Respect Authority

Dear ER:

I’ll miss you. I mean, not actively, not the way I’d miss, say, For the Love of Ray-J or the way I HAVE missed Project Runway, but in a more subtle way, the way one acknowledges the end of era without actively caring it’s over. You know, like baseball season. Shit was long as hell, lots of people liked it, but there will almost definitely be more.

Indeed, there have been no shortage of alternative hospital shows for years now, though certainly none has managed to combine melodrama and serialized realism in quite the same way. I doubt House could pull off having Hugh Laurie lose an arm in a helicopter accident. Then again, neither did you, really. That’s actually about the time I stopped watching.

Which brings me to my point. It’s been fun, ER, all seven hundred million years of it, but your time has come. If I wasn’t fairly certain of this before 2009 - the last four months of over-hyped promos for EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FINAL EPISODE have made me more than certain. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.

Somewhere along the way, in your multi-decade progression of characters and plot lines and drama, I lost interest. It might have been around the time George Clooney checked out, or perhaps after Dr. Robert lost his second helicopter fight. It might have been when that bitchy doctor with the crutches got all sentimental about being gay, or when that that Eastern European doctor dated pretty much everything with a vagina. But at some point, as the years passed, I found myself refusing to believe that this is how emergency rooms operate. In fact, I’ve been in an emergency room, and my guess would be that around 99% of the time - they’re boring! They’re full of drunk people, or people with mundane identifiable illnesses that don’t require special attention. And there aren’t nearly as many shooting sprees as you made it seem.

So thanks for our time together. Really, it’s been fun. But it’s definitely time to pull the plug.

Love, Kira

In the years I’ve followed Battlestar Galactica, I’ve had one review – it’s amazing and you should watch it. Now that it’s over, I’m updating my review – it’s amazing and you should definitely watch it… from the beginning. I have the DVDs, you can borrow them. In fact, come over and I’ll watch them with you.

That being said, the finale was a little… disrespectful. Not to the fans, but to the show itself. Obviously fan boys will have a problem with the loose ends (Starbuck and the millions of coffee shops named in her honor, God and his time traveling mind minions) but the real outrage should be directed at Ron Moore - who’s ego nearly swallowed the show whole.

Battlestar, from the mini-series, was always a show that paralleled reality but it did so without penetrating it. It was about humanity when its chickens came home to roost… then surprise-attacked us and turned our social/political world upside down. It was brilliant because it was about 9/11 without being about 9/11. And because the protagonists were both the heroes and yet also the instigators, it was about us without actually being about us, because ultimately Battlestar Galatica is a television drama, set in space, with space planes and killer robots.

When, thankfully, the show was picked up and transformed into a full fledged series, it was given the latitude to use dramatic representations of familiar social struggles – like abortion, religious expression, and civic freedom - to advance more entertaining plots that revolved around gratuitous, post-apocalyptic sex scenes and, of course, space battles.
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