Mike: 1) Bryce, Chuck's rival for Sarah, is dead. 2) Ellie and Devin's chuch wedding was ruined but they got married on the beach. 3) Chuck has the intersect back in him and 'powers' as a result.
Jim: And, still Mike, biggest mistake of the cliffhanger?
Mike: It was Ellie's wedding. Ellie and Devin's, you can argue, but it was Ellie's. And Ellie had so very little to do. She had less to do than Devin. And less air time.
Jim: Okay. Additional comments? I know Dona's got some and, those who watched, jump in.
Dona: I will. Mike's exactly correct. This was supposed to be Ellie's big day. And Ellie, not Ellie and Devin. Captain Awesom, aka Devin, has parents who love him -- played by Morgan Fairchild and I forget his name. But Ellie and Chuck's mother left and then their father. All they had was each other. This was supposed to be her big day and, for those who forgot, we already saw Devin's "big day" when he had his bachelor's party. We saw no bridal shower for Ellie. Now it's her wedding and every character's getting solo time in the church except her? It was really disappointing. We didn't even get a long enough reaction shot of her when, all made up and wearing her dress, the fire sprinklers came on ruining not just her dress but all the decorations.
Wally: I would agree with that and call it the really big mistake of the season finale. The other thing I would point out is that Ana was lost in the episode as well. She had something like one line. There were way too many guest stars and we also did not need all of Jeff and Lester performing that we saw. They could have, for example, given a scene to Ana and Ellie together. Instead, there were these women in the room with Ellie when Sarah and Chuck were in there and we'd never seen these supposed friends before. But you've got Scott Bakula, who is apparently on the show for good now, you had Chevy Chase, you had Morgan Fairchild and you had Devin's father. And if I can be really frank here, the only guests that really worked were Chevy Chase as the villian and Morgan Fairchild.
Ava: Bruce Boxleitner, from Scarecrow & Mrs. King, is playing Devin's father.
Wally: Thanks. Chevy and Morgan were really good. I don't know that their scenes were well written. I'd guess that they weren't well written. But when the camera found them, every time they were already feeling something. Bruce and Scott, for example, seemed to be caught easing into a feeling. Chevy was the bad guy so he tended to be mad. Morgan was trying to keep the wedding on track so she had a no-nonsense attitude every time she was in a scene, she had that as the scene started. She didn't search around and find it.
Mike: And that's a really good point because you already had Morgan's character finding what he was feeling. That was what his brief moments were about on the show. He was finding out how he felt. Did he really want to leave? Did he really want to go to Hawaii with Ana? So the other characters who did not have storylines where they were finding themselves needed to have some real snap from the moment their scenes started. They needed to have that snap to help the show move more quickly since this was the season finale. I agree with Wally that Chevy Chase and Morgan Fairchild were on top of their game. And they really added a sense of urgency and some real energy to the episode. It needed it because there was about 20 soggy minutes at the start with Chuck quitting his CIA job and quitting his Buy More job and then Sarah tells him she's leaving after the wedding and it's like "Mopey, Mopey, Mopey!" We really needed Chevy Chase and Morgan Fairchild every chance we got in those first 20 minutes.
Betty: I don't know what's happening or not next year. But if Chevy's still around, I recommend hooking Morgan's character up with him. In fact, I'd love it if they made Morgan an evil spy. And maybe she has something to do with Chuck's mother disappearing all those years ago? She's too good to just play "Mom of." Although, if they just want to have her coming back for no real reason, they could slide over to her, "There's something odd about that Chuck." You know, like the Gladys Kravitz role on Bewitched. But I'd prefer they made her an evil spy.
Jim: Betty watched Chuck for the first time Monday.
Betty: Yes. My parents were visiting and I didn't know that they were fans of the show. I knew Dona was and I'd told her before I'd try to watch with her. She, my kids and Jess usually catch it every Monday. Ty and Jim often do. But I'd finished setting out the kids clothes for the next day and was wandering around looking for my parents and found them watching the show. I missed the first five minutes but did enjoy it and could see getting caught up in it each week.
