Today I shall take time out of my busy schedule (attempt to do something related to moving house; feel exhausted; collapse on sofa) to check in on White Collar once again after another 4 episodes. I considered leaving this review until the mid-season break in another 2 episodes’ time, but a) I want to speculate and b) next week I’m offline so will be late catching up on the mid-season finale.
Therefore, thoughts on Neal’s inner angel and demon after the jump…
This seems like the right size chunk to consider something like White Collar in. Trying to analyse every episode would lead to a lot of repetition (which in greater writers might translate to very concise reviews, but you know with me I’d just talk a lot about nothing), but only checking in every half-season would take away the fun of speculating on the end (and mid-) points of the season arcs.
Thoughts on relationship re-adjustments and the perils of over-familiarity after the jump…
This week in Mystic Falls, nothing is beautiful and everything hurts…
Okay, I admit defeat. I can’t make a weekly schedule of blogging about tv – no matter how shallow – when I’m also trying to juggle a job which already requires me to spend much of my days typing, planning to flee the country within a few months and also having something that might be called a social life (if I knew what one of those was. Surely a girl who spends most of her evenings at home alone watching tv doesn’t have one?). Oh, and let’s not forget the thing I’ve had going for the last few years where I’m also absolutely shattered 95% of the time and seem to need about 10 hours of sleep a night to function. Okay, excuses done. Point is: it’s about two months since these episodes aired, right? But I’m not just going to give up on them, see, because I actually wrote blog posts for the penultimate and finale episodes in the weeks they aired. They’ve been sitting around in draft ever since, waiting for me to get round to doing this.
So I shall do it.
But I’m going to do it a bit differently. Given that it would be hard for me to evaluate the episodes without hindsight now anyway, and given how much time has passed, I’m going to lump them together and consider them from the point of view of the end of the season. (Spoilers up to 2.22, therefore, ahoy.) These two episodes are full of people trying to avert the seemingly inevitable, convincing themselves they can fight Klaus, survive their own self-sacrifice, stand a chance of winning Elena’s love, etc.
So was any of it worth the effort?
I’m once again writing this review far too late for real discussion of the issues raised, so after the cut I offer merely a few thoughts on all the things that can happen in darkened school rooms after hours. Aren’t they the best?
Having left it too long to write this, I no longer have any idea whether there was anything I wanted to say about this episode, really. Or… no, that’s not quite true. The things I want to say about this episode are things that have come from reading other post-air analysis, thoughts prompted by other people’s thoughts. So this may be a slightly different review from normal, focusing on what other people have said and how I disagree with them. (I always disagree with other people, even if I love them, even if I agree with 99% of what they say. It’s a constant risk of being my friend…)
It’s been a while since I’ve been here, hasn’t it? Sorry. I could make excuses – none of my shallow shows were airing in March, work has been busy, I’ve been planning my escape from work in a few months’ time, and for the last 3 weeks I’ve had a very nice lodger staying with me in my house and making me feel that it would be rude to a) watch television all evening or b) write about television all evening.
But I’m getting awfully behind on this blog and need to pick up the pace again if I’m going to stick with my intention to re, so here goes. First on the menu: some long overdue thoughts on the season 2 finale of White Collar.
I don’t have time to write a lot about this episode, but wanted to get a few quick thoughts out that have been milling around my head since I watched it, before the season finale comes along and makes them either real, moot or otherwise uninteresting for the next 6 months or so (boo). So, after the jump, a few thoughts on the implications of converging characters, and whether a tv show can ever have them.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the main strength of The Vampire Diaries is knowing how to take an old thing and make it new again. It is a problem the show has faced and overcome with panache ever since its premiere, when Twilight fans saw it as a rip-off, Buffy fans saw it as a sad indictment of the decline of girl power in tv, and everyone else saw it as oh no, not another damn vampire show. But anyone who stuck with it through its shaky first few episodes, even if they were a member of one of those sceptical camps to begin with, know that it has surpassed those assumptions – and that it has done it by embracing them. Stefan and Elena are every bit as True Love and teenage escapism as Bella and Edward*, but they come with less perfection and more infectious youth and enthusiasm. Elena will never be Buffy, but Alaric does just fine as a badass human Slayer and Elena’s self-determination and willingness to fight back in tight corners carry on the spirit of an empowered teenage girl in a supernatural world without the actual superpowers to help her. And the age-old vampire myths are there in recognisable form, but twisted just enough to give rise to new situations we haven’t seen done a million times before.
*disclaimer: no, I have not read/watched/otherwise engaged with Twilight, nor do I plan to. So please correct me if I’m wrong here but from what I understand of the storyline – and Twilight fans I know online who still love the extra energy and kickassness of TVD in comparison – I don’t think I’m too far off.
This ethos also seems to extend to its plot points, and is perhaps a partial explanation for how the plot on the show continues to move crazily fast without ever apparently running out of steam. In theory, many plots have already been re-used even within the one and a half seasons to date, but in actuality it doesn’t feel like that because the show keeps moving forward such that when we see an old plot point it feels new again, because the context has changed. There are multiple examples of this, but the obvious one coming to mind right now is Vicki vs. Caroline – technically the exact same plot, so much so that they had to have Damon point it out within the show, but boy oh boy did it feel different due to their different characters and the different slant within the show by this point on the different ways to be a vampire. And so old is made new again, and several episodes of heart-wrenching pain and joy are wrung out of a storyline that we thought we already knew.
Rather than adopt my usual approach of looking at each main character and seeing how their actions fit into the theme of the episode generally, then, I’m going to look at each of the main plot developments instead this week (so brace yourself, this could be a long discussion) and see whether they fit this mould of having your cake and eating it too.
 | Susannah on All you need is love (The Vamp… |
 | kate on All you need is love (The Vamp… |
| Susannah on Hello teacher, tell me, what’s… |
| cheekyhobbit on Hello teacher, tell me, what’s… |
| cheekyhobbit on Burn Baby Burn (The Vampire Di… |
Susannah's Ramblings 