Do I dare to dream again?

Season six of 24 burned me. It burned me bad. As the writers shoved more and more mediocrity in front of the camera as the season progressed, there were times when I was positive that at any given moment, I would be fed up with one of my favorite shows for good.

But I'll be damned if this doesn't get me giddy with anticipation:



Sure, with the WGA strike, the premiere of this episode could easily be a year or more away, but the mere thought of 24 being good again gets me all a-twitter.

Everything I've seen of Season 7 thus far looks promising. After seeing the wreckage that Season 6 caused, the writers have apparently razed the ground and started rebuilding brick by brick. Gone is CTU - once a staple of the series, but recently it had become a burden on the show and the boring office politics/romance subplots made that painstakingly obvious.

I am also excited about the return of Tony Almeida. His unceremonious death was one of the few things completely wrong with Season 5. Certainly there'll need to be a little bit of tap-dancing to explain why the guy's not six feet under, but in my opinion it's far easier to explain than a resurrection of, say, David Palmer.

I am hoping - nay, praying - that everyone involved can pull this off. If not, I fear it may spell the end of Jack Bauer's adventures for good.

-M

Not-so-random thought of the day - 12/12/2007

Spoilers.

I think the thing that I love most about Hot Fuzz is not the wonderful cinematography or the great spoof of action flicks at the end.

No, my favorite part of Hot Fuzz is the "big reveal" scene - in which the protagonist, obsessed with murders taking place within his small burb, exposes an elaborate, cunning plan on the part of the town's prominent citizens - only to have them reveal that the plan is in no way, shape, or form, elaborate in the slightest.

-M

An endorsement

For a long time now, Spidey Kicks Butt has been serving up insightful, well-thought-out commentary on Marvel's flagship character. Every time I read one of J.R. Fettinger's articles - which have covered a variety of aspects of Spidey's existence, from romance to villains and everything in-between - I am blown away by the fact that he writes not just the best serious comic book commentary I've ever read, but some of the best literary commentary I've ever read, period.

So why do I bring this up? Well, for one thing, I finished reading a three-part series that the man wrote, entitled "Why Did It Have to Be You, Mary Jane?" There, Fettinger deftly discusses his reasoning behind why the Peter/MJ pairing makes sense, has always made sense, and how it could've been done better. On Quesada's constant insistence that Peter's marriage to Mary Jane ruins his "loser" status, he writes:

Peter's appeal was not that he was a loser (although his hard times was a big factor in his popularity), but that he was ordinary. As Spider-Man he could kick Doc Ock's butt and save the world, but none of that helped him as Peter Parker. He still had to fight for the respect of his peers, scrap to pay his bills, and survive the day to day indignities that life throws everyone's way. He wasn't a rich playboy like Bruce Wayne, he was a working class hero. It wasn't that he would be crushed on a daily basis by catastrophe after catastrophe, such as friends and family dying all the time, or losing his home, etc., but that he would be accosted here and there by those irritants that frequently plague ALL of us. And none of that had to change when he got married.

It's great stuff, and there's a goldmine of information there for any Spidey fan - not just on MJ, either. Fettinger has written series on Venom, the Green Goblin, and Hobgoblin, among others.

Each article is pretty lengthy, but if you've got the time, they're absolutely worth the trouble. I give the site my highest recommendation (for what it's worth).

Happy hunting.

-M