Jennie Day Blog

Everything About Buffy Has Already Been Said

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I’ve been trying to write this post for months. Last May, I finally watched the very last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after years of watching through all seven seasons. I sat down and tried to write about it then, but I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say.

So, I decided to put it off until I’d read all of season eight, which was released in comic books from 2007-2011. I finished it earlier this week, and sat down to write, but again: I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say.

I realized I had to just start writing my thoughts out, otherwise I don’t think I ever will. And I realized that what’s been holding me back isn’t a shortage of thoughts about the show, but lack of originality.

Everything about Buffy has already been said.

I’ve said before that at its heart, Buffy isn’t really *about* vampires. It’s really *about* being a teenage girl in the 90s.

Coming at the height of the “girl power” days, the show is about facing the figurative demons that we all face in our high school years, as well as, you know, literal demons. It’s about teenage romance and how you lean on your friends when your boyfriend turns evil and breaks your heart. Wanting to be normal when you feel like an outsider. And most of all, finding friends who support you and whose strengths complement yours, and how we’re stronger when we work as a team.

Clearly, this is not a show that shies away from clichés or is concerned with being unoriginal. And still, I loved it.

Welcome to Sunnydale High School/welcome to the hell mouth.

A photo posted by Jennie Day (@jenniecday) on

So despite the essays and listicles, the entire books and websites, and even college courses that have been created about Buffy, I’ll risk being a little derivative. Also, a little longwinded. Here goes:

In Every Season, There Is a Chosen Theme

Season one is relatively straightforward – it sets the tone for the show, juxtaposing high school (cheerleading tryouts, prom, etc.) with Buffy’s late-night vampire-slaying. It’s a solid start to the series, including a few small moments of subverting the predictable – for example, a creepy ventriloquist doll makes an appearance but isn’t the villain. And in other places, it totally embraces the predictable, like Buffy’s love interest turning out to be a vampire.

Season two is about teenage romance; it’s the season that launched a thousand paranormal romances. Buffy falls in love with a vampire. It’s probably the best season as a whole, although I like the later seasons better because the show was still stuck to the tried-and-true TV plotlines in these early seasons.

Season three is about learning who to trust. Buffy’s mom doesn’t support her vampire slaying, but she still has Buffy’s back. Then there’s Faith, another slayer who turns up in Sunnydale, and turns out not to be trustworthy. The season ends with the gang finishing high school, and they go out in a big way.

Season four is about independence – Buffy goes to college! There’s a storyline about a government organization (The Initiative) who are also in the business of eliminating demons, and the control that The Initiative has over the demons, its members, and civilians. Paradoxically, season four is the weakest link of the televised seasons, but boasts some of the best standalone episodes: “Hush,” “Who Are You,” and “Restless.”

Season five is about family. Of all the seasons, it is the most emotional, which is much needed after the preceding season. I don’t want to spoil too much, but Buffy gains a new family member and loses another. It has the highest stakes of any of the seasons – the season’s main villain (“big bad”) is a worthy foe, and Buffy goes to the greatest lengths to save the world.

Season six is peak Buffy. It’s the darkest of all the seasons. Frankly, it’s about death, and the consequences of the gang’s choices and actions. This is my favorite of all the seasons – the writers became fearless about showing the characters’ flaws, to great effect.

Season seven is about the legacy of Buffy the character, and Buffy the show. It’s about wrapping up loose ends, like the slayer legacy, which was foreshadowed over pretty much the entire series. It redeems a few characters after season six. Oh, and if you’re wondering how they followed up on six seasons worth of big bads, the final season’s big bad can embody ALL OF THEM.

The Best Characters Are Supporting Characters

Jenny Calendar – The high school computer science teacher turns out to be a great ally to the gang, as she’s a Romani witch and introduces Buffy’s BFF Willow to Wicca. She’s also love interest to Buffy’s mentor, Giles. She remains beloved among fans mostly because her storyline ended abruptly and we weren’t ready for that!

Buffy has a rep for being such a strong, feminist role model for teenage girls, but I honestly think Jenny Calendar is a better one because she’s strong and fearless and gives Willow a boost of confidence, where Buffy is often, well, a whiny, self-absorbed teenager.

Oz – Oz shows up to be the level-headed, down-to-earth member of the gang at a time when they really need one of those, and then it turns out he has some supernatural abilities of his own.

