The New Blood
Okay, before I get into this whole self-loathing and talking about how shit my life is, let me just regale you with a brief tale of tradition. You see, it's Saturday the 14th today, which means that it was Friday the 13th yesterday (and in one of the least imaginative marketing ploys ever, the new Friday The 13th remake opened yesterday, creating a rather amusing situation where the two Winchester brothers off of TV's Supernatural both have a horror film out at the same time, Jared Padlecki (or whatever his name is) stars in the aforementioned return of Jason Voorhees, while Jensen Ackles (what? did the producers of Supernatural look for the two people with the silliest name available?) stars in remake of 80's slasher My Bloody Valentine - this time in 3-D! but only in selected cinemas). And while I could talk about the paucity of good horror films- when was the last time I saw a new horror film that wasn't a remake or a reimagining or a sequel... er... well, I did quite enjoy Shrooms, how does that float your boat? - I'm not in the mood. The horror genre is changing, half the books in the horror section are actually 'urban fantasy' which is basically a posh term for stories about having a vampire boyfriend. And it's always a boyfriend, because these stories are all written by women. Horror, friends and neighbours, has been defanged. It would be easy to lay the blame at the feet of Laurell K Hamilton, whose Anita Blake series, started way back in 1993, seems to be the taproot of this whole movement, although you could point out that Buffy and Angel have a hand in it as well. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing (well, it the case of Twilight it is very obviously a bad thing) but it has neutered horror - not many of the writers of these kinds of series' (and they are all series, Anita Blake runs to sixteen books now with another one due in the summer, Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan books, despite only being five years old, are almost at double figures) are as good as Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson and all those other people who made Buffy and Angel what they were. Too often they forget the horror and lay of the romance so thickly that what they are writing is essentially Mill & Boon but instead of the wealthy industrialist of whatever, you have a dark and mysterious vampire.
Big fucking whoop - it's anathema to what vampires used to be. Sure, there's sexual frisson in Dracula and most of Hammer's output would be rendered moot if it were not for the allure of Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt. But there was also an ever-present danger. Vampires kill people; it's what they need to do to survive. Joss Whedon and Co never forgot that; it's no shocker that Season 2 of Buffy, in which Angel reverts to evil and turns on Buffy - because Whedon knew that if there was no danger there then Angel might as well have just been a Care Bear with fangs. And if anyone can tell me who said that originally, you win a cookie.
Sorry, got a little digressed there. Where were we? Oh yes: Tradition. You see, every Friday the 13th, if possible, I watch a Friday The 13th film. It's kind of a similar tradition to the one where I watch a Halloween film every Halloween. And there's eleven of them, so it's quite a batch to pick from, although many don't offer much to differentiate between them.
Friday The 13th has always been an unloved middle child of the slasher crowd. Less artsy than both Halloween, which preceeded it by two years and whose success is likely the impetus for the production of that first Friday and Nightmare On Elm Street, which came four years later (the same year as Friday The 13th Part 4 - The Final Chapter hit the big screen). It's often seen as a cynical cheap exploitation film, which it is at it's heart. Forget about the whole subversion of Psycho present in the first film, where Mrs Voorhees has completely flipped her lid and has adopted the personality of her (as she sees him) vengeful son Jason (the flipside in Psycho is obviously Norman adopting his mother's personality - both ultimately caused by extreme guilt), that doesn't even last till the end of the final act; it's a bare bones stalk and slash (or club or axe or whatever happenes to by handy. There's nothing even remotely supernatural here, not even an I-shot-him-and-he-somehow-got-up-and-walked-away moment like at the end of Halloween. Mrs Voorhees is dead - her body and head quite decisively have a falling out, that's to an axe.
