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mygif

Except the Juliet episodes, obviously.

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mygif
NCallahan said on March 23rd, 2008 at 10:38 am

Well, ah, happy easter to you, too, I guess.

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mygif

And the Kate episodes. But then, every Kate episode ever has been a waste of time.

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mygif

Kate’s existence is a waste of time.

I’m still a little bitter about them bumping off Shannon.

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mygif

Gotta concur. If there were an opposite phenomenon from “jump the shark,” the season 3 ender might’ve been it, the “rattlesnake in the mailbox” ending seems to have pumped a lot of life back into the show — it broke the formula and gave the story a shape it’s been lacking. Seriously, we’ve been watching the first three seasons on DVD this week, and wow, this was a show that didn’t want to commit to anything for the longest time. It’d hint coyly at possibilities, but ran away screaming from giving any definitive answers. Now that the show’s internal mythology is beginning to firm up, it’s much sturdier as a whole. (And I think BKV’s contributions have been tight, too; he’s a good addition.)

It’s good to know your ending before you start your beginning, even when dealing with something as open-ended as this show. I think, in this case, that makes all the difference.

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mygif

It might just be some strange quirk I have, but it really oughtn’t take three whole seasons before things get to the “all killer, no filler” stage, right?

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mygif

I 100% agree. Though there have been a few cheap moves for cheap moves’ sake, like the Jin thing (which accomplished zero except for the “gotcha”) and the last scene of last ep (“rocks fall! TPK!”). But it’s like they went “okay, all that stuff we did right? Let’s keep doing that stuff. All that stuff that sucked? Let’s put it on other shows.”

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mygif

Uh, these comments aren’t threaded, so let me state that I agree with Chris specifically on the killer/filler proportions.

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mygif

Yeah, I agree too. Even the weaker episodes this season had fast paced and exciting or well acted filler. Like, the recent Sun and Jin episode didn’t actually do much, but they acted fantastically in it.

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mygif

I couldn’t even make it fully through the first season.

Formula shows have been successful staples of television since forever. No one ever got upset that there wasn’t an arcing plot to Columbo. Lost didn’t need an arcing sub-plot. A story about a bunch of contemporary people stranded on an island, really focusing on just how insanely hard that would be and then thematically linking each episode’s survival struggle to a character’s pre-stranded life would’ve been fine.

But they wanted to put in an overarching mystery. So why didn’t they actually come up with a mystery in the first place? It’s like Battlestar Galactica. They have no idea what’s going to happen next – and that would be fine if they didn’t spend every episode talking about the destiny of the show and where it’s ‘going’.

I just don’t get it. Babylon 5 wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was all carefully mapped out. Each season of Buffy was carefully plotted out even if the show itself wasn’t.

I just don’t get why a show would sell itself on the idea of it being an unraveling mystery when the writer’s haven’t even worked it out yet. Why would you sell a product that doesn’t exist?

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