He has one of the best lines on the show, when the rest of the gang tell him (I’m paraphrasing here) “oh, hey, our town is overrun with vampires, take a minute to absorb that information.” And he’s like, “oh, that explains everything.”

Spike – We meet Spike in season two, and Buffy (both the character, and the show) are never the same. He was written off at the end of season two, and I wasn’t sad to see him go. But about midway through season three, I missed him and was happy when he finally returned.

He often served as comic relief, but turned out to be one of the most complex and nuanced characters on the show. It’s unfair to call him a secondary character because sometime during season five, he becomes a regular, and he plays an integral role in the climactic scene of the last episode (but I’m sticking with it because he’s not one of the main trio who appeared in every episode.)

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My Very Favorite Episodes

  • “Nightmares” – This was the season one episode that convinced me to continue watching the entire series. Due to some force of evil or other, the gang’s worst nightmares come to life. It’s the first indication that there’s a bigger picture beyond high school and vampires.
  • “Who Are You” – Faith and Buffy switch bodies. This episode only works because the actresses (especially Sarah Michelle Gellar) NAIL each other’s characters. It’s also the best foreshadowing of Buffy and Spike’s pairing.
  • “Normal Again” – My favorite episode, the episode that has stayed with and haunted me, presents an alternate reality, where Buffy is in a mental institution and has been since the events of the movie (prequel to the series) started.
  • “Once More, With Feeling” – The fantastically cheesy musical episode. It’s terrible and hilarious and perfect. And those of us who’ve been rooting for Spike since he showed up in season two finally get what we want.

  • “Conversations with Dead People” – Probably the scariest episode, but the reason I like it is that it tried to do something very different (tell one small story in service of the season’s larger story) through four different conversations all spliced together. It’s wise and funny and bittersweet, and very scary.

Foreshadowing

The foreshadowing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another of my favorite elements, and part of what made it such a great show. There are tons of examples of it, from the *key* to season five who’s mentioned as early as season three, to the eventual pairing of Spike and Buffy, which was hinted at in earlier seasons (I think the writers were “testing the waters,” to make sure the viewers were receptive to the coupling, but it works.)

I think the most effective foreshadowing on the show is Willow’s magic. Willow gets involved with magic in season two with guidance from Miss Calendar. Giles warns her not to get involved with dark magic, and she tries (eh, kinda) not to for the next few seasons. We see her fear of dark magic in season four, but fear won’t prevent her from giving in to it in season six, and it’s magical mesmerizing.

Finally, the lore about the chosen one, the vampire slayer, comes up in season two, is explained in the finale of season four, and is a major plot point in the final season. The resolution that is reached in the TV series becomes the set up of the season eight comics.

I want to say more, but it’s long and complex and spoilery (not that I haven’t already dropped a ton of Buffy spoilers) but I realized this post is already about 1600 words long, which is probably enough for a show that I claimed everything about it has already been said. Now I kind of want to start back at season one, episode one and watch it all again. I think I’ll wrap up this post now before I actually commit to re-watching the entire series.

Super Serial

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When I originally sat down to write this post about This American Life spin-off podcast, Serial, I meant to write something completely different. But I realized two things:

  1. Some of you are probably already listening.
  2. If you aren’t listening, the only thing I want to say to you is YOU SHOULD BE.

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You should be, because the story is totally compelling. When it was first announced, I didn’t plan to listen to it at all (I already listen to/am chronically behind on enough podcasts!) But I was listening to TAL and they played the first episode of Serial, and I driving around in my car so I couldn’t reach down and change the episode. Ten minutes later, I was hooked. Ten weeks later, I’m tweeting:

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Because I’ve gotten so sucked in, I’ve been following stories about the show and there are two distinct threads: Discussion about the case that Serial is reporting; Discussion about the podcast itself.

I don’t want to say anything about the story in case you aren’t listening — but the story about the podcast is equally interesting to me. It’s become a huge sensation and developed a massive following – the first podcast to take off like this.

My personal opinion is that it’s taken off in popularity not only because the case is interesting, but because of the serialized format.

Serial was discussed on my *other* favorite podcast recently, TBTL, with Alex Blumberg (another voice I know from TAL who recently launched an excellent new podcast.) “This kind of thing wouldn’t be possible on terrestrial radio,” Blumberg said, and compared it to what’s happened in TV recently.

