Ghost Whisperer: Season 2

One thing I really, really dig about Ghost Whisperer is the town of Grandview, NY! I've always been a sucker for fictitious small towns, particularly ones with quaint town squares! I don't know why, but I think I can trace it back to Back to the Future.

But Grandview is particularly cool to me because every day in Grandview feels like sometime around Halloween!

No idea why that is. Maybe it's the cinematography, maybe it's the art direction, or the color timing. No idea. But it's neat! :)

So I'm just getting into Season 2, which means I'm almost done with the series.

I've watched it kind of weird.

See, I rented the first 2 discs of Season 1 from Netflix some time ago, just to see if Brian & I liked the show. Brian never ended up watching them, but I watched those first two discs, and I dug the show.

But...

After the first 8 episodes, I was exhausted from crying, so I gave the show a long break. (Mock me if you must, but the nobler nature of Man moves me to tears, and I'm not ashamed of it. So nyah!) Plus, I think there was other stuff that I was more excited about at the time.

But this last 2 years, my paranormal research and investigation got me thinking about the show again. Particularly when I started working on my own fictitious paranormal story. Just how did Ghost Whisperer manage to tell believable, true-to-real-life-accounts stories week after week? I kept running into walls with my paranormal novel because real-life paranormal events might be scary for, like, 5 seconds, but not for 21 chapters! I have a great deal more sympathy for writers of Supernatural Horror, because real-life ghosts just aren't that scary. (Unless you've never experienced one before and/or firmly believe they don't exist; then they can be quite frightening, I'm told.)

Also, my paranormal studies have sort of given way to more metaphysical topics lately. You read everything out there about ghosts and paranormal investigation, and you're eventually going to run out of books for a while -- until they write some more. Plus, everything you learn in fact-based paranormal research is going to lead you to ask tons of questions that, currently, only faith-based research offers possible answers for.

So, when this desire to pick Ghost Whisperer hit me again, I had a little extra money, and Walmart had a (marginal) sale on Seasons 3 & 4. So I bought them.

And I dug them!!!

Well, I prefer Season 3 to 4 -- and if you've seen the show, you can probably guess why.

Btw, SPOILER ALERT!!!

I don't plan on giving away any specific spoilers, but I'm feeling lazy, so I'm going to write this as though you've already seen more of the show than I am.

So if you haven't seen the first 4 (of 5) seasons of Ghost Whisperer and intend to watch it, please turn away now for your own entertainment safety!

So anyway, Season 3 is a bit more Horror-y, kind of. And Season 4 is good, too, but I was a bit bugged by what they did to Jim (her husband).

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Jay Mohr was a frickin' regular on the series by Season 3!!! How cool is THAT?!! I've always loved that guy and felt he was underrated as both and actor and a comedian! I mean, people who know who he is love him and give him credit, but many people don't know who he is.

After finishing Season 4, I went online to see how much it would cost to pick up the first 2 seasons, and saw that they cost more than what I got the 3rd & 4th seasons for! :(

So I took another Ghost Whisperer hiatus.

But this hiatus turned out to be blissfully brief! Maybe a month and a half after I finished season 4, Walmart had the first 2 seasons on sale for $20 each!!! :D YAY!!! I could own almost the entire series! (I don't know if 5 is out yet, but I haven't seen it.)

Also, Season 3 was a bit disappointing because it apparently went to air around the time of the Writer's Strike; it only had 18 episodes instead of 22. So the fact that Seasons 1 & 2 were both pre-strike (and each contained at least 22 episodes) AND were both before the Thing-That-The-Writers-Did-To-Jim was more cause for cheering!

But I didn't immediately hop back into the series. Not because I was adverse to going backwards, chronologically, but I've spent the past couple of weeks immersed in books. I tore through Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest by Christopher Balzano, Witness to Roswell, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up, The 30-Second Commute, Jay Mohr's memoir of his 2-years on Satyurday Night Live called Gasping for Airtime, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. At the moment, I'm only reading Messages: The World's Most Documented Extraterrestrial Contact Story by Stan Romanek, so I've got some free time to get back into the show.

I pretty much went through Discs 3 & 4 this week after work a couple of mornings. So I finished up Discs 5 & 6 yesterday and today.

Which puts me on Season 2.

I watched what I thought was the first 2 episodes of season 2 and was curious that the writers didn't do more with Season 1's cliff-hanger. They just breezed past it! Which was more realistic, I thought, but it seemed uncharacteristic: I tried to get Brian to watch Season 3 right after I bought it, thinking he would dig on the ghost-story like gangbusters, and would probably appreciate the spiritual aspect of the show; but he was immediately bored because the first episode of the 3rd season was a "clean-up" episode, where they untangled the continuity knots that Season 2's cliff-hanger had created. (Most of the show was a good, stand-alone episode, but Brian had had a long day at work, and the way the episode started just made him feel like there was tons he had missed out on. So he passed out. He still hasn't seen a full episode. Also, he may be a bit turned-off because I warned him that every episode made me cry, and I don't think my brother is quite as unabashed about crying as I am. We're Texas boys, after all.)

So anyway, I was a bit pleasantly surprised that the writers had simply glossed over a cliff-hanger maneuver that could so easily be turned into a high-drama episode or two. (Particularly after what they did to Jim in Season 4!)

THEN...Jay Mohr's character, Dr. Payne, walks into Melinda's shop and says "Remember me?" and I'm wondering if maybe he had shown up in one of the first 2 discs of season 1 (which I watched years ago)!

