyal to him through his incarceration and death. She also has a childhood sweetheart, Ben (Nick Wechsler), who nurses a crush on the girl he knew as Amanda all these many years later. Ben has a little brother, Declan (Connor Paolo), who owes the douchebag jar a substantial amount after only one episode. Declan and Ben's father owns a local bar that's about to be foreclosed, adding a layer of towny drama to the proceedings that is moderately disconnected from the revenge scheme but will surely get interesting if Ben recognizes Emily as Amanda.

The real fireworks though are sure to come from any showdowns between Emily and Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) who is one scary bitch. I for one can't wait to see what happens next.

All Hail The Douchebag Jar

2011-09-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed the New Girl pilot (currently free on iTunes) and all of the people in it. When Zooey Deschanel finds out her boyfriend is cheating on her in the opening minutes of the show, you get a sense that while she's as cute as a grown woman can possibly be, she is also as unaware of herself as a person can be. That doesn't sound like high praise but since it's a comedy, her lack of social skills and her generally oddness are quite funny. Deschanel's comic timing is spot on - I enjoy a good mumbled punchline and bad singing played for laughs - but it's her three male roommates who bring the necessary "normalcy" to the mix that makes her Jessica a real girl instead of a cartoon.

Nick (Jake M. Johnson) is a recent dumpee himself who is having a hard time getting over his ex-girlfriend. Schmidt (Deputy Leo, er, Max Greenfield) is a recovering douchebag who spends a lot of time paying fines to the world's greatest invention - the douchebag jar - on his road to recovery. Coach (Damon Wayans, Jr.) is a personal trainer who has a low tolerance for dochebagery and no idea how to talk to women. Unfortunately, Damon Wayans, Jr. has another job on Happy Endings that will prevent him from sticking around on New Girl so the roommate dynamic will change a bit, but I have ho reason to think that Lamorne Morris's Winston won't be just as fun as Coach.

This show probably won't be any one's favorite of the new season, but it's funny and cute and a comedy worth checking out. I've already given it a season pass.

Weekend In Reviews

2011-09-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

I had big plans this weekend to marathon Felicity and eat ridiculous amounts of junk food with my 16 year old cousin Claire but at the last minute she had to cancel which left me with a gaping hole in my agenda and no good excuse to eat my weight in sugar and carbs. Fortunately I found a way to fill the time.

Saturday I hung by the pool with some family friends, splashing and laughing with a couple of tots and my wacky water-loving dog who has taken to hurling herself into the pool at great speeds and from rather impressive heights. All that swimming meant I didn't have to feel guilty about the guacamole and homemade mac and cheese I ate.

After such an eventful day, it seemed like the best thing to do was lay low on Sunday. So I basically stayed in bed and read The Hunger Games all day. I can not say enough good things about this book and there is no way to convey how mad I am at myself for not reading it sooner. The only compliment I could ever muster for the wretched Twilight series was that Stephanie Meyers writes in such a way that makes the book go by fast. Virtually nothing happened in the entire series yet I was able to speed through them as if the action was propelling me the story. There was a briskness to her prose that was able to get you through it all fast enough that if nothing else, kept the books from stealing too much of my free time.

Suzanne Collins writes with a similar, if more enjoyable and less treacly briskness. And while that style can make a terrible book almost bearable, it can make an excellent book exquisite. It takes only a few sentences to make me care about Katniss and her story and all of District 12. Post-apocalyptic, distopian society stories aren't usually an easy sell for me but The Hunger Games didn't feel like some kind of sci-fi warning about the perils of American excess so much as the story of one girl in an extraordinary circumstance doing what she has to to survive and take care of the people she loves. It could have been 100 years in the past just as easily as 100 in the future.

How did Katniss not see that Peeta was genuinely in love with her? Why wasn't she in love with him? Why doesn't Gale marry the Mayor's daughter? These are all questions that haunt me still. Oh, I'm also desperate to know what becomes of these relationships so I started reading Catching Fire at lunch today. I might try to make this one last a bit. Savor the story for a week rather than devouring it in a day. Plus, I'm trying to rally my book club back together with the whole series. I think it could give us just the boost we need to get back together after almost a year.

