I need a new brain, maybe.

So, I thought about talking about the monster that was Karas, a monster for its more repellent aspects and for those factors that made it truly enjoyable, but I'm just not in any mood for that. In fact, I'm really not in a mood for much at all. I don't want to read, write, or talk right now. I don't even want to listen to music, though I am. What I want to do is float right on into space and go into some sort of quasi-sleep in some sort of nothing-world. I mean, I don't want to leave me friends and family behind, but fuck, I don't care about this world right now. It's boorish, stupid and ugly. Everyone seems to be the same, stuck up and caught in their banal attempt to do whatever it is the fuck people do these days. Fuck, play videogames, write, act, eat, watch tv, discuss, what in the hell is the point of it all? I mean, really, I can't help but thinking that life is useless and banal, that there's nothing that designates rights and liberties, that the cold, indifferent universe is exactly that. If so, why carry on in a nihilistic world like that? Because we lie to ourselves, because we honestly believe otherwise, because we're cowards, because... because why?

What in the world makes me carry on? The survival drive inherent to all biological lifeforms, I suppose? But why does that exist, and why still in me? What's the end goal in survival, and why is it so imperative? If it's just a biological reflex, an imperative with an origin in loops only, why? What are we surviving for? Why do I in particular get up every day? I can't think of a reason, even to see friends or family, especially not because of them. Realizing earlier this year that someday they just won't be there caused me to just.... well, it was before that, but this caused the final snap. I just don't even know a bit of anything anymore. And it frightens me. It confuses me. I want to tear down everything and everyone, build a monument to nihilism and nonexistent, and I think that's cropping up far too much in me these days. I sneer at everyone and everything, my characters in my stories have become increasingly more absurd and without direction on a philosophical scale; if they do have a direction, it's so exaggerated as to appear immediately nonsensical. I don't think my writing is suffering, but I think it's growing just a tad repetitive to see these characters show up so often. And why should I care if it does? It's probably meaningless tripe, whatever I'm writing. And then thoughts of suicide crop up and.... well, I know I won't do it because I couldn't stand to hurt my family, seeing as how we all reacted to a certain even recently; I care too much for them and my friends and am too afraid of the void, as it were, to really go through with it.

I supposed college would be something else, and it wasn't, but that's not the sealing nail in my coffin, just a fact that really hit me. Here I was, prepared to meet entirely new types of people, and who do I find but the same common sorts as throughout high school? Everyone just drinks and gets high in their spare time; a few simply want to communicate, to simply hang out, and that's what I want, really, in terms of relationships possible in the mundane world. Ideally I'd like to go exploring, but that's all daydreams and fiction, which I'll have to settle for through vicarious means. Everyone's so preoccupied with sex and escape and intellectualism and altruism that I don't think anyone's thought about, well, literally NOTHING. I... I'm just ranting now and I don't know how to stop it. I'm gonna go read and escape myself, because quite frankly, I think I hate everything and everyone right now for whatever bullshit reason I have.

Now what-it happen was...

See that over there? Yeah, that's right, Karas? No, that's just a
name someone thought was clever, doesn't mean anything.
It's actually a train-wreck.

I think I'll explain why later when I edit this post sometime in the near future.

"Personally I think Britney [Spears] is way much “punk” than the fuckin’ Dead Kennedys ever were--she DANCES way better, right?"- Metal Mike Saunders

I just wanted to preserve that quote for a time before I forgot it. I'll post something more meaningful when I'm not about to pass out.

Good videogame news.... for once!

Do you cretins know what this means? Castle Shikigami 3 mother fuckers! Let's hope the translation and attached voice acting are every bit as atrocious as they were for 2 and then we'll be set!

Interesting update on that English 101 nonsense

So, on the site there, Centenary's main page, it says I can be exempt from English 101 if I get a 4 or 5 on the AP exam...... so why in the world did they send me a letter after my AP scores came in saying I had earned exemption from 102 only and my adviser told me I couldn't be exempt from 101? Good lord; thanks there, Centenary, for that inspiring plan of yours.... I'm fucking speechless.

