The Real World: Tigers

Holy smokes, is it really December already? I guess the carols and eggnog in the supermarket should have tipped me off, huh?  🙂

This means…it’s time to buy Christmas presents!

AND!

Drink lots of eggnog!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mmm, I love eggnog. And also presents!

An excellent Christmas present this year would be for the moguls to stop being ridiculous and give the writers some kind of fair deal so they can go back to writing TV tout suite.

In the meanwhile, here’s some more of the only TV they can currently make:

Things to Watch:

Ninjas Give the Best Advice

Oh No! Cute Animals On Strike Too!

Strike Life, Episode 1 (this could be our only new show for a while, y’all…)

What You Can Do:

Send Angry Pencils to Moguls! Win Ridiculous Prizes Such As Captain Apollo’s Towel! Quite Seriously!

Poor cold picketing writers (well, it’s certainly cold in New York!).

In specific, I would like them to come back and fix Heroes RIGHT NOW, if you please. Listen, I love this show. I really do. I was one of the few who didn’t have issues with last year’s finale. I extra-specially-super love it since they added Kristen Bell to the cast. She can take any line, however silly, and make it absolutely perfect. I also love Sark (er, I mean, Adam Monroe) and I thought he was a thrilling new supervillain. I am not one of those people who has been complaining all season about their “sophomore slump” and blah blah blah.

But the “volume 2” finale last night was…kind of lame! Dude! Are you serious? That was it? [warning: skip ahead if you haven’t seen it yet. or, say, if you don’t want to hear me rant about TV. 🙂] Tell me something — wasn’t the “volume 1” finale all about Peter trying to stop a big terrible apocalypse from happening, except it turned out that the only reason it WAS happening was because HE was there doing dopey things like meeting guys with radioactive powers? Hmmm. Anyone else seeing a pattern here?

And hey, what’s happened to Caitlin? Aren’t they setting up kind of a mindboggling imaginary physics question here? OK, so let’s see…she jumped forward in time with Peter to June 2008. That means there’s no Caitlin in November 2007 anymore. If things went ahead as they were going to, Peter would see her again in June 2008 when she pops into existence there.

BUT! Now he has changed the future (which I am all for, because, you know, Virus Bad, World Population Good), so…wouldn’t she have disappeared along with everything in that future? or is she left trapped in an alternate future that never happened? (I feel like I need a Back to the Future chalkboard here.) Or is the idea that the rest of the future changed around her, but she’s still there, going “hey, what happened to all the dead people?”

My point is, I think this was very dumb of Peter to do without first trying to figure out how it would work, or without, say, jumping forward and rescuing her (or asking Hiro to). Because NOW what? How will they ever save her? Ridiculous. Grrrr.

Also, was there any point at all to the Maya/Alejandro storyline? Couldn’t Sylar have gotten to New York just as well without them running around and freaking out and making tortured faces all the time? Were they even remotely significant to the events of the finale? I must admit I cheered when Sylar killed Alejandro. Then I cheered even more when he killed Maya (especially when he rolled his eyes first -– yes, exactly! that’s what we think, too!). He was well on his way to being the best supervillain ever (kill Mohinder! go for the trifecta of boring!) (sorry, Mohinder fans) until he made Mohinder bring Maya back to life. YAWWWWWN.

Ten Things I Think Heroes Should Do To Regain Full Awesomocity:

(1) MORE ANDO. I cannot stress this enough. More Hiro and Ando together! Come on, let Ando help save the world, instead of reading an old scroll and playing video games at work all season!

(2) Kill Maya again, but more permanently this time. Then kill Mohinder, because we’ve had enough of the smart scientist guy being the dumbest person on the show. Aww, no more pointless pontificating voiceovers? Whatever SHALL we do!

(3) Give Kristen Bell at least half of every episode’s screen time. Hey, forget Caitlin; Elle and Peter had way more chemistry than those two! Yay Elle and Peter! Or give her someone to hook up with; don’t waste the queen of chemistry all by herself!

(4) Tell us what the heck Angela Petrelli’s power is, already. And for that matter, what was Kaito’s (Hiro’s dad)? Wouldn’t this “Generations” arc have been a good time to reveal all that? Sheesh.

(5) Reveal that Mohinder’s sister is actually ALIIIIIIIIIIVE! And, preferably, EVIIIIIL! Then, have her kill Mohinder. Really, definitely kill him, as far away as possible from Claire’s blood.

(6) Give Hiro’s sister Kimiko a part and a superpower! I mean, why wouldn’t she have one, if it’s genetic, right? And I liked the brief hint that Ando had a crush on her. More superpowered girls! MORE ANDO!

(7) Don’t forget the next generation, too! Do Nathan’s sons have superpowers? What about Matt’s unborn kid? I vote that we find out he really does love Janice and has not abandoned her; instead, he sent her away to have the baby in secret somewhere where she’ll be safe. So THEN they can get back together again later and we can have a superpowered baby. Woot! I do like Matt’s dark dark path of controlling people with his mind. Awesome. Is he going to be one of the “villains” of volume 3? Just as long as he doesn’t die, yo. That would be unacceptable.

(8) Speaking of that: More interesting villains with more complicated motivations! I mean, rrrrreally? “The world is a terrible place and we’re destroying the environment, so let’s wipe out everybody?” I think you can do better than that! (Like, say, maybe somebody’s mad about the fact that her parents tried to kill her to destroy the virus she was born with, HMMMM?) (<– completely imaginary speculation) (And by the way, why didn’t Adam want to kill Hiro when he had the chance – revenge and all that? Hrm.)