So I went to Wikipedia.org to read about his character, and discovered that he had, indeed, been introduced in Season 2. Introduced.

Also -- and this should have been a dead giveaway -- Camryn Manheim's character Delia was just part of the cast all of a sudden! I mean, there was a place for her character to fit into the cast -- one that had been made very apparent by the end of Season 1 -- but it it had sort of been implied that over the course of the summer, the character had slipped in and now she was there. I've watched enough TV and movies to fill in the blanks for myself, but writers usually make some sort of a deal out of the introduction of new characters. (Still, to my credit and the credit of the writers, the thing they changed about the show at the end of Season 1, they did with a great deal of skill and subtlety!!! They didn't spoon feed us, their audience, they gave us credit for being able to follow along! it was really impressive!!!)

But when Dr. Payne walked in -- for the first time in the series, I thought -- and started talking to Melinda as though he were referencing events in a previous episode, I had to wonder if I had somehow missed some episodes, or maybe I was watching...

I checked the DVD case...

The brain-trust that designed the DVD cases used an efficient, no-waste design in which both covers of the case held a single DVD. No wasted plastic, very "green". BUT, they chose to put Disc 1 where you expect the DVD to be on regular one-disc DVD cases (you open it up like a book, and the disc is on the right side, attached to the "inside back cover", if you will, because the "inside front cover" doesn't have a place to hold a disc) and they placed Disc 2 on the "inside front cover". But this is stupid, in my opinion, because Westerners read left-to-right. So we're going to assume that the disc that's on the left is the first disc in the series of 2!

In other words, I had popped in Disc 2.

So now I'm going to watch Disc 1, which means I'm probably going to have to sit through at least 45 minutes of untangling-the-cliffhanger-mess before they settle into the Season 2 normal-episode groove.

I mean, it will all be worth it. I know I like episodes 5 & 6, because I already watched them, lol. But that Episode 1 mess...blah.

The lesson: Don't do season-ender cliffhangers, kids! I know logic dictates that this will ensure your audience follows you to the next season, but it's really just a waste of story time! Check out Buffy Season 7: Joss had a 3-episode arch, with the 3rd- and 2nd-to-last episode BOTH being cliffhangers, and then the last episode just being one long Climax! THAT is how you do a fulfilling cliffhanger! Ratchet up the suspense within the season, and then send your audience off into the summer hiatus talking about how great your show is, not "what's going to happen next year?" Next year?!! Screw that noise! The Batman sitcom in the 1960s had a cool idea: The wrap-up to the cliffhanger occurred that same week! You didn't even have to wait 7 days to find out what happens next!

I know, I know: I watch TV shows on DVD so what the hell am I complaining about?

I dunno, really. I just have a long-standing grudge against season-ender cliffhangers, going all the way back to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It feels like insecure storytelling to me. It's not real storytelling, because -- as I said -- the first episode of next season is less about telling a great story and more about untangling the needless mess you created at the end of last season and getting the show back on track. It's a waste of my time. You could be telling me a GOOD story instead (rather than an obligatory story).

The-Thing-They-Did-With-Jim happened within the season, PLUS I felt like they were earning something. They made a very creative choice -- I didn't like it, but maybe the actor, David Conrad, was getting board with his character or something -- and then the writers eanred the right to keep the actor on the show. We wanted something to happen, story-wise, and it was something that shouldn't be allowed to happen by story logic. So the writers had to put the characters, the world, and us through a lot of emotional turmoil to make this story-thing happen, and that makes sense to me. In all the Indiana Jones movies, Indy fails; but the writers (and the characters) put up such a heroic fight that by the end of the flicks, we don't mind that Indy didn't achieve his goal: We're just happy he made it out alive!

But these season-enders are, I feel, just page-filling. Harve Bennett said that Star Trek III: The Search For Spock practically wrote itself, because Spock was dead, we wanted him back, the Klingons new about the destructive potential of the Genesis devise, so there ya go! The moment we, the fans, discovered that the Klingon's new about Genesis' destructive potential, we could have written Star Trek III. I think Bennet and Nimoy and company did a splendid job with the flick, so I'm not complaining, I'm just pointing out that if I hadn't been 13 when ST III came out, I might have been bored with the story.

I am now 39 (soon to be 40), have studied writing for 18 years, and "clean-up" episodes seem like a needless waste of time.

Stay in school, don't do drugs, and don't write season-ender cliffhangers, kids!

Okay, I have now bitched about season-ender cliffhangers for as long as it would have taken me to watch the damned Season 2 clean-up episode and get on with the good stuff, so I'm going to stop now.

SOME EXCITING NEWS:

I'm broke this week, but Brian is willing to take us to see Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D Sunday!!! :D WOO-HOO!!!

Also, my daughter turns 20 today!!! I don't get to celebrate it with her, but I know she's going to have a good time! (Hopefully not too good a time.) ;P

You know, if you asked me how old I am, I feel like maybe 29 or 30. So there's this real disconnect for me about the fact I have an adult daughter. I mean, every year she gets cooler and easier to relate to, but i don't feel proportionately older. I remember as a teen watching the original Planet of the Apes and that joke about "Don't trust anyone over 30," but now that I'm significantly older than 30, the joke seems pointless to me. (Plus, Heston was 45 when he delivered the line.)

Okay, so it's getting late, so I should stop rambling and get back to the clean-up episode so I can move on to the rest of Season 2. (I usually eat my vegetables before I even start on my steak, just to get them out of the way.)

I hope your weekend is FILLED WITH LAUGHTER!!!

:D