At the risk of sounding mentally handicapped

After finishing up our revisions for the second script of Garage Logic this evening, Mr. Rainwater presented an interesting opportunity to me. It seems his friend's girlfriend is the daughter of an acting troupe's leader and the man in charge is requesting that plays of the 'new' and 'avant-garde' variety be written for his outfit, specifically by his daughter's friends, which by round-about proxy includes me. The opportunity is terrifying, because it means I'm going to have to work my ass off for once on something that MATTERS (which not a thing in school aside from that Lovecraft paper has) and.... well, the idea of writing out an entire play makes me question whether or not I can actually do something like that. It's not a matter of time so much as a matter of will and self-confidence. But fuck, I should take it; the only thing it will interfere with is my playing Twilight Princess, and I'm not even that interested.

Not wanting to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I sprung into action mode and wrote up a brief outline of the characters and situations as well as themes I want to tackle, primarily the concepts of nihilism and hermitude. The setting? Antarctica and.... well, it sounds better in full detail, just trust me on that. God, god god god god god god this makes me nervous. I mean.... what if I just don't have it in me? What if I suck so much as to be offensively bad? Or what if it's just mediocre? Ugh. I'm gonna stick with it, though, gonna at least finish a rough script sometime soon. Oh god.

OHHHH!!! YOU STUPID JERK!

Those posters of this Pete Lee guy are pissing me off; where the hell does he get off thinking he's funny with his "mismatched couples" joke? Is this the kind of humor people want these days, completely trite reflections on relationships they already know are entirely meaningless? No, fuck that. And fuck these other comedians who fancy themselves new and original because they "Tell the truth". Sorry you pedantic goons, Bill Hicks et al, but your "deep" commentaries on religion and politics are bullshit, a smoke-screen to make people believe they're thinking about something important when you're just feeding them unsubstantiated rhetoric. And then there's the comedies in theaters now-a-days, all from the same three directors with the same three jokes about sexuality and the 'lovable scamps' that are the protagonist and his friends. The worst part of it all comes from my opponents who are going to ask me the most obnoxious question in the world: "Well then, what DO you find funny?" I don't have a pretty answer here, folks.

For the most part, my tastes are pretty tame and altogether typical. The first thing I know is that I'll be pigeon-holed into the 'intellectual', 'nerd' and, ugh, 'non-conformists' groups, all of which I loathe equally. Why? Because they take themselves and their humor way too seriously. Yes, I love the Monty Python troupe in all of its incarnations, my brother still hasn't convinced me that The Critic is anything other than the best animated comedy of all time, and I'm doofy enough to drag out my decade old Dilbert anthologies from time to time. Jesus Christ, I enjoy the comedic styling of Weird Al to this day! Not a one of them holds the title of favorite, though. No, not at all. None of them gives me deep belly laughs anymore; they've become a bit tired after all this time, boring and overplayed. The most I get now are chuckles and fond recollections of times when they were funnier. So, really, there's only one thing in the world aside from my friends that I find gives me that sort of laughter.

You probably don't know who The Angry Samoans are, which is a damn shame. A forgotten relic of the California punk scenes golden years, these guys were the most adolescent, mentally stunted (at least in their music; word is most if not all are college graduates with at least one being a mathematics professor) head cases with enough rage, confusion and venom (but never angst; they were too busy being demented to ever understand what in the world angst was) to find themselves banned from just about every venue in Los Angeles during their stint there. They were also the most unapologetic and politically incorrect band of all time, which in turn makes them one of the most hysterical. These 'kids' (the lead figure, Metal Mike, was 26 when they started the band) also possess what cannot be anything but the shortest amount of music produced ever, their combined works totaling something like 40 minutes; their most well album clocks in at around 20 minutes, only one song, the reprehensible and hysterical "Ballad of Jerry Curlan", clocking in at over a minute. Their music sounds like something an elementary school band of would-be punks would produce, except for the lyrics; they're too vile and too hysterical to come from any mind that young.