(8a) Supervillain suggestion: Micah! Angry superpowered orphan who’s all vengeful about his dead parents! OK, he’s probably too much of a good kid to go evil, but wouldn’t that just make it extra interesting?

(9) Give Claire something more interesting to do than “pretend to be normal” and “lie to her dad” and "freak out cheerleaders". She and Hiro are far and away the best characters on the show. (OK, and also Ando. MORE ANDO!) (and obviously Kristen Bell). Free Claire! Let her do more awesome things like jump out of windows to escape her grandmother!

(10) Give us our big bad cockroach supervillain. You know you’ve been hinting at it. There are cockroaches everywhere. Just give us a clue! Let us know he/she is out there scheming! “She” would be cool, by the way, after two seasons of big bad guys. (Mohinder’s sister, perhaps? ooooooh?)

OK, and one more: (11) Bring back Invisible Claude! He was awesome.

(P.S. Aha! I just figured out why I love Ando so much: He’s the Samwise Gamgee of Heroes! Luckily his Frodo is more adorable and less "oh, ack, woe is me, this ring is sooo heavy, stagger, wilt", etc.)

All right, enough ranting about poor Heroes. I still love you, lovely show. I’m only thinking of what’s best for you. I promise I’ll keep watching all the way to the end…unless you, for instance, decapitate Dr. Sara (oh, wait, different show).

We’re still behind on everything else, but we knew we had to watch this "finale" right away, or else I wouldn’t be able to go to any of my TV websites for fear of spoilers, and THEN how I would I procrastinate? I ask you.

OK, just a brief set of photos for today. One night we went to this utterly mad theme park in Phuket called PHUKET FANTASEA (The Ultimate Nighttime Cultural Theme Park!), which is basically Disneyland plus Las Vegas plus Hello Kitty on crack plus The Real World: Tigers plus Cirque du Soleil if it starred chickens as well as acrobats. Plus all the food in the known world.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t go there, of course. In fact, if you are in Phuket, you absolutely must, because it is just that fantabulous. Their website probably can give you an even better sense of it than I can, but I’ll try…

Here, for instance, is the ticket counter:

Gold! Glamour! In a cave! With murals! And costumes!

Here is one of the Deadly Serious Elephants that guards the ticket counter:

I can kill you with my brain. Er, if I had one.
(Firefly shoutout!)

Here are some fish going absolutely berserk:

Mine! Mine! Mine! Hey, I’m eating here! Mine! Ew, fishy! Oh, sorry, that’s your tail.

Adam, run! They’re coming for you! They can walk on water! Run for your life!

Yes, I do have my hand in a large stone serpent’s mouth. Why? Because, you guys, I’m on a “theatrical safari”! Oh, yes I am. A journey through “12 exotic and mythical scenes inspired by timeless legends and ancient folklores, starring many local animals and cutting-edge special audio and visual effects!”

Such as, for instance, this one:

You might wonder what the heck is going on here. We were about to walk right past it when we realized that THERE ARE GERBILS IN THERE! (or maybe hamsters) They’re exotically and mythically running around the moving candy wheels in an enormous psychedelic candyland, inspired, of course, by the timeless legend of The Candy-Making Hamsters Who Did Too Much Acid.

But the best part is at the end when you finally get to the tigers (as this whole section is actually called “Tiger Jungle Adventure”). The tigers are behind glass in this wild sultan’s pavilion kind of thing.

Dramatically lit tigers in their, uh, natural habitat

Magnificently, on one wall of the pavilion is what appears to be a hot tub (although it’s probably just a pool) large enough for like five tigers at once. (woooooo! Hot tubbing with tigers!) (oh dear, I shouldn’t give Hollywood any new reality show ideas right now, should I?)

So what happens is the tigers leap into the pool, splash around like kittens, leap back out, and immediately go slipping and sliding across a floor that someone who recently renovated her bathroom could tell you is probably not the right tile for wet feet, let alone wet fur. So there’s about six wet tigers skidding wilding around and crashing into each other and thinking malevolent thoughts like “those bozos in the window better not be laughing at us.”

It is thoroughly amazing.

After that there are a lot of goofy sparkly shops with dancing gals in elephant costumes at the front trying to entice you in, and then you get to the dinner in the big enormous gigantic seriously-it’s-maybe-the-largest-room-I’ve-ever-been-in buffet hall.

Come in! We have all the food in the known world!

I believe the word you’re looking for is "yikes".

And THEN there’s the highlight of the whole thing: the “Palace of the Elephants” Theater with its elaborate totally bananas show, featuring like ten live elephants on stage, Thai dancing, glow-in-the-dark acrobats popping out of the ceiling to do flips and midair spins, a love story (I think), a hero prince, and a fascinating barnyard number during which, halfway through, a flock of well-choreographed live chickens literally runs across the stage, followed by a goat (or possibly a sheep; I was kind of on sensory overload by then).

Oh, and they confiscate your camera on the way in (in kind of a Gestapo-like way, if I may say so), so I can’t show you any of what’s behind this door. But it is really quite remarkable.

Whew. This is what happens when I write all day for three days straight; I can’t stop! Yammer yammer! But I’d better go finish Almanzo, because I’m not allowed to watch the new Battlestar Galactica movie or Tin Man until I do. (Self-imposed rule! I’m afraid Adam is much too nice, much too fond of television, and much too not-actually-paying-attention to enforce rules like that.)

Quote of the Day:
Samantha’s mom: "I did not raise you to use amnesia as an excuse."
Samantha: "That would have taken enormous foresight."
— Samantha Who