I had a bit of a flashback when he said that – in one of my college English classes, I read Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson. I went home and dug out my worn, dogeared, heavily notated copy and flipped through it again.

Johnson’s argument in the book is that popular culture has grown increasingly complex and intellectually stimulating in recent years, and though we’ve criticized things like:

  • Fantasy football and baseball teams
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Video games
  • Modern television shows
  • Rapidly changing technologies

as being bad for us as individuals and bad for our society in general, they actually serve as a kind of “positive brainwashing.” Johnson describes this as “a Brave New World [where] somas and ‘feelies’ are actually good for us.”

Part of his argument (the part that most speaks to me) is how television has changed over time. When we watch modern TV shows, he says, the most important parts of the plot happen off-screen, so we as viewers have to do more work to follow along and figure out what’s happening. This makes for more interesting, more engaging entertainment.

Some narratives force you to do work to make sense of them … Part of that cognitive work comes from following multiple threads, keeping often densely interwoven plotlines distinct in your head as you watch. But another part involves the viewer’s ‘filling in’: making sense of information that has been either deliberately withheld or deliberately left obscure.

Johnson’s argument hinges on this point – these new forms of media make us think differently – better – and teach us to use “systems analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition, and – amazingly enough – old-fashioned patience [as] tools to make sense of modern pop culture.”

One of the shows he uses as an example is my all-time favorite, Arrested Development. To be honest, the first time I watched it, I thought it was terrible, because the friends who told me how amazing it was(is) didn’t bother to tell me to start at episode one.

The most delightful aspect of the show is what Johnson would call the complexity: the narrative arc that underlies each season, and the density of the inside jokes. Watch one episode out of context and you miss how cleverly the episodes work together as chapters of a larger story.

Actually, Arrested Development is an interesting case because last spring, seven years after its cancellation, they created a straight-to-Netflix 4th season. I’ve been meaning to write more about it, and still want to, so I don’t want to get too into that discussion today, but what I want to say didn’t work about that most recent season is exactly what works for the Serial podcast: downtime.

When the new Arrested Development episodes were released, creator Mitch Hurwitz implored viewers not to “binge watch:” exactly what they wanted to do (and exactly what Netflix allowed them to do) – watch every new episode back to back in a single sitting.

Hurwitz expected his viewers to, after waiting seven years for the new episodes, watch them as though they were airing weekly on traditional TV.

Serial is posting one new episode each week, and in the early weeks of the podcast, Serial received feedback that listeners wished the episodes had been released after all 12 were complete, because they wanted to “binge listen.” But the weekly, serialized format actually works to their advantage.

Tuning in week after week is powerful for listeners because it gives us time to mull over what happened last week and listen again to previous episodes. It forces us to keep the characters and details straight in our heads. We have to do the work of what Johnson calls “filling in.”

Although serialized radio is not new, podcasts are (relatively speaking), and this one successfully takes advantage of the format. As Johnson says in Everything Bad Is Good For You, new technologies challenge us to think differently. Learning how to consume a new form of media is as helpful in making us smarter as “filling in” and attempting to solve the case.

Engaging listeners, making them “fill in,” is what’s developed such a huge following for the show. As host Sarah Koenig said in last week’s episode, it’s in our nature as humans.

“We act as detectives all the time, gathering evidence. Certain scenes we remember or the look on someone’s face or that thing he said when he got mad. And then we act as judge of character. It’s just a human thing.”

And because there’s now this huge group of devoted followers, and a 15 year old case is once again making headlines, there’s a very real possibility that the podcast will affect the real life outcome of the story.

I can’t imagine how different the story would be if all 12 episodes had been released at the same time – having a week between every episode has created a sort of feedback loop. Koeing has spent time on each of the recent episodes discussing points that have been made on the show’s subreddit, or news stories that were published between episodes airing.

Despite that, I’m a little jealous of all those who have not yet begun listening and will be able to “binge listen” to the entire first season. The waiting, as Tom Petty sang, is the hardest part. It will be very interesting to see whether those listeners get as sucked into the story as those of us who started listening when the earliest episodes were released.

And if you’re not listening yet, now is a great time to start: the final episode of this season will be released on Thursday.

Addendum: The same day I wrote this post, Slate published an article about what makes podcasts addictive. It’s worth a read, if you haven’t already.