It's a mildly entertaining film, one which ticks all the necessary boxes and, unsurprisingly, it did the business. So a sequel followed. Then another, and another, ad nauseum. By the end of the eighties there were eight Jason films (and let's not make any bones about it, by then they were Jason films - any pretence towards the audience rooting for a series of increasingly inept horny teenagers was abandoned by the time of Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan) compared with five Nightmare films and five Halloweens. Not that many of them were any good.
Part 2 is a virtual re-run of the first film, only this time starring Jason (although he doesn't obtain the hockey mask till Part 3, in this film he adopts the Elephant Man look). Part 3 does exactly the same thing, just in slightly less bloody fashion and with a dose of ill-advised 3-D (like the few other 3-D films of this period, especially Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D - isn't it handy that so many franchises reached their third point just in time for this brief resurgance of people looking like dicks wearing their multicoloured specs? - the 3-D doesn't really work all that well). Part 4 attempts to do something different and is probably the best of the sequels by presenting us with a main character - pre-pubescent Corey Feldman - who is a lot different to the usual horny teenagers (which isn't to say that this film lacks in the horny teenager department) and who actually kills Jason. Feldman's character, Tommy Jarvis, is one we follow through the next two films, A New Beginning and Jason Lives!. A New Beginning attempts to be just that, it is Jason-less, aside from a dream sequences at the beginning. It focuses on a now grown up Tommy (and yes, the timeline of these films is so decompressed it's worse than Jaws, there's a five year gap between the first two film and at least ten years between 4 and 5, despite the fact that the films were, at this point, being churned out at the rate of one per year) and a copycat Jason killer, sadly not taking up any of the hints at the end of 4 that Tommy himself might actually have flipped his lid (in a similar way, Halloween 4 - made later kids - kills off Michael only to have his neice assume the mantle only for it all to be retconned in Halloween 5). The hardcore horror fans got Jason back for Part 6 and it is really here that Jason assumes the role of invincible zombie. Parts 6-8 are generally unremarkable (save for the fact that Part 7 - The New Blood, stars Kane Hodder as Jason for the first time - it's a role he will play up until Jason X and which he has been very vocal about and a great spokesperson for the films, in much the same way that Robert Englund became Freddy to an extent, so too Hodder became Jason and he got justifably aggreived when they recast him for Freddy Vs Jason and the remake) and end in a confusing psuedo-mystical mish-mash where Jason is washed away with toxic waste that floods Manhattan's sewer system every night (?) and becomes a young boy again (?) and then fades into nothingness (?). It's the sort of thing that only makes sense after a crateful of sambuca or during a meeting of executive producers and a pissed off writer. J
Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday (and at this point I'd just like to make note of the fact that several slasher franchies have used the word 'Final' in their titles, Friday The 13th is the only franchise to have done so twice and they lied both times) marks a change of tack. For the first time, Jason is truly a supernatural creature, a black smooshy blob capable of possessing people (?). It's a movie which no-one really likes, and certain rights issues notwithstanding, there's a Friday The 13th box set available with contains Parts 1-8. You're not missing much is you don't shell out for a seperate copy of this one.
But the two most recent entries into the saga are like those specials you get on TV at Christmas of old shows they don't make any more, like when the Two Ronnies had all but retired, they still rolled out for the Christmas day show. And because it's a special occasion, you do something big and spectacular. So, first up chronologically, we have Freddy Vs Jason (although Jason X was made first, FvJ fits into the gap between Jason Goes To Hell and Jason X) which is the Wrestlemania of slasher movies. It's a big dumb movie that belongs more in the Elm Street camp than Jason's oeuvre. It's all about Freddy getting the Elm Street kids to fear him again and as a monster mash, it works. It's certainly better than Universal's efforts from the forties when they started shoving every horror icon into the same film (Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, House Of Dracula) in a desperate bid to get bums of seats. It doesn't take itself seriously and it is a shame that the proposed sequel, which would have featured Bruce Campbell as Ash from the Evil Dead movies seems to have sunk without a trace (well, not entirely without a trace, a comic book series emerged last year which seemed to confirm that the movies was dead a buried, especially now there's a remake of Friday and a remake of the original Nightmare on the way, I'm sure that New Line aren't keen on having divergent continuity to confuse the cinema-goers).