After a day in bed, Monday called for some shit to get done so I cleaned and did laundry while I watched the first 10 episodes of Everwood's 4th season. I am not going to lie to you, I know what shit is coming down the pike from Bright and Yarn Slut and still I think he's perfect. Perfect. The love I have for Bright Abbott is real and deep and can not be swayed by one, horrible moment of horrible judgement and so much horribleness. He thinks about her EYELASHES, you guys! Besides that, I'm really just trying to love Little McQueen despite the fact that he's a huge pain in the ass and to not scream "get a HAIRCUT!" at Ephram every time he's on screen. There was so much emotion in the 4th season!

Vacation In Reviews

2011-08-31T15:16:00.001-07:00

Remember me? I know I disapeared without warning for a while but the fault lies entirely with my sister who came to visit for a little over two weeks and took up so much of my time I had none left over to write. I did have some time to watch a movie or two as well as two seasons of The Vampire Diaries.

Crazy Stupid Love - I'm not going to lie, 95% of the reason I wanted to see this movie was to ogle Ryan Gosling. The other 5% was because I adore Emma Stone. This movie could have been terrible and I would not have cared. It could have been two hours of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone standing in a room, side by side, staring blankly at the camera and I would have been FINE with that. But as it turns out, the movie was delightful.

There actually was a plot - Cal (Steve Carell) is unceremoniously dumped by his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), after her affair with David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon). He proceeds to spend night after night at a bar near his sad new middle-age divorcee apartment, telling everyone his problems while they try to ignore him. Jacob (Gosling) is a ridiculously attractive and successfull hound who makes that same bar his home court. After spending several nights listening to Cal's sad, sad story, he can take it no longer and essentially takes Cal under his wing by force. He transforms Cal into a much less dorky guy who is capable of picking up and having sex with a woman.

From there, Cal hooks up with a woman who turns out to be his son's teacher, which leads to his wife finding out thereby derailing a near reconciliation. Meanwhile, Cal's son is in love with the 'sitter who is, in turn, in love with his dad. There is a whole thing with some inapprotriate pictures (kids these days!) and people getting punched and tackled. And finally, Hannah (Stone) breaks up with her pathetic boyfriend - played hilariously by Josh Groban - and goes looking for a hot one night stand in the form of Jacob. Instead of meaningless sex, the two end up talking and laughing all night in that way that super attrative people do in romantic comedies. They start dating and when she's ready for him to meet her parents those parents turn out to be Cal and Emily.

Then a lot of other stuff happens which all ends up fine in the end because this is a romantic comedy so it's legally obligated to leave you with warm fuzzies and an intense desire to get naked with one of its leads. Check and double check.

The Help - I loved the book. Everyone I know who read the book loved it. There was an episodic quality to the stories yet they were seemlessly woven together into something that was greater than the sum of its parts. The best part of it were all of the small details that made the characters whole and real. The little things, blown up into big mysteries that amped up the humor and brought these people to life. The movie didn't have much of that.

It told the story, hitting most of the highlights of the book and getting the "point" of it across, but it left out most of the sad parts, most of the little moments, most of the details that I loved the most. Stewart was given very short shrift in the movie as they included only the scene where he acted like a dick on his first date with Skeeter and then when he came to apologize and skipped straight ahead to his breaking up with her after the book is published. Stewart seemed like quite a one-dimensional jerk whose relationship with Skeeter was nothing more than that of a guy she briefly dated.

Mini and Celia never bonded over the naked man in the yard. Mini never suspected Celia of a drinking problem. Mini never found out that Johnny knew about her and carried on any charade about him not knowing she worked there. And Celia learned how to cook. Boo!

Skeeter's father wasn't in the movie at all and her mother's cancer was downplayed to the point of barely even existing. The movie version of Constantine's dismissal painted Charlotte in a much more favorable light than the book version where I thought she was not terribly sympathetic but was real and flawed and interesting and exactly the kind of person who'd have raised Skeeter to be someone just a little less racist than she herself was. Racism isn't something that just abruptly stopped one day. Every generation had to teach the next to be a little less racist than they themselves had been and that was what I saw in the book version of the Phelans. They were the first step people in the road to eradicating racism from their own family.