Repost: Welcome to Twin Peaks

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This post was originally published in July of 2013, when my friends and I set off to several film locations from the show, Twin Peaks. We happened to plan this little excursion on the same weekend as the annual “Twin Peaks Fest,” and a sign welcoming us to Twin Peaks was conveniently set out.

In light of this week’s news that Twin Peaks will get a 3rd season, belated only by 25 years, I thought this was an appropriate time to repost this. Enjoy!

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I leave you today with some wisdom from Special Agent Dale Cooper: “Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.”

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If Your Kid Drinks From A Bottle, Don’t Take Them To The X-Men Movie

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On Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend, my friends and I went to the multiplex at the mall to see X-Men: The Days of Future Past which, because it was a holiday weekend and the movie had opened the previous day, was sold out. The kind of sold out where a manager comes in to the theater before the show starts to tell everyone to scoot towards the center of the aisle and leave no empty seats, and groups of latecomers have to split up in order to find seats.

This post is not about the X-Men movie, but I’m starting with this story because the movie going experience was actually awful. There was a group sitting around us with several toddlers who were constantly making noise and wandering around the aisle and kept distracting me from watching the movie.

A week or two ago, I read this post on The Daily Dot, arguing that Hollywood movies aren’t bringing in as much profit as they used to because movies these days are terrible, however, the blame is usually placed on the upsurge of movies being pirated online.

I don’t disagree with this, in fact, I wrote the following to a similar effect in a previous post:

[I]n the summer of 2008 … I saw Iron Man for the third time. That I saw it three times is noteworthy – previous to that, I’d not been to see a movie multiple times in a theater since the days of Titanic, because ticket prices were rising and I did not think the quality of movies was doing the same.

Yes, going to the movies has become expensive and a lot of the movies coming out these days are garbage. But there’s another huge piece of this puzzle that doesn’t get talked about in the article: movie audiences are also terrible.

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Our monthly Netflix and HBO subscriptions are less than the cost of two movie tickets and snacks are cheaper at the grocery store. Better yet, our couch is comfortable, I can wear my PJs, I can pause the movie if I need to get up to use the restroom, and best of all, there aren’t obnoxious audience members having conversations or toddling around the theater.

There’s also the fact that, frankly, our TV at home looks as good or better than most digitally projected movies. Joel has a theory that because movie theaters have to pay a fee to change their projectors between projecting in 3-D and 2-D, most theaters just leave the projectors on the 3-D settings, so 2-D look a little fuzzy. I think that’s pretty likely, and add that the eerie green glow from the exit signs reflected on the screen doesn’t enhance the movie for me.

And on the subject of 3-D movies, this is where I think movie theaters really get it wrong. I’m of the opinion that surcharges for 3-D or “real-D 3-D” and IMAX movies are boosting the box office results even if the number of tickets sold is actually declining.

I should acknowledge that I am a total hypocrite: for all my complaints, I still go see new releases in the theater with some regularity. Also, at one point when we were watching X-Men: Days of Future Past I said “hey, shut up!” to the group with the toddlers which I realize was probably more distracting to other people in the audience than the kids.

I have a whole host of complaints about movies coming out these days, but paying more to sit in an audience that behaves worse is tops. If you can’t turn your phone off, stay home. If you want to talk to your friend, stay home. If your child still drinks from a bottle and you don’t have a babysitter, stay home.

The movie will be on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or HBO or cable or Redbox in another month, anyway.

Addendum: About a week after I posted this, my friend Meredith and I saw the X-Men movie again at a 21+ theater in Portland. It was a very pleasant experience.

Last Week, Tonight

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Please tell me you’re watching this show.


My favorite clip, so far

Some of you may remember my obsession last summer with John Oliver’s stint hosting The Daily Show. It’s like last summer all over again, but it keeps going, and yes, there’s dancing.

The other thing I wanted to share is that if you don’t already have HBO (we didn’t) you might try calling your cable provider and asking for a free trial (we did) (they said sure.)

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It’s not TV, it’s HBO! … although so far, all we’ve watched are TV shows. The funny thing about watching HBO shows is that when Joel and I sit down together to watch an episode, after the static fuzz, I expect the Sex and the City theme to follow … Joel expects The Sopranos.