Mike: I want to make a point here, if we have time. Betty, you're not going to go out and rent or buy season one, are you?
Betty: No. I don't have the time to sit down and watch multiple discs of anything.
Mike: Same with season two? That's the one that just ended.
Betty: Right. I'll watch it if it repeats this summer. I'll watch an episode a week. As a mother of three young children, I can probably manage that. I can't sit down and watch 20 or so episodes. I don't have that kind of time.
Mike: I brought that up because Chuck built ratings throughout season one, then the season finale aired and NBC didn't repeat it. It didn't start airing again until season two started and it found itself with less of an audience than the year before. I think that will happen again at the start of season three if they don't air repeats this summer. And Ava and C.I. pointed that out, not me.
Stan: Exactly and I agree with them and Mike. Ava and C.I.'s point about how that Mark Harmon show becomes comfort food because CBS always keeps it on the air is true. You can walk in on a Tuesday night and turn on the TV and there it is. It's always there. And Chuck could be that for NBC if they'd bother to keep it on. They need to repeat it and it's a show that repeats well. It would increase the audience for the show when the third season started. My only real frustration with the cliff hanger was that Chuck's again misunderstood Sarah and thinks she's not interested in him. In fact, I'm pissed at the Scott Bakula character for butting in when Sarah was about to tell him -- if Chuck would have shut up -- that she loved him and was staying with him. She didn't get to tell him that and then Chuck overreacted to her reaction to seeing Bryce dead. But if season three starts like season two, it doesn't matter what happened because the premiere will be all about a guest star and ignore everything that happened last season.
Wally: Season two had the worst debut. The worst.
Jim: Stan spoke of Chuck in the last roundtable and deleted the remarks because he felt he was too negative about the show. That's why his entire comment in the roundtable that went up last week was "Daphne." Dona has no idea what anyone's going to pull. When she's tracking what's being said, she's tracking what's being said. Afterwards, if anyone wants to pull anything, they can. Since Stan barely made an appearance --
Wally: He had a walk on.
Stan: I like that, I had a walk on.
Jim: Since Stan just had a walk on, I'll toss this to him: What would you like to see in season three?
Stan: I like Betty's point about Morgan Fairchild turning out to be an evil spy. One thing we didn't talk about was that the bad guys for seasons one and two were Fulcrum. The cliffhanger informed us that there are others including what appears to be a group that's infilitrated the NSA. So she could be a spy or a leader of that. That would be interesting and they really need to beef up the women's roles in season three. They've got the General who is a woman and sort of their Charlie on Charlie's Angles, giving them their instructions each week and showing up for a tele-conference after the mission. Then there's Sarah who gets the most to do of any woman and should because she's a CIA agent and Chuck's love interest. But Ellie and Ana need to be doing a lot more. And maybe it's time someone sues Buy More which appears to have only one female employee, Ana. I also think they can keep Sarah and Chuck apart for season three but if they keep that up in season four it will go too far. We can take it for one more season and only one more.
Jim: Thank you, Stan. Again, Mike covers Chuck at his website. So I'm going to give him the last word and then we'll move on. Mike?
Mike: Dona, Stan, Betty and Wally made strong points. Ana is hilarious and she makes you laugh even in her sad scenes. Jeff and Lester's whole bit it writing while the actors play blank. Ana, the actress playing her, is actually acting. She's adding to her scenes and I can't figure out why she is repeatedly given so little to do. I figured Ellie was going to take a back seat the minute Chuck's dad showed up. That's really sad because the family bond between Chuck and Ellie was one of the best things on the show. Then Daddy shows up and Chuck and Ellie hardly ever get scenes together. Along with Jeff and Lester, we've got Mike who was the boss at Buy More and now the guy who's repelaced him and it's just too many male characters. If Buy More comes back next season -- Chuck and Casey quit since they didn't need it as a cover anymore -- we need a lot less males. It's a sausage fest on the show. And it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the show that follows it.
