Notes while I'm supposed to be doing my reading

[jlh]

So like, did Couch Baron and Joe R trade places just for the recaplets, or are they doing this for just this week, or for the rest of the season, or what? Is this a Sign? I think we all know that Joe R is grouchy about Idol, but I didn't think CB was all that down on VM, even with the new direction.

I read Jacob's recaps of Idol Gives Back and, well. I think I mentioned how much I enjoyed his bringing the cultural criticism on Tony Bennett week, and I agree that a lot of what was going on with Idol Gives Back was complete bullshit, especially the not very much money Fox was giving for votes they were going to get anyway. Never mind the kind of offensive ExxonMobile appearance that they tried to soften by trotting out the African staffers; Negro, please. Jacob was angry through a lot of the Tuesday recap and a good amount of the Wednesday recap though his reaction to Ryan and Simon in Africa is subtle and endearing and I encourage y'all to wade through the other stuff to see it. (He also has a whole reference to Ryan using this to become serious enough to make Anderson Cooper like him, but that won't work mostly because Andy likes him some dark meat, yo, so Ryan is not going to be his type anyway.) Jacob saved it for me with his closer, because he was really running up against the "nothing we can do is good enough" dead end, and then he said:

Every bit of pain that ever happened to anybody in the world resulted from just this: the sin, the cancer, the awful confusion and heavy responsibility of ever thinking you were alone. You aren't. You never were.

Which is really my own entire point, and I go off the rails, personally, when I forget that.

Veronica Mars: ziggy1278 and bhanesidhe are both on record as liking season 3 more than season 2, and I agree in parts, but I like a mystery, personally—mystery is the genre I gravitate toward, rather than SF/F or adventure—and I didn't think that either the Hearst rapist or the Dean's murder were particularly good mysteries in their construction. Season 2's bus crash had definite pacing problems, but the mystery itself and the clues and all worked better than either of the two mini-arcs this season. Also, they worked around the absence of the secondary characters much more organically in season 2 than in season 3. Val points out that this isn't an ensemble show and she's right, but still, Weevil and Wallace's absences are felt.

Anyway, without being spoilery, I'm kind of with Joe's recaplet. Spoilery, I can't decide if I'm disappointed or not. All that said, this felt like an episode of Everwood, with the whole dad-doing-his-job plot (and yet, not being particularly badass) and the rest being mostly about who feels about who is fucking who. The MotW was a bit heavy handed and predictable and I'm tired of their messing about with politics and not doing a great job with it (never mind that I could hear calloocallay howling from here). The oh no minors are drinking! thing was totally undercut by the final party … at which minors were drinking. So I'm not sure, really, what the hell that was all about except that Keith got to fire some people and Deputy Moustache got to continue to be awesome.

Meanwhile the more I listen to Ryan's radio show the more I wonder who he thinks he's kidding with this straight thing, for reals.

Comments

[lessthangreat.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile the more I listen to Ryan's radio show the more I wonder who he thinks he's kidding with this straight thing, for reals.

I'm so with you there. Honestly, Ryan, do you even listen to yourself when you talk?

[thepodsquad.livejournal.com]

He might have lost me forever when he accidentally said something akin to handling Brad Pitt's penis.

I try! I try to believe in his straightness. But damn. The Brad Pitt sequence was PRICELESS.

[lessthangreat.livejournal.com]

See, I just missed the Brad Pitt thing. But I got there in time for the Simon wearing lipgloss thing. And the pet names. Oh, my word, the PET NAMES.

[thepodsquad.livejournal.com]

The recap sort of prompted me to rant at dollsome all philosophically for hours on end while I was supposed to be writing a ficlet for her. Mostly because...I'm a terrible person, who doesn't really do that stuff, but for a whole host of personal reasons that make sense to me. And because everyone has their own host of problems, and acting like money is the solution is dumb...and I agree with a lot of what Jacob was getting at in the recap, actually.

Anyway, I didn't read everything because frak, he can ramble at length and I can't read it too much or I get even more ranty and things spiral out of control.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was losing patience with Jacob because he was just going on and on and ON and, hate to play this card, but he sounded like some of my vulgar Marxist students who rant about the System and don't have a sense of what they want to do about it. I agree, but you know, it was Lenin who asked What Is To Be Done so perhaps you should like, follow in his footsteps if you want to be all Bolshevik about it.

That said, it's worth it to go back and skim for the Rymon's Second Honeymoon stuff because he actually says at one point that he didn't think he could love Ryan more, and then he did. I might post excerpts later today when I get back from class because the recap is big time tl;dr.

[scrabble.livejournal.com]

I have not yet watched VM, as I was not home. And honestly, I have not even looked to download it yet. I am just really not excited at all. Which makes me sad. :/

[scrabble.livejournal.com]

Oh, and about the secondary characters: Weevil's absence never seems too strange to me, because he's never a constant presence in her life. But the Wallace absences this season have been completely unacceptable. No explanation, no "hey, long time no see," just "I'm going to pop into this scene and tell you Logan likes Parker and then I'm going to go read Remembrance of Things Past, so you know, I'll be busy."