As the television season has ended I give my thoughts on some of the series I have watched : Scrubs, House, CSI, CSI: New York and Lost.
Scrubs – Season 5
To be quite frankly, Scrubs has kinda lost its magic touch as many others think so too. This is due some factors, from which here are a few:
- Zach Braff is overacting imo. I’ve been an actor myself (youth theatre) and quite can say that I recognize this behaviour. In the first seasons JD (Zach’s character) used to go to his high-pitched voice every now and then. In the last season he always starts with that air/attitude and always uses some fake smile. Don’t get me wrong, it sometimes still is funny, but it’s overdone. It’s like eating spaghetti all day, every day : once you’ll stop liking it due to the spaghetti-overload
- Many characters have changed over time. Take Jordan (Cox’ (ex-)wife) for example. She has gone from “don’t care what you’re saying since it doesn’t concern me” to “really, do you mean that, how can I talk this out with you so that we get along”
- …
So, do I still like Scrubs? Yes, I do! The season has had some high-quality episodes like “My way home”, a ‘Wizard of Oz’-hommage where JD tries to get home from the hospital (the 100th episode btw). The clues in that episode are a-w-e-s-o-m-e! Toto, yellow lines, the Todd stating “Lions & Tigers & Bears, Oh my!”, the 2nd part of the ep has more colorbrightness (FYI: the original “wizard of oz” is black&white, but the part that takes place in Oz are in color), Janitor screaming “Oilcan, oilcan!” whilst having a screwdriver in his mouth, Jordan who is referred to as “the wicked witch of the east-wing” screaming “I’m melting” when her airco gets stuck, etc.
The season also topped with the “My Lunch” episode and the two episodes after that. Won’t go into detail about them, but just watch as Cox (still my favourite character!) gets tormented over the death of his patients. Really, this is one of the best episodes of Scrubs ever! In that episode we also get to see the neurotic Jill Tracy again. Too bad she had to die though.
The season finale was just a “normal” episode with some better and lesser jokes, but the ending really was a bit too vomit-inducing/”ooh-look-at-that-cute -baby”-like imo. Great, now everybody’s pregant! Cox & Jordan, Turk & Carla, JD & Dr. Kim … though I don’t believe that JD is the father of Kim’s upcoming child. Still, it is a good episode, but the ending’s a bit overkill for me (note that “My Overkill”, the debut of season 2 is a very good episode, that said aside). Most likely this (the open ending) also had to do with the fact that season 6 was on hiatus.
The season finale also’s cleverly named “My Transition (1)” to symbolise the transition to HDTV in Season 6 … whiiiii!
Summing this one all up : Very good and amusing, although it’s not the “old-skool”-scrubs.
House – Season 2
House is a series which I would describe as a crossbread between a hospital series (E.R.) and CSI qua setting : investigate medical issues.
What I really like about House is House himself. He really is an arrogant doctor, though he has it at the right end (“House is an infectious-disease specialist at a New Jersey hospital who brutalizes colleagues and patients with his harsh honesty.” as some paper described it), which always leads to hilarious, yet realistic and tragic at the same time, scenarios
Since I only started watching this season (season 2 that is), I had to quickly watch season 1 to get up-to-date on the characters and how they relate to eachother, which really was no biggie at all : House is awesome! After watching one ep, you are so seduced to see the next one and the one after that and the one … you get the point 😉
The 2nd best episode of the season is where one of the main characters gets ill: Foreman gets a really weird disease after checking out a euphoric drug-dealing cop his flat. The story stretches over 2 episodes named “Euphoria” and really builds up the (thrilling) mood.
So what’s the best episode then? Well, the season finale was one to dream of! House gets seriously injured after a patient shoots him twice. It’s a weird episode, though it gives on a very good insight on Greg (House) his perception of things and left me with an enormous “cant-wait-to-see-the-next-season”-feeling.
House, you rock!
CSI – Season 6
Aaah, C.S.I. Yet again a very decent season for this very decent series! The climax for the season finale started at the ending of episode 23, where Brass got shot, real bad. The finale itself went on on the process of Brass getting surgery and such (he recovered) and wasn’t that spectacular (I’ve seen better season finales of CSI!).
Though, the last minute gave me a strange feeling. “Wtf is Grissom doing in a Hawai shirt, with his head tilted? That’s so not ‘him’ … ooh, the camera rotates … hmmz, he’s on a bed, wtf’s he doing there? … oh my, female legs on screen … uh … what – the – f*ck? It’s Sara Sidle“.
Okay, we knew they had a thing a going on, which was “told” us in season 1 when Sara Sidle became part of CSI team, but it was never again (or maybe once or twice) mentionned throughout seasons 2 to 6. And there we all of the sudden have it again. Damn you writers, we wanted to know this in season 2 already! It really is a bit of an anticlimax, no-one would have thought they’d bring this up again.
Yet still, I still love CSI as I did before! Season 7, where art thou?
CSI : New York – Season 2
CSI:NY never got any real big attention here in Belgium. Many people watch CSI, many people watch CSI:Miami, but CSI:New York only has half the viewers of the first 2 series. So why don’t they like it? I guess too many CSI’s are around now. I myself don’t watch CSI:Miami closely, but some loose episodes every now and then. Yet still, I feel way more “one” with Caruso and his crew than the crew of CSI:NY which I can’t even name all by name.
That sentence kinda said it: one can’t really bond to the characters. In the original and Miami, you can really bond to Grissom and Caruso, but Mack … well … he’s kinda weird imo. When CSI:NY got launched I read up on what it would be. One of the facts is that Mack lost his wife during 9/11. Only in one of the really first episodes you can see him wondering around Ground Zero, though it’s never verbally mentionned nor visually indicated that it is Ground Zero (you only see some fences with posters and flowers). Don’t think many of the viewers got that… After that it can’t remember a single ep where it’s mentionned again.