Anyone with a lick of self-importance or pretension is not going to enjoy this CD, nor will anyone who considers themselves 'above' juvenile humor. Fuck the lot of you, you're not even wanted. If you're open about the experience, though, and don't take your humor or life all that seriously (as you shouldn't) you'll be having fits. This stuff is classic; it alternates between insane , rage fueled diatribes against homosexuality to absolute and utter disdain for parental figures, compounded by only the thinnest layer of teenage isolation. But then, they have fun with this teenage isolation, never playing it up for tears; who the hell would cry when Metal Mike's screaming about his gas chamber of a room or his obsession with steak-knives and stabbing himself in the skull? You can't, because lord knows they don't. It's really stream of consciousness stuff here, uncoordinated screaming about what a stupid jerk you are and what a whore your mother is, how much they abso-fucking-LUTELY HATE JERRY CURLAN (it's scary to hear, like a guy with rabies dying at the hands of his mother's raper, that's how absolutely hateful the singer sounds), and someone's desperate need to drink blood for breath. It's awful in a way, like being caught inside of Son of Sam's mind, cept' without the religious bent.

And good lord, it's fun. This stuff is infectious, it seeps into you and does it ever feel cathartic. I'm serious; scream this stuff as you drive around, ideally on the interstate with windows rolled down, and yell it like you mean it. You'll notice something: it's too absurd to take seriously, you must look like a retard, but you'll also notice that you feel good. If you don't laugh at this stuff? I don't even have a solution here; something is wrong with you and it's not going to be fixed anytime soon. It's probably because you're one of those people who thinks constant 80's references are funny, you look forward to conceited and egotistical faux art-house fare such as 'Across the Universe', or you think M.C. Hammer references are still 'ironic' and 'hip'. All of which probably put you in the same camp as Jerry Curlan, and we all know the truth about people like Jerry Curlan. Like it or not, this stuff is hysterical, and you're miserable.

When am I moving to Greenland again?

Sorry to start off with a rant of personal nature today, I've got better ideas I'll explore soon enough, but this nasty cold spell of mine has made me inclined to do a bit of unwarranted venting. Basically, I know it's only been a month, but good lord college is boring. I mean, what am I doing here? My classes, aside from German and Philosophy, just feel like high-school. What really perplexes me now is the English FYE business. The way this works is that every incoming Centenary student must take FYE, a sort of introduction to rhetoric and the art of arguing. What's perplexing is that for the longest time, FYE 101 and English 101 were the same thing. Then, for reasons inscrutable, they changed it this year, insuring that those of us with planned English majors had to take two classes instead of the one as per requirements. It gets funnier when you consider that one can enter Centenary as a freshman and be exempt from English 102 thanks to test scores, but one cannot, under any circumstances, be exempt from the lower level 101. Where in the world is the sense in that? I can't fathom that there is any; compounded with the fact that FYE is an entirely arbitrary class with only the core-guidelines and book being the unifying aspects between classes (Teachers are free to do as they will with the course, it seems, as evidenced by the disparity in work between my class, my roommates and his friend's). So, yeah, two classes I'm taking this semester are there not to improve my skills, as I've proven capable of testing out of a higher level course in the same vein that incorporates the skills from those classes, but to fulfill some new, arbitrary change in plans that those in power made for reasons I'm not sure they even quite understand. It's as if those in charge had a conference to see how best to piss off incoming English majors and ended up with the current results. Nonsense!

Anyhow, on to more important topics, particularly Dracula, Dracula of the Bram Stoker variety. Goonish as this may sound to some, I never had any interest in the book before reading the ultra-violent Japanese comic Hellsing, and even then it took some serious insistence on my friends' parts to bring about my reading it. I'm glad they did; I can't think of the last time that reading was entirely an adventure, laced with only a very slight-hint of pretension. That is to say, Dracula has themes that one might consider deep, but only if that reader was intensely interested into fabricating the greater layers of depth for themselves. No, I don't believe that Stoker ever intended the epistolary style to give rise to discussions on the ambiguity of "good" and "evil". Just because the writings come from a biased source doesn't mean that the characters were written as if they were addressing an audience; their tone, writing style and the straightforward nature of the text make it painfully obvious that these are journals meant to reflect the character's immediate thoughts. Lord knows why they would be fabricating loads of evidence to convince themselves that Dracula must be destroyed if he had never even given rise to their hatred for him. Moreover, am I expected to believe that Mina and Lucy mysteriously contracted vampirism and Lucy was killed as per an elaborate plan to set Dracula up? Or that Dracula was adversely affected by inherently holy (in the book's universe) objects if he himself was inherently good? Nonsense. It's simply another example of people creating depth for a story.

