Lost Rumormongering

I try to avoid spoilers for my favorite shows. The word itself reveals why: the very nature of spoilers is to totally fuck up your potential enjoyment of an episode's various twists and turns. But the Internets are such that it is incredibly easy, and tempting, to spoil oneself. I like visiting Dark UFO for its intense dorkifications, like screengrabs of the mysterious Jacob from last week's Lost, but it also has a spoiler page that I find myself increasingly compelled to click on. I like to read Aint It Cool News's little teasers for episodes, but mostly because the ensuing insane fanboy talkbacks are hilarious. Alas, some dude named Lostfan108 (OK, buddy) posted spoilers all over the most recent talkback, several of which I glimpsed from between my fingers (yeah, I like to read websites half-blind.)

I understand how infuriating it can be to get spoiled without your consent. I once had a LiveJournal buddy who put a post behind a cut that read "I just found out I was adopted." Eager to get my Schadenfreude on by reading about someone else's family's dysfunctionality, I clicked the link. Behind which he had written "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE" in caps like a million times. Now that called for an INSTANT DE-FRIENDING!

All this is to say, I'd love to hear some predictions for the last two episodes of this season of Lost, but that entails some airing of rumors and a confirmed spoiler or two. Caveat lector!

Qs for commenters, should you exist (and ideally will speculate on these q's, rather than answer definitively):

1) Which five characters will die?
2) Does Locke's Bad Dad count as one of the five?
3) What makes Jack's upcoming flashback so "dark"? Personally, I am hoping that the darkness means Jack commits suicide in flashback, and, to quote Douglas Adams, promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
4) Is Locke dead?
5) Who is the returning cast member? Is he/she there to stay?
6) Will Eyeliner Guy make an appearance? He's hot.
7) Any other predictions?

Sunday / Monday night lights

Wowee wow wow, as Borat would say, it's like the execs at Fox are reading this blog! This is why I'd like to use this space to thank Rupert Murdoch for casting Paul McCrane as Jack's brother on 24. Rupes must know from a previous entry that I love the formerly red Afro'ed PMC from his work on ER, and he thusly cast him as Jack's evil twin. Never mind that they resemble each other in the way that I resemble Dennis Rodman. I trust that PMC will add some much-needed snark to an otherwise humorless show, full of nuclear expolosions in LA (who needed that place, anyway?) and Jack crying!?!

Moving over to the ol' Home Box Office, I've been enjoying this second and final season of Rome muchly. The first two episodes have blown all of the last season out of the water in terms of quality and entertainment value. With Caesar murdered, everyone is going batshit crazy. A kind of proto-Mafia is warring in the city (one captain is killed by being put in a bag full of SNAKES and then drowned.) Mark Antony is trying to keep the young, effete, but highly intelligent Octavian from his inheritance as Caesar's adopted son, and Cleopatra is swooping in majestically with lots of eyeliner on to make Mark Antony's f*ckbuddy, Atia, go insane with jealousy. Best line from Atia to Cleo? "Die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop." I'm waiting for the opportunity to use that turn of phrase myself.

Rome is no Deadwood, but it's appealing in many ways, one of which being that I can actually understand all the political machinations taking place. Thank God for HBO teaching me about such varied historical periods as ancient Rome and the Old West, because I certainly napped through every high school history class I ever took. And when learning about the troubled years before the formation of the Triumvirate involves seeing Mark Antony's c*ck repeatedly, count me in. Because he's hot, in an aging British guy sort of way.

House 12/13/06: Aww, Greggy-poo

Last night's House was perhaps was the most miserable Christmas episode that I have ever seen. Between the detoxing, and the stealing Oxy from a dead guy, and the betrayals and the ultimatums and the sniping, and the really hot dwarf (wait, what?), Bad Hat Harry Productions has left us with almost nothing but negativity to carry us through the dark House-less days until January 9th.

Almost nothing. Because last night's episode provided Jeanette and I with one amazing revelation.

Gregory House has metamorphosed into a teenage girl.

Sure, House was cutting himself because it helped to "release endorphins" that temporarily "relieved his agonizing leg pain" and the "discomfort of detoxing from Vicodin." But any graduate of a suburban high school knows what sort of people really cut themselves, and why:

Angsty adolescent females who want everyone to see the pain they feel inside. The kind of horrible, horrible pain that comes from parents who give you your grandfather's old Buick for your 16th birthday instead of the Audi that your friend Julie got. The intolerable ouchies of a rejection letter from Brown University, which is where you were meant to go, because you worked your upper-middle-class butt off for this and your consolation prize is a SUNY, and SUNY schools are for poor losers!

