Dairy of a Madman

Maybe I’m just getting old, and I’m finally at that cynical place where you start believing things like “All the good ideas have already seen fruition.” Maybe I’m too busy with work and music and Interplanetary to enjoy rest that doesn’t involve sleep properly. Maybe it’s just a midseason lag.

Or perhaps the shows that I have become so enamored of have just eaten their own tails.

Yes, I know I need to start watching Heroes, but I’m halfway uninspired, and halfway convinced that I’ll fall madly in love with it, obsessively getting to my television set three minutes before whatever time it comes on*, ignoring phone calls and shushing the wife… and then it, too, will become 24, Lost, and Scrubs. And I will finally fly to Los Angeles and go postal on a large subset of an industry.

No, not the drug lords.

To be fair, all three are picking up, about half-way each through their respective seasons. But Scrubs nearly drifted away with all the baby talk early on, the writers of Lost are either full of themselves or have to come up with a way to drag out a three-season idea indefinitely (seriously, an answer or two to keep the list of mysteries down to a single leather-bound tome would be nice), and 24 is suddenly spending every season trying to top itself.

Look, nobody’s happier with the idea of a large chunk of LA taken out in a single nuclear blast than me, but one, how do you top that for the next 20 hours of the season? And two, it’s suddenly not hard to imagine the writers seriously consider an alien invasion of Earth for season seven, where South America gets microwaved into the fifth dimension (probably with someone Jack’s related to on vacation in Buenos Aires) somewhere along the way.

I don’t really worry too much about that, because in space, no one can hear you say “Damn it!”

So given that my three remaining TV shows are all teetering perilously close to Ouroboros-dom, I have a wish (and I’m willing to pretend that I’m in the final stages of terminal cancer, if that helps further my cause): give me a final, season closing, three-part epic that spans shows. Have the Lost gang end up finding a hatch that somehow opens into Sacred Heart hospital (it can be staffed by no one but Dr. Cox and Janitor, if necessary, though I can imagine some entertainment if Sawyer and Sarah Chalke’s Eliot were to meet). Just as Cox is teaching much needed life lessons to Hurley and the gang, Jack Bauer burst in to discover: behind the nuclear threats of this season stands Gil Grissom (turns out years of obsessing over bugs pushed him right the fuck over the edge) and Chloe. All the gangs team up and take Gil down, who is finally led away by Bill Buchanan and Det. Brass muttering, “I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

Chloe escapes, of course, because someone’s gotta sell the secret blueprints of Earth’s government buildings to the Martians.

*No, I have no DVR, and you people always spoil things for me if I don’t watch them immediately anyway.

… No, seriously, Robert Patrick versus Jack Bauer versus Sayid with commentary by Perry Cox. What more could you want?