Jim: Which is Heroes. Rebecca covers it at her site and she wrote about it last week. The title tells it all, "heroes jumps the shark!" Briefly, it jumped the shark how?
Rebecca: This was the show's third season. Nathan is one of the key characters. His super power is he can fly. He's a US Senator. He is the brother of Peter, the son of Angela. He's the father of Claire. He's slept with the now dead Jessica/Nikki and fell in love with Tracy. And this season, he turned on the heroes and initaited a witch hunt, think McCarthyism, which found them rounded up. He is a major character and one that Matt Parkman had a vision of becoming president. But Nathan's now dead. Sylar, the bad hero, killed him.
Jim: Rebecca's not done but I'm jumping in for a minute. Last week, Ruth pointed out, "On Heroes, I will note that they appear to have written themselves into a corner. The next season, if there is one, either has everyone working to destroy Sylar or there is not much point because, at this point, Sylar has pretty much every power anyone could have. He has killed off how many people now to steal their powers?" And that's what Sylar does. He has all these powers because he steals them. His shape shifter power is one that he had for the last several episodes. Rebecca?
Rebecca: Right. So Angela and Matt find Nathan after he's bled to death from Sylar slashing his throat. Peter captures Sylar. Angela wants Matt to use his powers to turn Sylar into Nathan. She's saying she can't lose her son. Sylar was pretending to be Nathan for the last three episodes. He'd touched Nathan's things and that's how he gets the ability to become someone and he also picks up their memories when he does that. So Sylar could physically change into Nathan and, Angelea's point, he already had Nathan's memories. So Matt and Angela know but no one else does. It's jumped the shark, the storyline's offensive.
Marcia: I agree. Nathan, until this year, was supposed to be chief among heroes. The typical idea of the male hero. And they've just killed off the character. That's bad enough but the show could survive. However, to have Nathan kept on via the show's evil character thinking he's Nathan? Sylar's really popular, so is Nathan. Right away you've got a problem that until Sylar finds out the truth, the actor's not on the show. I supposed they can use him in 'Nathan' nightmares. Or maybe 'Nathan' looks in the mirror and sees Sylar. But at some point, Sylar's back and at a point after that, Adrian Pasdar is off the show. One has to leave. And Sylar tried to kill Clair before. And was being, I felt, sexual towards her, in the cliff hanger so to now have her thinking she's interacting with her father and having it really be Sylar, that's just creepy. Ruth was right, they'd written themselves into a corner with Sylar. Instead of finding a way out, they burrowed further into the corner. It jumped the shark.
Jim: Ruth?
Ruth: I agree. And it jumped the shark that last episode in another way that hasn't been dealt with.
Jim: We're waitng.
Ruth: I believe it was three episodes ago that Angela, Clair, Peter, Nathan and Noah in a diner at the end of the episode, when, on the diner's TV, Nathan was shown holding a press conference calling out the president. Nathan was really Sylar. And the heroes in the diner realized that Sylar was posing as Nathan to meet the president so that he could touch him and shape shift into him, thereby having the ability to pose as the president. The next episode was a bunch of sitting around and pretending something was happening. But finally Nathan and Sylar came face to face. They had not been face to face in some time. In fact, the shape shifting power was a new power for Sylar since he last saw Nathan. So Nathan gets knocked out and Sylar transforms again into Nathan. He ends up going to a speech of the presidents. He bumps into one of Nathan's old friends who now works for the White House. After he battles Nathan, Peter and Clair, he transforms into Nathan's old friend and gets in the limo with the president. He reaches out to shake the president's hand and instead it's Peter. While fighting with Sylar, Peter absorbed Sylar's power which is Peter's power -- absorbing powers. So that's how Sylar was captured. Anyone see a problem?
Cedric: In how Sylar was captured?