And why, when Dracula needs no added depth to improve it? Why insist upon making a book some grandstanding examination of xenophobia when it has no pretense of presenting itself as anything more than an adventure novel where the battle takes place entirely between very black-and-white definitions of good and evil. The epistolary style isn't an attempt to introduce ambiguity so much as it is to further define these characters through themselves and through one another, all the while allowing for the more flexible inclusion of third-party letters or newspaper sources; it's a tool for the narrative itself and the characterization of its protagonists (and, by association, their antagonists, as we never experience him through his own thoughts). Dracula himself is very clearly a traditional villain: unnatural, motivated only by greed and granted sympathy only by the one character most inclined to such acts, he's nothing more than a bogeyman here. Evidence of Stoker's fear of foreign invasion, some say? I can't help but think of that as anything but nonsense. He's foreign because history demands that he be, considering the historical figure (though this has been called into debate) he is based upon. Lord,it's frustrating to think that people look into the story as some allegorical fable, all the while ignoring the bottom line: It's an archetypal story with archetypal characters and events..... Look, I'm just going to finish this right now. I don't know where to go with the rest of it; my stomach hurts, my head hurts, my nose is runny, and I have a paper on mis-en-scene that I must construct the rough-draft of tonight. I'm taking a nap before I scream.

Let me jot these topics down for later discussion;

It's late and I'm going to bed, don't feel so good, so let me give you a preview of my mind, Matt, my only reader: Gotta discuss Dracula and why I think it works because it's NOT deep literature, just an awesome story, then I'll hit upon why I hate the movie Brick, and I'll top it off with a reflection on this 80s film, a claymation vision of a good deal of Mark Twain's works, particularly the scene with the devil which hit upon an idea I couldn't put down: Meta-characterization and meta-influence. Let me get these ideas straight, get through that stupid homework, and then I'll do this, I swear. Until then, I need sleep; being sick in college sucks.

Lord of time, please forgive me.

Upon completing Persona 3 last Saturday at 3 in the morning, I noticed that my game clocked in at over 83 hours. I'm ashamed, really; it's time spent that I can never have back, that I could have been spending on any thing else in the world. It's not that I'm adverse to spending time on videogames, my 80+ hour files on many other games says quite the opposite; rather, I'm adverse to spending that time on boring games. And really, at the end of the day, that's all Persona 3 is: a joyless, uninteresting ride through nowhere in particular with the very clear destination of nothing at all. It's astounding how the game falls short on so many levels considering not only its pedigree but the number of fans it has, enough fans to spawn an expansion pack in Japan no more than 9 months later and win a number of magazine's spot as the game of the month. And why the praise? Because of it's "excellent soundtrack," "deep story" and "excellent gameplay". Thank you, Play Magazine, thank you, EGM, thank you, PSM, for having your heads stuck so firmly up your asses that everything comes in inverted.

It's not that Persona 3 is a particularly poor game, that it offends the senses in the same ways that any number of games do, but rather that it offends you because it at first comes across as so damn likable. This is a game that, from the get go, feels absolutely stuffed with promise. The art style, while not of Kazuma Kaneko's caliber, is snappy and stylish, bordering just a little too close to the very typical anime style that's so prevalent in the JRPG realm, but still never quite falling into that camp. The story starts off strong enough, the characters all seem fairly interesting and the music is unique if nothing else at first, making the four-hour introduction fairly painless. Then you leave the introduction and find yourself firmly in control of your avatar, able now to explore the labyrinthine tower Tartarus, the games sole, 264 floor dungeon, and engage in the much discussed 'S-Link' portion, a school/dating sim light that directly affects your performance in the tower. And these are fine enough in their way. Fine enough, that is, until some six hours pass and you realize, quite shockingly, that you're going to be doing all of this for the next 70 hours, over and over and over again. And that soundtrack, once a tad cute if not at times enjoyable which has revealed itself to be particularly banal, is going to haunt your every moment in this fantasy world.