And then there's Jason X. For me it's the crown jewel in the Friday series. Most other fans seem to hate it, and I can sort of understand why. It's not terrifically gory, a lot of it is played for laughs and it's another one of those entires in a long-running horror franchise which is usually suffixed with the words 'In Space!' (exclamation mark optional) which includes Critters, Hellraiser and - God help us - Leprechaun. Yes, it's Jason In Space. And it just so happens that it was this entry with which I celebrated yesterday's Friday The 13th.
Why is it my favourite? I know I'm biased, being much more of a science fiction buff than a horror fan but that's not the whole story. Sure, it's a great idea, and it takes the series away from the Camp Crystal Lake locale which - let's be honest - was tired even way before Part 4 (and let me just pause there and point you towards a very informative timeline which confirms the guess I had that Parts 2-4 take place over a very short space of time, and attempts to iron over some of the time-jumps in Tommy's age: http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/saga/timeline.html). It is essentially Alien, but instead of a phallic xenomorph with a vagina dentate, we have Jason, an unstoppable killing machine. And it has the most attractive cast for a long while, headed up by Lexa Doig who subsequently went on with co-star Lisa Ryder to do five years on Andromeda, a show which no one seemed to like but which inexplicably lasted five years.
The main problem with the series is the character of Jason. What is his modus operandi? Where do his powers come from? With reference to the other two titans of slasher film, Michael Myers and Freddy, he comes up rather short. His regenerative ability, referred to in Jason X as a freak ability, is nebulous at best - he spends twenty odd years at the bottom of a lake, emerges still as that child (if you accept the theory that the dream at the end of part one is actually a vision) or lives out in the woods by himself without actually killing anyone for all that time, only going on a murderous rampage when his mother has her head lopped off - then he has his skull chopped in half by Corey Feldman, spends another ten years or so in a grave before being reanimated by a bolt of lightning, another year at the bottom of a lake, gets blown up by the FBI, frozen beyond all capability to revive, blown up again, blasted out into space and finally (?) burns up in the atmosphere of Earth 2. Not bad for a little retarded kid who couldn't swim.
His goals are equally nebuolous. Most of the time he just wants to hack his way through anything in his way - unlike Michael Myers there's nothing malicious about his actions, where Michael would lay out bodies and hide things for greatest shock value, Jason just hacks them to pieces and leaves them where they lie. His mother had a very simple goal; she wanted to stop the camp that killed her son, in her eyes, from reopening. Jason seems to have had a psychotic break following the death of his mother (like all good psychopaths, he has mommy-issues) and while at first he seems content to 'defend' the area around Camp Crystal Lake, he doesn't stop at those trying to reopen the camp. Anyone in the general vicinity becomes machete-fodder, and when Jason is taken away from the lake, he simply continues on with his hacking, as witnessed in Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason X, although in those cases, they manage to stop him before he can cast his net wider.
In Jason X we hear of Jason's reputation as a mass murderer, apparently he's responsible for over 200 deaths, and isn't that a lot for a sleepy little town like Crystal Lake? You would think that people would generally avoid the area if it had a death toll like that. After all, there are hundreds of lakes in America, what's so special about this one? Leaving aside the issue of morbid curiosity (as most of the casts know nothing about Jason till he starts picking them off) it's still a stupid holiday spot.
So, final verdict on the series. It's a guilty pleasure, full of gratuitous nudity and classic cliched horror movie behaviour. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Chocolate Orange, sure it looks nice and at the time it's damn tasty, but it's not very good for you and if you eat too much, you'll just make yourself sick.
I was going to talk about myself a little here, but I got carried away talking about Jason Voorhees. It happens.