Ruth: No, in his shape shifting. To shape shift into Nathan, he just needed to touch things belonging to Nathan. He hasn't been face to face with Nathan since he got his shape shifting power. That didn't prevent him from being able to assume Nathan's items. He just went to Nathan's office, picked up some of Nathan's items and was able to become him. So why wasn't he posing as someone -- the Homeland Security Agent he often poses as, for instance -- to get into the White House? All he had to do was touch some things of the president. He didn't have to touch the president. This was a huge flaw and no one seemed to notice it. If he could become Nathan without touching Nathan, then he could have become the president merely by going to the White House and touching some items on the president's desk.
Cedric: I did not catch that while I was watching. That's a pretty huge flaw in the storyline. And Sylar's entire storyline has been about breaking into people's homes. He's always done that. Characters were always arriving home -- this season and the others -- and finding Sylar. That's a huge flaw in the storyline. So Tracy's back. The last scenes were 'Nathan' -- really Sylar -- acting strange while Angela tried to get him to out with her and get Chinese food. He's staring at a clock that's gaining time and Tracy -- or maybe Barbara, the third sister -- with the ability to become liquid. Tracy was last seen frozen and then shot. After she shattered, she had a tear. So it may be Tracy or it maybe when Ali Larter debuts her third role, Nikki/Jessica and Tracy's sister Barbra. Who knows? I agreed with Rebecca's point that they screwed up big. Monday's show could have and should have been promoted with Ali. Last weekend, the movie she's the second or third lead in, Beyonce's film, was number one at the box office. And NBC had her but wasn't able to promote the cliffhanger by noting it since Tracy supposedly died several episodes ago.
Jim: I'm going to bring Elaine and Jess in this because we're really not going to be discussing Medium at length since it didn't have a cliffhanger. Kat, you as well.
Elaine: We watched, Mike and I, NBC straight through Monday. I don't think I've watched that many consecutive hours of TV since The Winds of War. It's a joke. Heroes is a joke. Let's just list the male characters in the episode and I'll leave out the president, the White House friend and anyone else who isn't a major and regular charcter. You had Danko, Nathan, Peter, Noah, Sylar, Matt, Hiro, Ando and Mohinder. I hope that I didn't forget anyone. But that's nine major male characters. And all of them, even Mohinder, have active powers that allow them to fight. Matt can see the future and read minds, yes, but his active power -- in battle -- is being able to make people do things. Mohinder's got super strength as a result of his experiments. Danko's a government agent who packs a gun. Now women? We had Clair and Angela and, until the very last minutes, that was it. Then Tracy showed up. Angela has prophetic dreams. That's not an active power and she has no power in battle. Clair? She can't die. Kill her and a few seconds later she's back to life. You'd think by season two, she would have had martial arts training. Instead, she's never garnered an active power but it's always, "Wow, Clair died for us! And came back!" It's a highly passive power. The final two scenes, one of them, shows who I'll call Tracy. A male government agent who imprisoned the heroes comes home to find his home flooded. He goes to the sink where water's pouring out and he drowns because the water is Tracy. So she's got that power and can freeze people. But she's not in the big battle, she's not even on the show for more than 30 seconds, if we're talking about the actual actress. And it's at the end. Why the hell have people run from this show? Because women have repeatedly been killed off, written off the show and reduced to little nothings. It gets really old.
Kat: Let me jump in ahead of Jess. I know Jess agrees with Elaine but I want to make a comment that Elaine will agree with and either didn't list or didn't notice. Ando has powers. He has powers because they were implanted in him. What can he do? Basically, his power is electricity. For those paying attention, that was Elle's power. But it wasn't good for Elle. That power didn't keep her on the show. Elle got killed off -- by Sylar who took her power. Suddenly her power's so amazing . . . now that Ando has it. Compare what she was allowed to do -- and she was supposed to be evil and a threat -- with what Ando's been allowed to do.
Elaine: Kat's right and, no, I didn't think of that.