Ahem. To confirm our suspicions, we received a leak of the teleplay for the next new House. Here's a teaser, exclusive to Boob Tubers readers.

EXT. PRINCETON-PLAINSBORO TEACHING HOSPITAL - ESTABLISHING

INT. HOUSE'S OFFICE - DAY

CAMERON
House, our patient is presenting with symptoms of liver failure. Yellow eyes, dark urine, and a strange attraction to old, curmudgeonly men. Oh wait. That last one is a symptom of my personal failure as a human being.

FOREMAN
It's clearly Seacrest's Disease.

CHASE
It's not Seacrest's, I already told you. Seacrest's involves the erratic growth of facial hair in men of short stature.
(beat)
House, what do you think?

HOUSE
YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ME!

CAMERON
What are you talking about?

HOUSE
You guys act like you know so much, but you really don't. Like, do you know how I lost my virginity?

FOREMAN
I don't see how this is relevant to our patient--

CAMERON
I want to know.

HOUSE
It was at the cast party for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. To Ben Kellner, who played Joseph. All the other girls in the chorus were SO JEALOUS.

CHASE
Uh, why don't we get back to the differential diagnosis.

HOUSE
But I'm so tired. Coach Sweeney made me do twenty laps this morning because I had three latenesses to gym class.

Cuddy enters, dressed very unprofessionally.

CUDDY
How are we doing with the patient?

HOUSE
Ugh, I hate you. I am so fat compared to you.

CUDDY
Well, I don't have a bum leg. I can work out every day.

HOUSE
Oh my God, I can't believe you just said that to me. You're such a bitch.
(begins weeping)
I'm a freak!
(reaches for conveniently located scalpel)

SPIKE
Oh, House. It's time you learned...
Life's not a song
Life isn't bliss
Life is just this
It's living...

Green-Colored Spotlight On: Dean Winters

Green-colored because you really can't get any more Irish than this familiar TV actor. You would think that Jeanette would be a more appropriate author for this entry. WRONG you would be. It is a little known fact that this Jewess has dabbled amongst the leprechauns. I just can't help myself. I find both freckles and Catholic guilt very alluring.

Of late, Dean has played affable, slightly dim micks on shows like Rescue Me and 30 Rock. He must be a good sport, because his IMDB profile indicates that he is in fact a well-traveled college graduate and not, for instance, a beeper salesman or Denis Leary's drunk adultering brother.

I first encountered Dean in a very different role, as Ryan O'Reily (seriously) on HBO's prison drama Oz, a show grittier than a sandbox full of broken glass. I learned many things from Ryan: how to manipulate hardened rapists and murderers like a modern day, really cute Iago; how to seduce the Latina prison doctor after having your brother kill her husband; how to survive shootings, gas explosions, and solitary confinement. I should also mention that whenever someone is thrown into solitary confinement on Oz, they are naked. And creator Tom Fontana never shied away from showing us that. Seriously people, what are you waiting for? Netflix that sh*t.

If all that doesn't cement Dean's coolness in your minds, consider this. He was on Law and Order: SVU back in the heady days of the '99/'00 season, and managed in his brief, glorious tenure as Det. Cassidy to nail Olivia Benson. That's something even Chris Meloni (who also starred on Oz) hasn't managed to do.

Dos and Don'ts

Lately, when I think about the show Heroes, I don't think about the schlocky dialogue. I don't think about how Niki got seriously gypped with her "super power," or how in real life, Nathan Petrelli is married to Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks, a band that actually titled a song "Lubbock or Leave It." Get it? It's not a bad song actually, but that's gotta be the worst title since The Constant Gardener. Sample lines from that film, at least in my mind:

"Always gardening, you are! By Jove, Manifred, when will you stop the constant gardening?"
"Never, dear Winthrop. My green thumb is eternal. For I am... the Constant Gardener."

No, I think about how Milo Ventimiglia has the stupidest hair on television. The proof is in the arbirtrary asymmetry:



The long-in-the-front, short-in-the-back 'do went out of fashion back in '99, when this chick from my high school, Stephanie, got props for being the "most creative" just because her hair hung in her fucking eyes all the time. Meanwhile, while Stephanie was artfully walking into things because she couldn't see through her HAIR, who was at home writing stories about girls who thought they were metamorphosing into dogs? ME. I SHOULD HAVE WON "MOST CREATIVE" IN THE SENIOR SUPERLATIVES SECTION OF THE YEARBOOK, DAMMIT.