So, I've been on holiday for the past week. I'm back at work tomorrow. And what have I done with my time off? Absolutely fuck all. I have watched a great deal of Stargate SG-1, finally seeing the entire damn thing right up through until The Ark Of Truth. I just have Continuum to go and I shall have seen the entire canon. It's only took me the best part of three months. Season 8 was a definite low point, it was water-treading season and it looked for all the world like they'd ran out of money. Luckily, once Richard Dean Anderson eased himself out of the show totally, making way for Beau Bridges as General Landry and the mighty Ben Browder as Colonel Cam Mitchell, things looked up again. And they even managed to get Lexa Doig of Jason X fame in as the new regular medical officer, a role that had remained empty since Janet Frasier's death on Season 7. Unfortunately they named her Lam, so you had a Sam, a Lam and a Cam all at the same time, which isn't good timing.
Thoughts? It didn't need to end when it did. Unlike many shows upon reaching their end (naming no names but X-Files, Babylon 5, Lois and Clark) it didn't feel tired. Maybe it was the infusion of new cast members and the jolt of the Ori storyline (both things which other series, X-Files comes to mind, had tried and failed to do) but Season 9 felt very much like a new series. I suppose it's a good idea to quit while you're ahead but you get the feeling that there was at least another couple of season's worth of stuff in there. And the lovely Caludia Black as Vala Mal Doran, we hardly knew ya.
I had made some tentative plans with Debra, but they feel by the wayside. I don't really want to get into the specifics of it all, but I kind of get the feeling that she doesn't want me. At all. When she said she wanted to be friends, I think she meant it, but friends merely in the sense that we don't actively dislike each other. Any hopes for getting back together have been somewhat dashed.
So, where do we go from here? There's not much happening on the dating site front; had a couple of people show interest, exchanged a few e-mails and, since Monday, nothing. Again we come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with me. It's happened to me too many times for it to be a simple coincidence. Now, I'm a nice guy, or at least I try to be. I know I'm selfish and self-involved and sometimes me and tact aren't the closest of friends, but I try, I really do, yet no one seems that interested in me. Not in 'that way'. And all my friends seem to think I'm great; in fact I just got a text from Emma not five minutes ago telling me not to feel down (it's a bit late for that; about ten years too late) and that she thinks I'm a great catch. Well that's all fine and dandy but all those people who think that are people I've known for a long time and subsequently people who have long since passed into the Friend Zone, which is kinda like the Death Zone on Gallifrey but less welcoming.
Every now and then I think that I should just give up on the whole idea of ever finding happiness with someone else and sequester what happiness I can from myself. And while that sounds like a reference to masturbation, it isn't. I could focus my attention on my writing and on being a science fiction fan - watching all that Stargate did make me happy on some level, and not in an entirely facile way. But at the same time, I can't imagine just giving up hope of ever finding anyone.
We'll see.
Peace out.
Big fucking whoop - it's anathema to what vampires used to be. Sure, there's sexual frisson in Dracula and most of Hammer's output would be rendered moot if it were not for the allure of Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt. But there was also an ever-present danger. Vampires kill people; it's what they need to do to survive. Joss Whedon and Co never forgot that; it's no shocker that Season 2 of Buffy, in which Angel reverts to evil and turns on Buffy - because Whedon knew that if there was no danger there then Angel might as well have just been a Care Bear with fangs. And if anyone can tell me who said that originally, you win a cookie.
Sorry, got a little digressed there. Where were we? Oh yes: Tradition. You see, every Friday the 13th, if possible, I watch a Friday The 13th film. It's kind of a similar tradition to the one where I watch a Halloween film every Halloween. And there's eleven of them, so it's quite a batch to pick from, although many don't offer much to differentiate between them.