But then, isn't that the premise of most games, the repetition of one task until such time as you achieve whatever it is the game wishes for you to achieve? Certainly so, but other games add a little something to their make-up known as 'variety'. Take Persona 3's cousin game, SMT: Nocturne as a prime example. While essentially similar to Persona 3 in a number of ways, being from related series and development teams, Nocturne isn't so dull or stupid as to try and sell itself on being 'unique' or possessing a 'challenging design'; it's too busy being excellent to bother with selling itself through novelty. It's friendly enough to want its gamers to like it based on its every facet; as such, new music crops up constantly, one spends their time wandering a world filled to the brim with exciting dungeons, demon's to recruit and story tidbits to uncover. The trick, Nocturne's development team must have realized, lies in amusing the audience economically. It's really like any good movie in that sense; it moves along with one plot thread as the focus for some time, one particular dungeon and the demons that go with it, waiting until the precise moment the player would be coming to boredom to reveal it's next big turn, it's next astoundingly designed dungeon, it's next set of beautifully realized monsters.

Persona 3 doesn't do this, and it doesn't care if you don't like it. What you see is what you get. That tower? That's your only true outlet for battling this entire game, and by god, does it get boring fast. It's even worse when you realize that you're never going to control any character beyond your own, making battles at time unimaginably frustrating. There are a number of times where should you be in control of the party you would win and effortlessly so, but with the AI being what it is, you WILL die a number of completely unnecessary, avoidable deaths through no fault of your own. What this means, in the end, is that the battle system becomes not only a good deal arbitrary, but also stupendously dull. Strategy is rarely required from your part in battle; simply keep a variety of persona capable of covering one another's weaknesses and you should be all set; it is such that in the later stages of the game your allies become entirely superfluous. In short, they're almost entirely unnecessary. It's really a shame, too, considering how fantastic the SMT battle systems have been this generation. Even Devil Summoner, something of the blacksheep this generation managed to be relatively difficult at the same time as it was fun. No such luck in this installment; be content grinding through 260 some-odd floors of drab backgrounds, uninspired enemy designs and boss battles devoid of entertainment.

The games other half, the sim aspects, are in a word trite. Really. There is absolutely no reason for their inclusion in this game, other than an attempt to establish it as 'unique'. So, yes, it's off the beaten path, mixing in this sim aspect, but it is by no means compelling. There's a bit of storyline precedent to this socialization, a tossed in number concerning the strength of your personality as reflected through others, but nothing is done with it; the excuse is superficial and by no means ties into the game thematically. Consider it nothing more than a way to level up your persona much faster and unlock some hidden ones and you'll be all set. Some will try to argue that the individual social link stories build the games themes, microcosms of the bigger picture as it were, but don't be fooled. These social chains are overly bland, prone to the sort of rushed characterization that finds its way into JRPGs so often. Every side character has one aspect of their personality directly tied to some tragic event in their history that becomes not just an aspect of them but the character themselves; the melodrama in these side-stories is stifling and overly wrought, nothing more.

Ah, and then the middle, the fusion of the two, our story. What the hell, Atlus? What in the hell? DDS1 and Nocturne had brilliant stories, truly, DDS2 had a decent one and Devil Summoner's was at least light-hearted and ironic enough to be fun. Persona 3, though, is a step backwards, regressing to the same nonsensical third-grade philosophy present in so many of its ilk. No, fans, it's not deep. Don't feed me your lies and stop treating the developers' bullshit as though it were a gourmet meal. Bullshit with seasoning and all the trappings is still bullshit, is still inedible and wholly unappealing. The characters shooting themselves in the head to summon their persona is no deep commentary on identity suicide or impending death, it's a shallow gimmick made specifically to improve the aesthetics of the battle. 'Memento mori' doesn't mean anything in the context of the game outside of a few side characters dying banal deaths, giving their connected party member two minutes of character development then disappearing from all mention outside of a few battle quotes. Yes, I understand that when the hero dies in the end that's supposed to be us, the player dying, being closed 0ff from the game world; too bad FES came along and allowed us right back into the world we'd been kicked out of, stomping all over the importance of that detail. Look, it's a nice enough theme, really it is, but they did nothing with it besides throw in the aforementioned character deaths, the aforementioned gun gimmick and your avatars final demise. It's a hodgepodge of cliches, the story, as our the characters, villains, heroes and supporting alike. In short, it's bloated nonsense that was out of style when the original Shin Megami Tensei showed up and at the very least tried to do something more than say what poorly written Japanese animation had been saying for decades. What a wonderful step back from a videogame genre I'd though had finally matured.

