It's been a strange week

This has been a strange week so I’ll get “The Event” out of the way first.

My week wasn’t significantly less strange for watching an alien planet show up between the Earth and the Moon, and this wouldn’t have been a bad place for the writers of the show to have consulted a scientist or two, because if a planet were to show up between the Earth and the Moon, even a little one, certainly the side of the Earth facing this interloper would experience some rather dramatic effects.

And there was a little bit of weather -- oo, with gale force winds! But we’re talking about seismic, catastrophic events and more to the point, why in blazes would they bring that charred thing along for?! They were bringing an extra 2.5 billion aliens, that’s like India and China. They didn’t have to bring their whole ruined dead planet along. Talk about overpacking!

Anyway, we’ve got our top astrophysicists gauging global destruction in 20 years based on whether some otherwise nondescript asteroid slips through some specific keyhole in space next year – it’s kind of incredible they can predict what might happen that far in advance but they can’t predict whether it will in fact hit that keyhole – but all the same, what do you suppose the effect of a giant hunk of space charcoal plunks itself into orbit – or worse, crashes to Earth? Just in terms of energy efficiency what were you thinking?

This show deserves a golf club across the back of the neck. After tracking these star-crossed lovers across a season’s worth of running about, the half-alien girl is infected with a virus that will kill her – heck, he never even got to propose properly. He kept getting interrupted by these jerkwad aliens who I think were meant to kill everyone on a plane or a boat or something, despite the fact that all of them think their mission is peaceful, and Sofia keeps insisting it is.

I think this metaphor is utterly out of hand. That aliens are coming and they mean well but we just can’t accommodate them. The numbers are 2.5 billion (like we’re not stretching our planet’s carrying capacity already) but we’re talking about relocating them here despite the fact that the deal was for them to relocate elsewhere.

And the metaphor continues that they’re duplicitous and they bring diseases and sow constitutional crises and now I’m looking at NBC wondering who greenlit this production? Was it the same idiot who greenlit the “V” remake? I think these narratives are unpopular enough that their shows get canceled because we know as a viewing public, as a nation, that this is madness.

I’ve been called on this elsewhere, but think back to the pop culture of the 1950s where the argument was that Communists were lurking everywhere and needed to be routed out. We had the Blob, we had Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and we had Rod Serling tilting at windmills weekly to show how out of control the narrative was getting. Part of the role of science fiction is to explore our fears as a culture in a speculative framework.

So what has “The Event” been arguing? That a group of aliens, otherwise confined in a remote military prison, has infiltrated our society at the highest levels, who seem indistinguishable from us except they don’t age, raising the argument they were here first (then where did they go? And why? And isn’t “We were here first” beaten by “Well, you left”?) and the “sentinels” are dead, so now there’s a new generation to keep vigilant.

So yes, vigilant against these people who are both from here and aliens. Who manifest a genetic discrepancy of more than a chimpanzee removed from us, but we can successfully mate with them. Who are both all-powerful and powerless. Who have advanced technology but are content to sit in a remote deep-freeze for decades. Seriously, this is a race of people capable of generating stable interstellar portals through time and space that can transport a planet but they’re somehow baffled by iron locks. Oh, and who are both incapable of violence and actively orchestrating global genocide.

This show makes no sense. It has never made any sense. There’s been some very occasional wow factors but most of the time it is a murky mess that longs in its heart of heart to be “24” but is barely on the same level of “Flashforward,” which by way of comparison, suggested a collision of two protons in the Large Hadron Collider in Europe could bring about a global blackout and precognitive event. That was bad science fiction. “The Event” is simply bad. Good riddance.

"Cougar Town"

Shifting my attention to much better storytelling, the one-hour season finale of “Cougar Town” kept promises made by other people on other shows and I think that’s awesome enough for some callbacks.

First, there was some advertisement of cheap flights to Hawaii and Travis, who has been pining after his runaway grad student lady love who spurned his proposal of marriage and who has all but dropped out of school over it, decides on an impulse to go. And the cul-de-sac crew decides to take their vacations together and go for it. They’re talking about how to split up the room assignments – three people, two beds – when Barb makes her final appearance of the season.