Friday The 13th has always been an unloved middle child of the slasher crowd. Less artsy than both Halloween, which preceeded it by two years and whose success is likely the impetus for the production of that first Friday and Nightmare On Elm Street, which came four years later (the same year as Friday The 13th Part 4 - The Final Chapter hit the big screen). It's often seen as a cynical cheap exploitation film, which it is at it's heart. Forget about the whole subversion of Psycho present in the first film, where Mrs Voorhees has completely flipped her lid and has adopted the personality of her (as she sees him) vengeful son Jason (the flipside in Psycho is obviously Norman adopting his mother's personality - both ultimately caused by extreme guilt), that doesn't even last till the end of the final act; it's a bare bones stalk and slash (or club or axe or whatever happenes to by handy. There's nothing even remotely supernatural here, not even an I-shot-him-and-he-somehow-got-up-and-walked-away moment like at the end of Halloween. Mrs Voorhees is dead - her body and head quite decisively have a falling out, that's to an axe.
It's a mildly entertaining film, one which ticks all the necessary boxes and, unsurprisingly, it did the business. So a sequel followed. Then another, and another, ad nauseum. By the end of the eighties there were eight Jason films (and let's not make any bones about it, by then they were Jason films - any pretence towards the audience rooting for a series of increasingly inept horny teenagers was abandoned by the time of Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan) compared with five Nightmare films and five Halloweens. Not that many of them were any good.
Part 2 is a virtual re-run of the first film, only this time starring Jason (although he doesn't obtain the hockey mask till Part 3, in this film he adopts the Elephant Man look). Part 3 does exactly the same thing, just in slightly less bloody fashion and with a dose of ill-advised 3-D (like the few other 3-D films of this period, especially Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D - isn't it handy that so many franchises reached their third point just in time for this brief resurgance of people looking like dicks wearing their multicoloured specs? - the 3-D doesn't really work all that well). Part 4 attempts to do something different and is probably the best of the sequels by presenting us with a main character - pre-pubescent Corey Feldman - who is a lot different to the usual horny teenagers (which isn't to say that this film lacks in the horny teenager department) and who actually kills Jason. Feldman's character, Tommy Jarvis, is one we follow through the next two films, A New Beginning and Jason Lives!. A New Beginning attempts to be just that, it is Jason-less, aside from a dream sequences at the beginning. It focuses on a now grown up Tommy (and yes, the timeline of these films is so decompressed it's worse than Jaws, there's a five year gap between the first two film and at least ten years between 4 and 5, despite the fact that the films were, at this point, being churned out at the rate of one per year) and a copycat Jason killer, sadly not taking up any of the hints at the end of 4 that Tommy himself might actually have flipped his lid (in a similar way, Halloween 4 - made later kids - kills off Michael only to have his neice assume the mantle only for it all to be retconned in Halloween 5). The hardcore horror fans got Jason back for Part 6 and it is really here that Jason assumes the role of invincible zombie. Parts 6-8 are generally unremarkable (save for the fact that Part 7 - The New Blood, stars Kane Hodder as Jason for the first time - it's a role he will play up until Jason X and which he has been very vocal about and a great spokesperson for the films, in much the same way that Robert Englund became Freddy to an extent, so too Hodder became Jason and he got justifably aggreived when they recast him for Freddy Vs Jason and the remake) and end in a confusing psuedo-mystical mish-mash where Jason is washed away with toxic waste that floods Manhattan's sewer system every night (?) and becomes a young boy again (?) and then fades into nothingness (?). It's the sort of thing that only makes sense after a crateful of sambuca or during a meeting of executive producers and a pissed off writer. J
Jason Goes To Hell - The Final Friday (and at this point I'd just like to make note of the fact that several slasher franchies have used the word 'Final' in their titles, Friday The 13th is the only franchise to have done so twice and they lied both times) marks a change of tack. For the first time, Jason is truly a supernatural creature, a black smooshy blob capable of possessing people (?). It's a movie which no-one really likes, and certain rights issues notwithstanding, there's a Friday The 13th box set available with contains Parts 1-8. You're not missing much is you don't shell out for a seperate copy of this one.
