And so on that note.
harmonyfb recced this fun little X/S story by fitofpique. I'm always amused by the plot device of characters having to pretend to be...you know. And then getting caught up in it.I am indescribably out of sorts today. Rain, war, and a kind of inexpressive depression make me dumb.
"Charmed" sucked ass last night. Like that's a surprise.
They have the subtlety of a naked whore on roller skates. They brought in this antagonistic guest character, a whitelighter, and tried to make her one of those rule-bound caricatures whose by-the-book limitations drive home the moral of thinking outside the box, and winging it, and any other spin you can think of that disguises the lazy, undisciplined, self-serving behavior exemplified by our snippy witches. And they cast an actress who, as the recapper points out, looks like a cow next to the anorexic stars. So that's nice. In conflict with this character, the Halliwells come across even more than usual as the most loathesome, self-satisfied, maliciously catty little twats you'd ever not want to meet, in part because--despite crap material--the guest actress worked her ass off to give her character dignity. And she'd *almost* succeeded, when all of a sudden they dump us into this horrific scene where she "trains" the witches for the upcoming fight. If you can imagine...oh, you won't be able to, but if you can try to imagine this woman forced to mouth the most ludicrous, painfully lame lines of dialogue ever, in the manner of a bootcamp drill instructor, a harangue which instantly demolishes all her previous, tenuous credibility and makes her look like an idiot. And then, and *THEN*, we cut to a montage of skanky-ass witches jumping Matrix-style off the walls and playing war games with fireballs as "It Takes Two" plays over the action ("It takes two to make a thing go right / It takes two to make it outta sight").
I'm still scarred and bruised by the long fall I took to reach this nadir of television.
And then? Having made their guest star look a fool, they trot out the inevitable, remaining cliches of this storyline. Rule-bound thinking leads to failure, of course, and the whitelighter's miscalculations cause the villain to get the upper hand--but not only that, they freakin' *kill* this poor bint off as punishment for the sheer nerve she's displayed by trying to enforce a little rational discipline on the snotty-ass witches under her charge. The wicca sisters are all "I told you so," even though she's *dead*, and they kick the villain's ass and crow over his demise with truly sickening self-satisfaction. And do they ever show any real regret over the whitelighter's death? Uh, what show are we watching here? No, because they're too busy preening in an orgy of self-righteous triumph.
Gah.
And now to work, so I can get through this day, so I can go home, so I can sleep, so I can get through another day, so I can go home, so I can sleep.
Whatever.