What I’ve Been Watching

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Remember when I said in my last post that I haven’t been doing much? It’s the truth, but only part of it. The whole truth is more like this …

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I’ve been meaning to write a thoughtful and eloquent post about each of these shows for the past couple of weeks, and since it clearly hasn’t happened yet, I’m just going to toss them all into one super-post. Here goes.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I started watching Buffy two summers ago, and I am finally … almost done with the third season. And of course, once I finish the seven seasons, there are three seasons of comic books and a spin-off to catch up on. I’m thoroughly enjoying it, and I suddenly have a new understanding of the “Teen Paranormal Romance” section in every Barnes and Noble.

Watching Buffy is inciting flashbacks of being thirteen, and the hours I spent pouring over Seventeen magazine, trying to duplicate Sarah Michelle Gellar’s hair. Anyway, I’ve said this before, but it remains true: at its core, Buffy is not about vampires or the forces of evil, it’s about being a teenage girl in the 90s.

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Heroes

When this show was airing, I was obsessed with Grey’s Anatomy, and I remember reading about it when I read up on Grey’s spoilers and thinking it sounded so cliche and disinteresting. So … it should come as no surprise that when I actually watched it (with much coercion from Joel) I actually loved it.

It’s basically what would happen if the X-Men were made into a weekly soap opera.

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Wilfred

Honestly, we only started watching this show because we’d finished all Lord of the Rings movies and we I wanted more Elijah Wood. Anyway, neither of us had any expectations but we ended up laughing our butts off. It’s crude and offensive, but still makes witty social commentary … I guess I’d say it’s kind of like South Park, if South Park were live action with a guy in a dog suit.

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What Not to Wear

You probably aren’t surprised to hear that I adore this show. I actually hadn’t watched it in a few years, but caught up on the recent seasons that are on Netflix. I was a bit surprised that the format had changed so much … it’s less about advice for putting oneself together and more about pop psychology and snark. But, really, was it ever actually about fashion advice?

Here’s all the fashion advice you’ll ever need, according to Stacy and Clinton: don’t wear pants with an elastic waist ever, and belt all the things!

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Brooklyn 99

We were really late discovering this show, but Joel and I powered through the entire first season in about a week. It’s SO funny. We couldn’t stop.

It’s basically the 2014 version of Scrubs: a goofy, immature guy works for a boss who’s uptight and seemingly disdains him but inside has a heart of gold. There are fantasy sequences and flashbacks, and of course he’s into one of the girls he works with but won’t admit it.

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The bad news is that since I’ve been obsessively watching older shows, my DVR is totally full and I’m way behind on the current seasons of my favorite shows. My life is so hard!

The Problem With Watching Borat in 2014 …

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… is that you start singing “all other countries have inferior potassium” to the tune of US and A’s national anthem, or you stand in the cheese aisle at the grocery store saying “what is a-this?” and people look at you like you’re crazy. Eight year old pop culture references have been long forgotten.

By the way, if it’s been a while since you’ve seen the scene in the cheese aisle or maybe you missed it (it’s a deleted scene, but probably my favorite scene) I implore you to watch it. It’s totally SFW – it’s utterly ridiculous, but not gross out humor or shock value humor.

Here it is:

Anyways, if, like me, you heard that Da Ali G Show is being resurrected on FXX and thought “sweet! New episodes!” and then “it sounds too good to be true,” and then “I wonder how new episodes could be made when Sacha Baron Cohen has officially retired Ali G, Borat, and Bruno.” Well … it is too good to be true. FXX is going to re-air the original episodes, plus a few that had never been aired.

Oh, well. We’ll always have Borat.

My Oscar Predictions

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For the past ten years or so, my dad and sister and I have had a little Oscar prediction competition. (Sometimes my mom and/or Joel will play along, but they aren’t as competitive.)

I can attest that the years I make an effort to see as many of the nominated movies as possible, I do much better than years I don’t. 2008 was the only year I saw every movie nominated in the major categories, and that year, my final score was 20/24 (if memory serves.)

This year, I’m not counting on doing very well, because I’ve seen only one of the movies. As I was tallying up the movies I’d seen, I thought “no way that’s right! We saw a bunch of movies last year!” But we focused or moviegoing dollars on superhero and action movies, and while we saw several “Oscar bait” movies at the end of the year, none of the movies we saw scored any nominations.

A week or two ago, I found this article on Grantland.com that pointed out that the major award nominations this year are dispersed among only 12 movies, the fewest in 30 years. And last year, it was just 14 movies, the second fewest.

The conclusion I came to about this differs from the Grantland article – I just don’t care. I have many fond memories of spending Oscar Sunday on the couch with my family, watching the red carpet, making predictions, enjoying the ceremony. In recent years, it just hasn’t been as exciting.