But the two most recent entries into the saga are like those specials you get on TV at Christmas of old shows they don't make any more, like when the Two Ronnies had all but retired, they still rolled out for the Christmas day show. And because it's a special occasion, you do something big and spectacular. So, first up chronologically, we have Freddy Vs Jason (although Jason X was made first, FvJ fits into the gap between Jason Goes To Hell and Jason X) which is the Wrestlemania of slasher movies. It's a big dumb movie that belongs more in the Elm Street camp than Jason's oeuvre. It's all about Freddy getting the Elm Street kids to fear him again and as a monster mash, it works. It's certainly better than Universal's efforts from the forties when they started shoving every horror icon into the same film (Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, House Of Dracula) in a desperate bid to get bums of seats. It doesn't take itself seriously and it is a shame that the proposed sequel, which would have featured Bruce Campbell as Ash from the Evil Dead movies seems to have sunk without a trace (well, not entirely without a trace, a comic book series emerged last year which seemed to confirm that the movies was dead a buried, especially now there's a remake of Friday and a remake of the original Nightmare on the way, I'm sure that New Line aren't keen on having divergent continuity to confuse the cinema-goers).
And then there's Jason X. For me it's the crown jewel in the Friday series. Most other fans seem to hate it, and I can sort of understand why. It's not terrifically gory, a lot of it is played for laughs and it's another one of those entires in a long-running horror franchise which is usually suffixed with the words 'In Space!' (exclamation mark optional) which includes Critters, Hellraiser and - God help us - Leprechaun. Yes, it's Jason In Space. And it just so happens that it was this entry with which I celebrated yesterday's Friday The 13th.
Why is it my favourite? I know I'm biased, being much more of a science fiction buff than a horror fan but that's not the whole story. Sure, it's a great idea, and it takes the series away from the Camp Crystal Lake locale which - let's be honest - was tired even way before Part 4 (and let me just pause there and point you towards a very informative timeline which confirms the guess I had that Parts 2-4 take place over a very short space of time, and attempts to iron over some of the time-jumps in Tommy's age: http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/saga/timeline.html). It is essentially Alien, but instead of a phallic xenomorph with a vagina dentate, we have Jason, an unstoppable killing machine. And it has the most attractive cast for a long while, headed up by Lexa Doig who subsequently went on with co-star Lisa Ryder to do five years on Andromeda, a show which no one seemed to like but which inexplicably lasted five years.
The main problem with the series is the character of Jason. What is his modus operandi? Where do his powers come from? With reference to the other two titans of slasher film, Michael Myers and Freddy, he comes up rather short. His regenerative ability, referred to in Jason X as a freak ability, is nebulous at best - he spends twenty odd years at the bottom of a lake, emerges still as that child (if you accept the theory that the dream at the end of part one is actually a vision) or lives out in the woods by himself without actually killing anyone for all that time, only going on a murderous rampage when his mother has her head lopped off - then he has his skull chopped in half by Corey Feldman, spends another ten years or so in a grave before being reanimated by a bolt of lightning, another year at the bottom of a lake, gets blown up by the FBI, frozen beyond all capability to revive, blown up again, blasted out into space and finally (?) burns up in the atmosphere of Earth 2. Not bad for a little retarded kid who couldn't swim.
His goals are equally nebuolous. Most of the time he just wants to hack his way through anything in his way - unlike Michael Myers there's nothing malicious about his actions, where Michael would lay out bodies and hide things for greatest shock value, Jason just hacks them to pieces and leaves them where they lie. His mother had a very simple goal; she wanted to stop the camp that killed her son, in her eyes, from reopening. Jason seems to have had a psychotic break following the death of his mother (like all good psychopaths, he has mommy-issues) and while at first he seems content to 'defend' the area around Camp Crystal Lake, he doesn't stop at those trying to reopen the camp. Anyone in the general vicinity becomes machete-fodder, and when Jason is taken away from the lake, he simply continues on with his hacking, as witnessed in Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason X, although in those cases, they manage to stop him before he can cast his net wider.