The movie was fine and if I hadn't read the book I probably would have loved it. But I did read the book and so I guess I just liked it for what it was. The acting was mostly terrific (man that Bryce Dallas Howard is blank though, isn't she?) and if Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis aren't nominated out the ass for every award we can think of, then awards mean less than nothing. But on the whole, I'd sooner read the book again than watch the movie for a second time.

The Vampire Diaries - It's become quite a tradition for me to get my little sister hooked on a TV show when she comes to visit. Over her spring break I introduced her to Friday Night Lights which instantly became her favorite thing ever. This time, before she arrived, she piped in on a conversation that Mikey and I were having over Twitter and said she thought this summer she'd like to give Everwood a shot. We watched the pilot but it didn't really take. She was luke warm at best on it and was pretty much resigned to not watching anything new on this trip.

One morning, while she futzed with her hair, I decided to rewatch the Switched At Birth pilot on Netflix Instant. She came out and asked me a few "what is this about" type questions and then declared she'd like to give it a shot. She liked it and she thought Emmett was adorable. She wasn't wrong.

But Switched At Birth is only 10 episodes old and hardly the kind of thing we could really bond over since it didn't get really good until 1/2 way through it's 10 ep first season. So I convinced her to give The Vampire Diaries a shot.

She was only 1/2 convinced at the end of the first episode. She thought that it was good and that the people in it were super hot, but she was squicked a bit by the blood and the "violence." She particularly hated how Damon kept killing people. By the 6th episode, she no longer cared who Damon killed, as long as he did it while facing the camera with his beautiful eyes. She was HOOKED.

This is her new crack and I seriously can't wait to get her texts as she watches the third season play out in real time.

Big Anticipation, Tiny Payoff

2011-08-11T13:33:00.001-07:00

I just wrote up my typically long, opinionated recap of last night's So You Think You Can Dance performance finale and then Blogger ate it. I don't have it in me to do it all again. I might have been able to muster the inner gumption if last night's show hadn't been such a soul-sucking bore, but as it stands I just can't go through it dance, by painful dance again and then format it all and blah blah blah. I'll hit the highlights, and mostly the lowlights and you'll all just have to be happy with that.

Katie Holmes is the worst celebrity guest judge in the history of celebrities guest judging anything, ever. Remember the time Ellen Degeneras came on and was a guest "judge" but all she did was crack "funny" "jokes" and never said anything about the actual dancing? That was a study in insightful judging compared to Katie Holmes. My favorite part was when she told Marko "I loved when you jumped up." As did we all, Katie. As did we all.

After a blissfully disco-free season, they foisted a Doriana Sanchez number on us right out of the gate that was the worst disco they've ever done on the show. Even worse than the one Mollee and Nathan did in Season 6. It was shaky and slow and low-energy and I honestly didn't think Marko was going to make it through some of those lifts. Melanie and Marko have spunk, talent and awesomeness to spare but none of that made its way into their disco.

Sasha and Tadd danced the world's most awkward cha-cha during which she looked like a doe who's just stood up on her unsteady legs for the first time and may tumble back to the ground at any moment while he resembled a full-grown deer...in the headlights.

Tadd and Marko danced something called a "Gumboot Stepping" routine that was the worst addition to the show since the Russian nesting doll routine or whatever the hell that thing was called back in Season 5. Nigel mentioned it on the show last night and then took to Twitter to say he doesn't really know why the show was so disappointing last night but it clearly hadn't occurred to him that the problem might have been that he and his fellow producers popped in some dance styles that were abysmal at best.

The highlights included a phenomenal (in my opinion - Nigel didn't agree) performance from Marko in a Spencer Liff Broadway routine; a terrific contemporary piece from Melanie and all-star Robert; a good (but not, in my opinion, great) jazz number from Sonya Tayeh danced by Sasha and shirtless all-star Mark that once again focused all of its energy on Sasha's "struggles" which I continue to believe are mostly about her sexuality and for that reason I kind of wish they'd stop shining a spotlight on it since she clearly doesn't want to TALK about it; and finally, a really amazing performance by all-star Lauren Froderman with Marko that I know shouldn't have any bearing on anything since she's not competing, but I really thought she was breathtaking.

My Predictions:

Tadd will come in fourth which is a very respectable finish for an untrained B-boy.

Sasha will take third place based on the fact that two of her 5 routines last night were really terrible and one of them was completely forgettable.