So that's why I hate Milo Ventimiglia's hair. Otherwise, he's pretty cute, in a Guido sort of way. Wait. I take back the "Guido" thing. I don't want all of Bensonhurst crashing this blog and threatening my life. Well, I sort of do.

Other retarded hair cuts:

Flattop-era Will Smith


Keri Russell, whose Season 2 cropped hair was such a blow that it actually made ratings on Felicity go down. Also her ass looks big here.


David Boreanaz, now and forever. ("Angel's lame. His hair goes straight up and he's bloody stupid.")

"Love makes you do the wacky." --Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Too right you are, Buffy, especially when the love in question is for two dead guys. Today, as part of the brilliantly-themed Vampire Blog-a-thon, sponsored by Nathaniel of The Film Experience, I will tackle the age-old question that has tormented academics and fangirls alike: Angel or Spike? (Or, if you prefer, Tall, Dark, and Forehead or Captain Peroxide?)



I'd just like to see [Angel] grow. Honestly, everything he's done so far I've enjoyed, so there's not really one thing. Maybe, like, golfing or something." --David Boreanaz
There's nothing I love better than one of these completely insane one-liners. Unfortch, Angel the character lacked much of Boreanaz's off-the-wall charisma. In my mind, Angel didn't grow much on Buffy. He had two wildly different states of being, yes: guilt-plagued, brooding good guy and nasty, rage-filled bad guy. The most he could do was flip-flop between those two and occasionally make Buffy cry. Perhaps the problem is that Angel was too much a part of Buffy's central metaphor that became the show's framework in the first few seasons. That is, High School Is Hell. Sometimes you sleep with a guy and he becomes a totally different peson. We all knew Buffy and Angel's relationship was doomed from day one, because so much was set in stone. If Buffy sleeps with Angel, giving him one moment of true contentment, he will revert to the evil Angelus. And in the Buffyverse, as in our world, there's not much hope for a partnership with those kind of sexual high stakes. Once Angel goes from a mopey repenter to Angelus, we've seen everything he can do. (That is, until his spin-off.)

"The truth is, I like this world. You’ve got – the dog racing, Manchester United, and you’ve got people: billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs." --Spike
Spike, however, remained an unpredictable presence for much of the series. Unlike Angel, he didn't have a split personality - no soulless doppelganger. Soulless Spike was not very different from Soul-Having Spike, so there were much fewer rules dictating his behavior. We saw from the beginning that he was a different sort of vampire, cut from a more romantic, Anne Rice-ish mold. The Judge told Spike and his highly irritating girlfriend, Drusilla, that they had too much humanity in them. "Yeah, what of it?" Spike said. Spike never seemed evil so much as a juvenile delinquent in arrested development. He took a manic glee in creating havoc for havoc's sake and had some of the best one-liners ever uttered on television. Unlike Angelus, who was a by-the-book villain, Spike was much more self-aware; he turned the bad guy cliches on their head. He also was incredibly sensitive, even without a soul: see season five's "Fool For Love" to see how quickly Buffy breaks the guy who has "always been bad."

"I love syphilis more than you." --Spike
Sigh. It's no surprise that Buffy should fall for either of these cradle-robbing creatures of the night, despite Angel's massive forehead or the fact that Spike's hair makes his head look like a Q-tip. But Angel is ultimately a eunuch, or the forbidden fruit if you prefer something less emasculating. Angel will always be Buffy's first love, but their relationship is a dead end.

In season four, Spike is rendered impotent by a microchip the Initiative places in his brain; in one episode, in which Buffy and Faith switch bodies, Faith-as-Buffy humiliates him sexually with some vivid dialogue. (I seem to remember "make you pop like champagne" being said at some point.) In season 5, Spike has an epiphany after having an erotic dream about Buffy. Turns out, all that fighting they've done is kind of like third base for Spike. And so begins some of the most perverse sex ever aired on network television. We all thank you, Spike.

Her relationship with Angel forces Buffy to become independent. She discovers when she must kill Angel, that at the end of the day she has only herself to rely on. Spike, on the other hand, forces Buffy into more existential dilemmas about herself, the nature of her job, her baser wants and instincts. And I don't know about you all, but exploring those baser wants and instincts were far more fun than watching Buffy swoon in Angel's arms.

Advantage: Spike.