Jess: And that's a great example by Kat and Elaine's sketched it out. I'm real sorry that Tim Kring and everyone never got that women are superheroes. That while Aquaman couldn't keep a comic alive. In terms of the heavy hitters at DC comics who've had their own comic books for decades, it's Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. So Heroes' refusal to offer strong, active female super heroes has been appalling and ignorant. They weren't on the last episode so Elaine didn't mention them but we also have the passive wives. There's Nathan's wife that no one ever notices or mentions but was injured in a car accident at the same time he discovered he could fly. She's a dutiful DC wife. There's Noah's wife who had a little more spunk, thank goodness, this season. Then there's Janis Parkman, Matt's good little wife. Tim Kring gives the female super heros nothing to do and then creates these insulting female characters that are so weak and exist to shop and cook dinner and he can't understand why he's driven viewers away? Get real, no one wants to see that s**t.
Rebecca: If I could add something, if you look at the X-Men in comic books, Wolverine was always immensely popular. But, back during Jean Grey's return from the dead, we were working on a p.r. project involving comic book heroes and Marvel couldn't pull it together so none of their characters were even considered for the project at the end. But before that, in the research, it was obvious that Jean Grey was off the charts. She'd been popular when she was killed but becoming Phoenix, then Dark Phoenix, etc., is what drove the X-Men at that time. There was huge excitement about the character. And Tim Kring ensures there is no huge excitement about Heroes by refusing to develop strong, active female heroes.
Elaine: Well every woman with a power is seen as sick, if you think about it, except Clair who needs to move beyond My Two Daddys' Little Girl. I'm referring to the writing, not the performance. The actress does a wonderful job. But Elle, for example? Ended up dead in a large part because she couldn't handle her power. What male struggled like that? And when did he die? The woman from Mexico who could go nuclear with heat? She was sick because of her power. Nikki/Jessica? As Ava and C.I. pointed out, that was insulting. She had the split personality because of what was done to her as a child. It was a coping mechanism. But the writing turned it into a problem and something evil that she had to escape from. They were right, Ava and C.I., the proper approach would have been to integrate the two personalities but instead we got "Nikki should be afraid of Jessica!" No. Jessica was what protected Nikki. Clair's biological mother. Just go down the list and grasp how many women on this show with powers are seen as sick. Peter? No. Hiro? No. But women, over and over, are given weak powers and then are considered sick for having them. Always in need of a cure. It's disgusting.
Jess: It really is. I don't know if Tim Kring has issues or what but not evey man is afraid of strong women.
C.I.: Actually, filmed characters who were strong women have tended to be popular with men in both movies and films. Men were much less interested in the poor-pitiful-me female characters so not only does the strategy alienate women, it also drives away men. You can check ratings or box office. So-called sob-sisters have never been hugely popular with male audiences.
Ava: Correct. The Greer Garson Mrs. Whatever roles may be popular with some women but men never went for them in large numbers. They like active characters. And that's not even a straight v. gay male issue.
Ty: I was just going to say that. Bette Davis' character in Dark Victory is certainly popular with some gay men but Margot Channing, who is active, in All About Eve is the role gay men overwhelming love if they enjoy Bette Davis. And it's also her most popular role among straight men. There's not a big divide on that issue.
Jim: Why do you suppose that is?
Ty: Nobody likes a pushover. Go back to one of the most famous films of the thirties, Gone With The Wind. Are most viewers, regardless of race, going to be more interested in Scarlet or the push over Melanie? Door mats aren't all that interesting.
Jim: Okay. Well we're going to wind down here. Stan wrote about Medium in "Medium" last week and we're going to let him make a few comments.
Stan: As C.I. pointed out last time, Medium will run through Conan O'Brian taking over The Tonight Show, run through that with new episodes so he's not replacing Jay Leno with no prime time lead in. So there are several more episodes to come and this Monday the show starts an hour early because it's a two-hour broadcast. Tracy Pollan will be guest starring Monday.
Jim: And on that note, we'll end the roundtable. Rush transcript. Ava and C.I. took notes but did not type. If I ended up tying, all typos were intentional.
