Watchin' TV

It's time for Voyager time! It's time for Voyager time! I watch a lot of Spike TV in the afternoons when I'm home. They play Star Trek reruns for several hours. I'm not a huge Trekkie or anything, but they're nice to play in the background because they're simple and you can multitask without missing much. I haven't had Voyager time for a couple of weeks. It's sort of disappointing because, the last time I watched, I believe Voyager had just encountered the Borg cube, and now Seven of Nine is on board. I don't recall seeing those episodes, so it's too bad I missed them. I can't make up my mind whether Trek is more or less satisfying than a show like Battlestar, specifically the fact that there is much more of an encapsulated feel, with the episodes standing alone rather than existing in an arc.

These season-long arcs are the trend these days. I do enjoy the fact that events in current "cable shows" exist in a larger context, but it's a very different concept of how to do television (although, Voyager is less on the other extreme than Next Generation-- there are some ongoing threads and the ship's journey has a point). It's satisfying to have longer arcs, because we have more character development. You're not going to be able to jump in and figure out what's going on right away, of course. And you can't just casually view and feel satisfied when the episode comes to a neat conclusion. Then again, there's the danger (and I haven't seen enough Battlestar Galactica yet, but there are worrying shades of this) of falling into the "X-Files syndrome," where the episodes are either issue-of-the-week/monster-of-the-week or focused on the show's mythology. The problem is that X-Files tried to drag out the series and ended up compromising its own mythology. I like Battlestar, but being an X-Files fan makes me decidedly wary of "They have a plan." Because it turned out the aliens in X-Files didn't have a plan. Or rather, there were about eight of them that made sense in their own mini-arcs but not as an overall mythology. The show outlasted itself by at least two or three seasons, by my reckoning. And they had to put a lot of "filler" in to make it last that long. So I guess there's the problem with having an overarching plot to episodic television: it has to come to an ending. And that ending has to make sense from a storytelling perspective. That is, after all, why it's an arc and not, well, a line.

I don't know, I don't watch a lot of TV. I don't even know if I'm going to watch The Shield this season. Oh, fine, I probably will, because Mike will watch it religiously, and I'll be in the room. But I do not forgive them for what happened to Lem (oh no, they didn't!). Me and The Shield are so not speaking.