Now, the storylines of CSI:NY are great and of a high quality. With the normal CSI I can sometimes tell that “that dude we saw there” did it, CSI:NY kinda left me in doubt most of the times.
The major change between season 1 and 2 is that they wrote off that latino girl (Aiden Burn now that I googled it) and replaced her by Dakota as Danny likes to call her (Lindsay Monroe now that I googled some more). Aiden got laid off (in the series) after messing with some evidence in a rape case, which reappears in one of the last episodes.
Another change is the fact that Hawkes “upgraded” from doctor to crime scene investigator somewhere in between seasons 1 and 2 (at the end of S1 he still was the doc, in S2 he came back as CSI and got introduced as that by one small sentence by Bonasera). Although I find that he acts in a weird way (always looking a simple petri-dish as if it were something new) he really is a good character.
And yet another change was the switch of locations. The moved from that dungeon as I’d like to call it to a vivid location with many windows. A move worth moving imo.
I can’t talk about the finale right now, since I still have 3 episodes to go … maybe they’ll track back the rapist who smells like paint thinner? Who knows?
And ooh, before I forget: Danny – the former Tanglewood crook – rocks!
Lost – Season 2
Yeah Lost. Who hasn’t heard of it by now?
Season 2 continued on the cliffhanging season 1 where Locke blew up the hatch. Okay, major change in plot. Then some eps came, nothing major. Then Michael’s kid got kidnapped, we encountered the other 42 of the tail end and we encountered “the others”.
“Yeah yeah, where’s the frickin’ monster from season 1? And whatup with that damn polar bear? And who are those others”
Okay, let’s continue watching then…
And Michael sets off … “wtf, the others!”
“Hehe Eko, you’re a cool guy!”
All of the sudden Kate remembers her unborn-baby-napping
And some more watching … “hmmz, that ep where Hurley has an imaginary friend that says this is all a dream … I think he must be right”. Especially at the ending of that ep I really went *oink*: “Hurley’s gf ain’t no psychiatrist, she was in the mental institution herself!”
“Wow, they captured Henry. Oink, Michael’s back? Hmmz, I don’t trust him, he must be one of the bad guys.”
“You see, Michael killed Hurley’s girl and that latino cop! He MUST BE a baddie”
And then, all of the sudden: Desmond is back! “What the frick?” . Yup, he’s back.
Okay, some more watching then, not?
Crud, turns out Michael ain’t a baddie, but a real selfish fool! Sayid to the rescue! Yet still, Michael keeps on going: “Whine whine – gotta get my kid back – whine whine – don’t care if anyone dies – whine whine – my kid – some more whining”
And then … Locke goes short-circuited and blows up the hatch. Too bad he didn’t get it by the right end though. Cos’ that movie in “the other hatch underneath the plane where boone died and eko’s brother died too” really made sense: It’s an expirement! Clever, how didn’t I think of that? ** NOT! **
Okay, the hatch blew up, bright lite emitted, as did an awful sound and … NOTHING! Noone on the island said a frickin’ thing, they all found it normal.
“Wtf’s Charlie doing there? He really should be dead by now”
And what about that nod between Michael, Jack, Sweetcheeks and Sawyer when Michael took off with Walt?
As you might have noticed, season 2 leaves one with more questions than ever. Heck, even some of the questions left at the end of the first season aren’t explained : black smoke, black smoke, the numbers, the black rock, the polar bear, walt behaving strange, “the monster”, the french chick, the babystealing stuff, hanso project, …
And now season 2 has many other questions added to that: the others (named hostiles (?) in one ep) are faking it, ‘henry’ is the leader?, the foot statue has four toes?, the hatch blown up but charlie swirls out of it alive, locke/des/eko are dead?, michael still is up to something?, hurley’s girl was also a mental patient so hurley might be hallucinating it all?, the tubes lead to nowhere, the clinic where they’d take Claire’s baby, …
Ooh, what about the very last minute of the finale. Des’ girl gets called by some portuguese speaking dudes:
“Miss Widmore, it’s us. I think we’ve found it.” (or was that “him” at the end?)
** Boom **
End credits roll.
See you in September!
Leftovers
No, not a series, but all the leftovers I won’t go into detail that much.
- The Simpsons already is at season 17 by now. It kept me amused, but I really can’t say that it was awesome. I have way more hilarious memories of the old episodes than these new ones. Has the cow been milked?
- Numb3rs also started its second season. Started watching the first few eps, but didn’t continue watching. It’s good (kinda CSI like, but then with math), still not excellent. Maybe I’ll watch them on a lazy sunday.
- Season 6 already for The Sopranos which will have it’s finale within 2 weeks. Still didn’t have time to watch this … heck, I’m still stuck somewhere mid season 1! SHAME ON ME!
- Didn’t even bother watching season 5 of 24 … They say that 1000 monkeys can write a (good?) script. I believe it, now stop throwing Jack Bauer at my face!
- Cold Case season 3 : still in the queue to watch. /me likes that show!
- Another animated series: Tripping The Rift which had its second season real early. Also in the queue to watch, and maybe real soon. The first season was hilarious!
- Watched the first ep of Heist. Definately one to watch, but not right now … maybe that lazy sunday is long enough to watch the 6 episodes after eachother 😉
- Also heard a lot about Prison Break, which also is in the queue
Summing it all up
As you can see the television season was quite a heavy one indeed. Many great shows, too less time to watch them all at once. It might be a good thing that the tv-season has stopped by now, so that I can watch the eps/series I didn’t get to watch.
Anywho, enough chit-chat. Gonna watch them 3 left eps of CSI:NY now 😉
(Heard sth special is gonna happen)
B!