Even in 2012, when Billy Crystal came back to host, the ceremonies aren’t fun to watch (although, I really enjoyed Seth MacFarlane last year, but I’m in the minority.) The pool of movies is so tiny and there aren’t any that I care about. Not even watching Joan Rivers on the red carpet can get me excited about this year’s Oscars.

Actually, this year, I’m probably not going to watch at all – I’ll be spending Oscar Sunday with my family this year, but at my grandpa’s birthday dinner. I’m not even going to DVR it. I’ll just pull up the results online to see how I did. Probably not very well.

This is an odd mix of who I think will actually win, who I hope to see win although unlikely, and I had no idea but 12 Years a Slave seemed like a safe bet. (I haven’t bothered listing some of the smaller categories here. Want to fill out your own ballot? Download it here.)

Best Picture – 12 Years a Slave
Best Director – Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Best Actor – Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Best Actress – Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Best Supporting Actor – Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
Best Supporting Actress – Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave
Best Animated Film – Frozen
Best Adapted Screenplay – Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
Best Original Screenplay – Bob Nelson, Nebraska
Best Song – “Let It Go,” Frozen
Best Score – Thomas Newman, Saving Mr. Banks

Harold Ramis on Authenticity

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A sentence from an interview with Harold Ramis has been getting passed around since he died on Monday, and while it’s a nice sentiment, the entire quote (and in fact the entire interview) is truthful and worth reading. This is regarding his decision to make a sequel to Analyze This.

The interviewer asked “What challenges did you encounter when trying to keep it true to the first one but also make it different and stand out in some way?”

The audience will always say that they want something new, but then if it’s too different, they don’t feel they got the experience they came back for. There was always that tension – how to keep it fresh and familiar at the same time.

For me, I can assure you that no one did it just for the money. I wanted to say something thematically and creatively that was worth saying. I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. In this case, it took me a while to find what statement I could get behind that would not be too weighty or that would overwhelm the comedy but that would be worth talking about. If I’m going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that – you know, I realize the movie was about change and can people change and crime in our society and can people be redeemed. That’s what keeps me going in the big picture.

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And while we’re talking about authenticity and things that are worth saying, a couple of blog updates:

First, I updated my home page, namely doing away with the image slider. This should make the homepage in particular and all of my images in general load faster and look better if you’re reading on a phone or tablet.

Also, if you care, I created a disclosure policy and updated my FAQs.

Team Piz

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Joel and I just finished watching the last episode of the last season of Veronica Mars last night, and now I understand why longtime fans were so desperate to get a Veronica Mars movie made (the ending is pretty abrupt) but more importantly, now I understand why the season three love triangle has polarized fans in the ensuing years.

With the movie coming out in just a few weeks, I wanted to take a moment to declare that I am staunchly Team Piz.

Two reasons:
1. I get really tired of good girls choosing the “bad boy” in movies and television. Characters on the screen should choose the person who is easy to be with, because that’s how real life works. Sigh. I know I can’t expect TV to be anything like real life, but this is a case where it really bugs me.

I also think that Ilsa made the right choice by leaving Rick in Morocco, in another love triangle that polarized its fans.

2. I get really tired of TV shows abusing the will-they/won’t-they plot line for their entire run. Veronica Mars didn’t take this as far as, say, Friends or Scrubs, but it’s really boring to watch an on-again-off-again couple break up and make up countless times over the course of all the years the show airs.

When Veronica and Logan got together in the first season, I dug it. It was a fun tryst. Vulture posted that creator Rob Thomas is Team Logan, or at least felt that way when watching season 1:

“When I started writing the movie, I would get on my treadmill each day and watch an episode,” said Thomas. Eventually, he reached the season-one episode where Veronica and Logan have their first kiss … and he broke down. “I rewound it and I rewound it and then my wife entered and I have tears in my eyes,” Thomas laughed. “It was an embarrassing moment that I’m watching my own work and crying … but it just felt so earned to me!”

But three years later, it was equally earned when Veronica and Piz had their first kiss.

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I’m sure this makes sense only to the one or two of you out there who are also Veronica Mars fans (marshmallows? Am I using that right?) but I wanted to put it out there because I’m really excited about the movie. I hope I’ve sided with the team that gets the girl, in the end, but I have my doubts.