In Jason X we hear of Jason's reputation as a mass murderer, apparently he's responsible for over 200 deaths, and isn't that a lot for a sleepy little town like Crystal Lake? You would think that people would generally avoid the area if it had a death toll like that. After all, there are hundreds of lakes in America, what's so special about this one? Leaving aside the issue of morbid curiosity (as most of the casts know nothing about Jason till he starts picking them off) it's still a stupid holiday spot.
So, final verdict on the series. It's a guilty pleasure, full of gratuitous nudity and classic cliched horror movie behaviour. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Chocolate Orange, sure it looks nice and at the time it's damn tasty, but it's not very good for you and if you eat too much, you'll just make yourself sick.
A New Beginning
I was going to talk about myself a little here, but I got carried away talking about Jason Voorhees. It happens.
So, I've been on holiday for the past week. I'm back at work tomorrow. And what have I done with my time off? Absolutely fuck all. I have watched a great deal of Stargate SG-1, finally seeing the entire damn thing right up through until The Ark Of Truth. I just have Continuum to go and I shall have seen the entire canon. It's only took me the best part of three months. Season 8 was a definite low point, it was water-treading season and it looked for all the world like they'd ran out of money. Luckily, once Richard Dean Anderson eased himself out of the show totally, making way for Beau Bridges as General Landry and the mighty Ben Browder as Colonel Cam Mitchell, things looked up again. And they even managed to get Lexa Doig of Jason X fame in as the new regular medical officer, a role that had remained empty since Janet Frasier's death on Season 7. Unfortunately they named her Lam, so you had a Sam, a Lam and a Cam all at the same time, which isn't good timing.
Thoughts? It didn't need to end when it did. Unlike many shows upon reaching their end (naming no names but X-Files, Babylon 5, Lois and Clark) it didn't feel tired. Maybe it was the infusion of new cast members and the jolt of the Ori storyline (both things which other series, X-Files comes to mind, had tried and failed to do) but Season 9 felt very much like a new series. I suppose it's a good idea to quit while you're ahead but you get the feeling that there was at least another couple of season's worth of stuff in there. And the lovely Caludia Black as Vala Mal Doran, we hardly knew ya.
I had made some tentative plans with Debra, but they feel by the wayside. I don't really want to get into the specifics of it all, but I kind of get the feeling that she doesn't want me. At all. When she said she wanted to be friends, I think she meant it, but friends merely in the sense that we don't actively dislike each other. Any hopes for getting back together have been somewhat dashed.
So, where do we go from here? There's not much happening on the dating site front; had a couple of people show interest, exchanged a few e-mails and, since Monday, nothing. Again we come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with me. It's happened to me too many times for it to be a simple coincidence. Now, I'm a nice guy, or at least I try to be. I know I'm selfish and self-involved and sometimes me and tact aren't the closest of friends, but I try, I really do, yet no one seems that interested in me. Not in 'that way'. And all my friends seem to think I'm great; in fact I just got a text from Emma not five minutes ago telling me not to feel down (it's a bit late for that; about ten years too late) and that she thinks I'm a great catch. Well that's all fine and dandy but all those people who think that are people I've known for a long time and subsequently people who have long since passed into the Friend Zone, which is kinda like the Death Zone on Gallifrey but less welcoming.
Every now and then I think that I should just give up on the whole idea of ever finding happiness with someone else and sequester what happiness I can from myself. And while that sounds like a reference to masturbation, it isn't. I could focus my attention on my writing and on being a science fiction fan - watching all that Stargate did make me happy on some level, and not in an entirely facile way. But at the same time, I can't imagine just giving up hope of ever finding anyone.
We'll see.
Peace out.