There's no real way to rap this up; I've said all I really had to say. The game is hollow, plain and simple, without much of a soul, point or even any real motivation for its players. Do yourself a favor and buy the infinitely superior SMT: Nocturne.

Just who is Lester Young and how might he have died?

It's a question that seems relevant to me because it's the first of many questions that came to me upon a repeat viewing of The Big O. Not the second season; questions in the second season were practically nonexistent until the end, the only one sticking with me being "why did they even bother"? It's not that I don't like the second season, really, I loved it, but, well, it's just not the first season; it doesn't even seem very much like Big O. That sounds a tad ridiculous, I admit, very narrow minded considering that the first season is only thirteen episodes that were always intended to be followed up by another thirteen, but I couldn't help but feel upon viewing the two back to back that the second lacked so much of what made the first so amazing. It never lacked for quality writing, for a fantastic score, for an interesting story, for solid pacing, smooth animation or superb directing. In some aspects, particularly animation and directing, it was its other half's better. In all the others it was at the very least its equal. The fundamental aspect it lacked was something more than all of that. No, not a soul; the second season had plenty of that as well and not originality (both seasons have committed their fair share of aping, honoring and parodying). It lacked mystery.

Well,that's not entirely fair to say. More than a fair number of entirely ambiguous questions worm into the heart of things, more than a number of enigmas (particularly that ending) go unanswered and still have fans up in arms, locked in endless debates about the nature of the show's reality: was it just The Truman show, minus Jim Carrey and that awful scarecrow's grin, or was it something entirely more postmodern, a commentary on identity, free will, a modern day 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'? The conversations are endlessly fascinating, intellectually stoking and entirely pointless. Fascinating because the second season truly did introduce an entirely new series of questions to wrestle with, intellectually stoking because of the themes previously mentioned, and entirely pointless because, as was always Big O's strength, there wasn't a point to begin with.

The first season is largely standalone. Not because the second season can stand without it; it can't by any means. It's because the first season can stand entirely well without the second season. If the second season were to disappear, become no more than the show's vaguely defined memories, and if all possibilities of such a season were to be discarded forever, the first season would still be worth every frame of animation, every note composed for it. The same cannot be said of the second; certainly this is the case for all sequels worth their name, I'm well aware of this fundamental fact. It's not the plausibility of the second season I'm calling into question, nor is it it's connection to the first season. What I'm asking is why it was necessary at all. The most obvious response is that it was essential for typing up the loose ends.

As it stands, there is absolutely no reason these loose ends up had to be tied up. None at all. Watching The Big O for these answers is akin to watching a magician simply so his act may later be picked apart for posterity. Yes, you'll certainly feel smug later as you sit in his subsequent shows informing his audience that it's all just smoke and mirrors, that the woman is not so much being sawed in half as she and her counterpart are sitting in two completely separate boxes with only the illusion of a sawing occurring, and when he cries himself off of the stage and the show closes down you'll feel a sense of self-righteous superiority but what you'll grasp is the spirit of such shows. That's what the second season misses that the first one understands so beautifully: a mystery is something entirely magical in and of its being a mystery.