Barb is the only character anymore who can legitimately be considered living in “Cougar Town,” in that she’s a middle-aged woman chasing relentlessly after younger men, and the one she’s seeing now wants her to tone down her Barb-ness, by which I mean this wonderful habit she’s got of coming up to Jules and her friends and saying suggestive things. I feel there should be more Barb. Other people seem to feel like there should be no Barb. So in that there’s any Barb I’m completely supportive of that, but like I said, I wish there were more.

I feel like Barb could be a central character in her own show called “Cougar Town,” and then they could call “Cougar Town” “Wine Time” or however they wanted to do. I love how they’re constantly making fun of their name – it totally works with this show.

That and oh jeez I forgot to mention all the wonderful things. Like … OK, there was an episode of “Community” a few episodes back in which Danny Pudi, the actor who plays Abed, talked about having taken a walk-on role as an extra in “Cougar Town.” I mentioned that in the podcast a month back or so.

Anyway, in this past week’s season finale, they cut to a scene outside a Subway and there, in the background, is Danny Pudi. Who injects himself into the scene a little bit and then suddenly dashes out of shot. The reason why is that this was, in theory, the moment he recounted to Jeff in “Community” about having crapped his pants. It was somewhat disruptive and if you weren’t also a fan of “Community” it was probably really confusing, but in that I was it really wasn’t and in fact it was this really delicious call-back to something from earlier in the season. But earlier in the season of another show. On another network. Which was why it seemed really cool.

“Cougar Town” already hosted a guest shot from a show called “Tosh.0” on Comedy Central. There was an episode that was envisioned as a web redemption for someone who’d made a fool of himself in some situation or another online and he made a guest appearance in “Cougar Town” as a truly odd and creepy photographer. He was on screen for less than a minute and it was a moment of low continuity with the rest of the episode, but still, very cool of them to have included it.

Finally, it was so cool to see Ted from “Scrubs” on “Cougar Town” while they were on their trip to Hawaii. His character could take any song and make it sad. Honestly, brilliant character. The whole thing was brilliant. I liked the storyline closure they found for all of them and Travis especially. He’s always been a side character at best, which wasn’t helped at all by him being away at college (though he was never out of shot for any significant stretches of time), but in this arc he deepened into a guy who nothing significantly bad had ever happened to him and he had to find a way to cope.

They had to do this quickly because he wasn’t dating his high school sweetheart anymore and he’d only been seeing this new girl for a few months before popping the question. But it was young love which covers a multitude of sins. Besides which, I really enjoy seeing someone making big enough mistakes it will affect their character. Usually people aren’t allowed to screw up enough that it matters. Travis missing half a semester has consequences that some people never completely recover from, and it will be interesting to see how the show deals with that when it returns next fall.

Coming up

Apart from that, we’re moving into the summer schedule with basic cable picking up some of the slack. This week, Bravo premieres a song-writing competition called “Platinum Hit” with singer-songwriter Jewel and a former “American Idol” judge. I don’t know how this will do, but it sounds creative. That premieres Monday at 10/9c. NBC is burning off episodes of canceled “Law&Order: L.A.,” so I guess there were enough Laws&Orders on television already.

Also Monday, the History Channel is giving itself over to The Civil War, so that’s probably of interest. Also, there’s some celebrity kerfuffles in a new series called “Love Bites” premiering Thursday at 10/9c on NBC, and I understand from the online buzz that this coming weekend’s installment of “Doctor Who” is going to be astonishing. So … looking forward to that.

And for the past few weeks I’ve been enjoying rebroadcasts of Dave Foley’s “NewsRadio” project, which was one of my favorite sitcoms of the later ‘90s. They air them weekday mornings and pair them old to new so there’s episodes with Phil Hartman and episodes with Jon Lovitz. It would play havoc with continuity if this show required any, but in that it doesn’t, I figure I’ll just enjoy them until the Reelz channel gets bored with airing them.

And in my home media project I’m going through my old “Buffy” and “Angel” recordings from their syndication on FX and TNT to see if there’s anything I need to keep – in case the odd episode of “The Avengers” snuck in there, for example. Otherwise I already own the DVDs so I can discard the tapes. Mostly there hasn’t been much of interest, but it’s still a good excuse to skim and revisit these wonderful Joss Whedon creations.