Marko will be the surprise runner-up in an upset over Sasha, carried up a notch by his interview with Cat, his frequent weeping and the adorableness of his parents.

Melanie will win because she's had the talent all along but also the incredible personality to go with it.

Sorry no videos this week. Blame Blogger. Bastards!

I would silent fight over Emmett in a hot second.

2011-08-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Last night's summer finale of Switched At Birth was so good that I no longer even remember what it was I kind of didn't like about this show when it began 10 short weeks ago. The show managed to become the very best thing about the summer and it did so on the back of the most riveting fights on television. Fights that were fought in utter silence.

Angelo Sorrento finally made an appearance and he looks like Gilles Marini which makes it really hard to be mad at him for being the kind of dude who'd run out on his wife and deaf kid. Well, I mean, there are also those extenuating circumstances where he know the kid wasn't his but his wife kept insisting she hadn't had an affair and no one immediately thinks "baby swap" under those circumstances. Bay doesn't know what to think of his arrival and briefly hides it from everyone before introducing him to her parents. She remains worried about Daphne's reaction.

John Kennish is roughly as welcoming of Angelo as you expect him to be until Angelo is like "I want in on the lawsuit and also I brought along an affidavit from the nurse who mixed up our babies saying she'd been working for 48 hours straight so you totally need me if you want to win." The Kennish's attorneys are all "SHADY" but John is blinded by his need to be righter than the hospital so he doesn't want to listen.

Meanwhile Kathryn and Regina are totally BFFs again and Regina is going to open a salon of her own and Kathryn wants to find something to do besides stay home and make elaborate meals that no one eats so the whole episode I was like "Kathryn is going to be Regina's partner!" and then Angelo goes all squirrely and tells Regina he's not leaving and will instead stay around, be hot, get back together with Regina and then give her his 1/2 of the hospital settlement to open a salon and support him in the lifestyle to which he'd like to be accustomed until he gets bored and leaves again. I'm paraphrasing.

Daphne is capital-P Pissed when she runs into Angelo and no one blames her. She quickly brushes by that trauma to focus all of her energy on her blinding rage over Bay dating Emmett. She silent fights with Emmett about how he swore he would never date a hearing girl and he tells her it's none of her damn business and then finally he demands that Daphne tell him what the hell she's so upset about. She tells him that she likes him and he blows a silent gasket saying that he waited for years for her to see that he liked her and to feel the same way and the very second he moves on to liking someone else she decides to have fuzzy feelings for him. They have the best silent fight ever, all signing over one another and finger shouting, and then he kisses her. He pulls away and her face is totally dreamy while his is just angry. He tells her that he is with Bay and that's that.

But then Daphne's in his head and he's all weirded out by how he can't understand what Toby and Wilke (Jones) are saying when they try to convince him to be their drummer at some show in St. Louis and then Bay laughs and doesn't know how to sign "bet" so she finger spells it and Emmett kind of dumps her. Toby remembers how to be awesome and goes to see Emmett and lays some signs down on him. He basically tells Emmett to stop making his sister sad which is a very sweet brotherly gesture that isn't entirely his business but whatevs.

Emmett thinks some stuff over and then goes to see Bay to tell her that he doesn't like being around hearing people because he's never really been around hearing people but from the very beginning she was different. It wasn't like she was either hearing or deaf, she was just her and it was easy to be around her. He says he doesn't want to be with Daphne, no matter what feelings she suddenly realized she had, he just wants to be with Bay. Oh, and that last part? HE SPEAKS. My mind was blown!

Then he joins Wilke and Toby and they go to St. Louis and Wilke tells Toby that he likes Daphne and Bay asks how Daphne's doing and she's like "I hate that Angelo is here and I don't want you to talk to him and also, I will not rest until Emmett is hers. Again, paraphrasing.

So, I am going to come out firmly in favor of one Emmett 'ship over another here, ready? I want Emmett and Bay to be together. Bay is just so much more tolerable and interesting as a character when she's with Emmett. And I like Daphne a lot but I think it's a better story for her to have a struggle with her friendship with Emmett as well as her strange relationship with Bay while also dating Wilke who is the cutest thing that isn't Emmett in the whole world. I feel like everyone wins in that scenario.