Watching the first season, it's astoundingly easy to feel lost, this being entirely the writers' fault. It's not because they lack cohesion or competence, far from it really. It's because they want you to be. They want you to be every bit as ignorant of this world as its own inhabitants are; hell, you don't even know just how ignorant it's inhabitants are (not until the second season shows up and tells you), just that even those who seem to have it together are themselves floundering in a world of mass illusion. You're handed puzzle pieces to entirely different jig-saw puzzles; some of these pieces aren't even jig-saw pieces but rather rubix cube pieces, maybe a few pieces to one of those massively convoluted 'alternate reality games' here and there. You're also told to find the solution to this puzzle, and that's it's going to be a 3-D puzzle and it's not going to make sense. And you work with these pieces because they're just so bizarre, so utterly disparate that it's impossible to resist playing with them. How was Dastun in that movie killing an actress some 40 years dead when he's living it after the fact? What in the world was that archetype and what was it doing in that cavern? Metropolis, foreigners, huh? Just what is 'the truth' of the cataclysm? And most importantly of all, WHAT THE HELL ARE MEMORIES?

You work at it, though, taking scraps of information from interviews here and there, discussing with your entirely uninterested friends just why it's so important that these robots are called "megadeuses" and what in the world 'R-D' means. You watch that absolutely stellar episode 12, what is undisputedly the finest giant robot fight in the world because it's so sluggish, to see Schwarzvald one more time in the hopes that he reveals something in his rantings, you pay attention to the score, to that insane 'Flash Gordon' intro and you hope that the musical direction has some baring on the whole, that it connects events no matter how nebulously, and learn. And eventually, you finish it up. The end result is too nonsensical to describe, by no means does it look like a finished puzzle, but you know somewhere that it is. Somehow, someway you know your solution to the puzzle makes sense. What you know also is that your friends' puzzles, though entirely contradictory, also make their own sense. There's no debating now: the puzzles are too delicate for that, this project never intended to be taken apart once put together. What you're meant to do is bask in the otherworldliness of it and take it as seems best.

Season Two wants nothing to do with mystery. It says it does, surely, turning Schwartzvald's demise into an impossible set of circumstances that couldn't happen within the show's established framework, throwing out that mind-warping ending, but the mysteries don't mean anything anymore. They're thrown in there as a way to make up for the answers it has given us, a bartering tool. It wants to replace pieces of your puzzle with its own and wants to give you direction as to the real fitting of the pieces. And by god, it's a boring new puzzle it's given you. In throwing away the mystery, the second season robs the show of its identity. The excellent if unconnected episodic nature of the first season is gone save for one or two instances of tangently related episodes that really do nothing. They offer no new characterization, at times bastardizing an already established one (Alex's regression from the aloof egotist to spoiled child is really the worse), never offering a mystery that can even fit into the bigger puzzle, and what's worse, answering mysteries they proffer before the end of the episode. Like I've said, they're excellent enough, but just don't fit with the first season's experience.

The second season, then, is the younger brother of an up and coming magician and as such is privy to his entire catalogue of illusions; being that he had to practice and had a ready audience in his younger brother, why not? Oh, he means well, telling everyone after the show just how it's all done, but he doesn't understand at all that the people never wanted such information. They wanted the mystery, the illusion, not the cold science of things. "But wait, don't you want to know that he's got another show after this one, with entirely new tricks?" implores the younger boy. "No, I do not," you reply testily, because in spoiling those first tricks, in taking away your write to reason your way to the answers, he's forced you into a mode of thinking guaranteed to ruin further such experiences. The boy meant well, really, he was a clear speaker and interesting enough to talk to, but damn it, he gave away the magic, tarnished it for once and all. And illusions, magic, once spoiled are very much like all things else once spoiled: irreparable.

When it's all said and done, that's the shame of the follow up: It really is a fine show and complements the story of its first half quite well but it doesn't let its first half be. It insists on showing things its way and because it's linked so integrally to the first, insists that it do so too. It's not that the second season should be avoided, it's that the second season should be avoided if you truly loved the first. If you merely enjoyed it, then by all rights do dig in. If it holds a valuable place to you though, as it does for me, if you're one of those who thinks it's the mystery itself that's so rewarding and not the answer, then don't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Please. The innocence, relatively speaking, inherent in the first cannot be regained if lost. But hey, at least the second never revealed the identity of the enigmatic Lester Young, and for that I'll remain forever grateful.