south park season 12 pt 1 subsector 8 form 26b microfieche

with the conclusion of season 12 part 1, aggrocrag readers will soon finally be treated to a post about something other than south park. ...soon. for now, more 'park it is.

last night's journey to days of field trips yore brought with it the first predictable cartman/butters episode of the series. the formerly novel and always brilliant recipe instantly became formulaic, and some may even say it had echoes of shark jumping (...say it ain't so!). besides that, i was irked by one specific, tiny line that hopefully is not a sign of something bigger to come: the police officer commenting on how annoying the people at the 1800s village are for never breaking character. it was a non-sensible diagetic oversight that played down to a dumb audience--something south park is fantastic at rarely doing. add this to a season without a single real bright spot (besides the 30 seconds of butters singing "what what in your butt," which loses replayability quickly and illuminated their struggles to pick up on potentially brilliant plot lines) (and perhaps the kenny/cheesing episode, which was by far and away the best of the first half of the season but still terrible compared to the classics) and it looks like we may be in for a bumpy ride to the finish.
we should note that it's still the best show on tv.

in other news, matt groening (sp?) interviewing david chase at the writer's guild this past week was exactly as fulfilling as most wga events: i left saying "it was worth the 10 bucks and howevermany hours of my life...but just barely." if you're around in late april and may, though, james l. brooks and judd apatow are coming 'round the bend...

le office

my current feelings on the office season three are as follows:
the office was fantastic because of its normalcy; we all know dwight and creed and kevin and all of the other rosenkrantzes and guildensterns in our lives, and we all like to fantasize that we're a jim or a pam not quite fitting in. the other characters' understated yet obviously present quirky character traits builds up their realism and reinforces our narcissistic identifications. season four (until this week) has been using an hour of time to tell a half-hour of jokes, and has been filling in the remaining time with direct, over-the-top caricaturization of the characters who work perfectly as side notes. that's my problem with this season.

on another note, michael was fantastic in this past episode--another one of those "oh yeah...i guess he isn't soooo bad..." moments. his commercial was perfect: exactly the right amount of racial insensitivity bottled up in an otherwise clever, low budget idea. huzzah!

interesting turn in the hannah saga...

a new development in the possible hannah montana shark-jumping. this week's episode ("when you wish you were the star" s2e5, even though it was the 13th shown of the season...) appeared to be ripe for the jumpin'--a trite "alternate universe" episode. the first commercial break, however, revealed that this episode was part of disney's "wish gone amiss" weekend. this new context excuses the episode's cliche plot, as long as the show manages to do something with it. and hannah did. the alternate universe provided great use of a guest star (jesse mccartney), excellent alternate personalities for all of the main characters, and it made way for the truly incredible rap duo of rico and oliver. seriously. (although the show's return to this shtick during the closing credits--while good at first--took a turn towards the absurd when they insisted on having the show's one regular black character, roxy, finish the closing rap by donning a flava-flav style clock and snapping while saying "peace out!" [another interesting note from today's episode: for the first time "roxy" briefly broke from her stereotypical ways and spoke in a normal voice, although it was rather brief.]) keep in mind, however, that this episode was the 5th of the season (from back when the season was still decent) and it simply aired out of order, so this may be a false hope.

other worthwhile observations from this week:

good observation by andy. during a very emotional scene, out of nowhere a crawl appears at the bottom. "penelope, 11, ca: i wish rico and i could play video games together!" that's all it said. nothing before, nothing after. it then disappeared. as far as we could remember, this was the only crawl all episode besides the normal post-commercial show-identifiers. amazing.

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normally i wouldn't post about something this stupid, but given last week's discussion about hannah's diagetic violations of late i figured this was worth mentioning. hannah's way of getting out of the alternate universe once canon had established that she had already used her one and only wish--brilliant. absolutely brilliant. for those of you who have not seen it but who were not scared away by the spoiler alert:

miley wishes on a star to be hannah 24/7. hannah tries to wish back but she is told her one and only wish has been used. at the end of the episode, she has a kind-of heart-to-heart with the estranged "hermit" (they meant "hobo"), jackson, who then sees a shooting star and uses his one wish to get them back to our world.

they do a great job of keeping canon in tact, but in order to continue, all of our newer episodes--
(and this is nit-picky, and by no means this should actually happen nor am i faulting the show for breaking this, because, in sitcom form, plot flexibility to a certain degree is completely both allowed and required in order to keep interesting episodes around)
--should feature a jackson who has no memory of our world pre-miley's wish and only of the world where he was a "hermit." hannah, after all, had no memory of her new post-wish world while she was there (but she had maintained all skills learned in that world, like the ability to speak french). just a thought.

hannah montana jumping the shark?

despite how fantastic the second cd is, i'm thinking hannah has started to jump the shark.
a show creates a diagesis--a universe--that it must operate in. that diagesis can break every law of our universe, but the workings within that universe must obied by all of the laws of it. every episode of the seconds season (least so in the jake ryan hour long double, but even in that) has violated the rules of the hannah world, indirectly mostly. the show has abandoned the idea that its characters are logical and un-absurd (relatively speaking) in their non-pop star effected lives. to a much less severe extent, they are suffering from a syndrome that is related to the boy meets world collapse.
the stories are loose; there are too many obvious ways out of any created conflict. in tonight's episode ("sleepwalk this way," s2e13), for instance, someone could have reassured miley that she need not be worried until monday, and jackson could have pushed his party forward to a day before monday. those would greatly alter the main plot arch (their refusal to acknowledge these obvious flaws is a violation of the psudo-cannon that the characters are logical). even the small conflicts had too obvious yet still ignored solutions. they could/should have woken miley up during her tirade in class (and why is she adjusting her shirt while asleep? and coming up with witty, non-obvious retorts to kunkle's every word while asleep?), and jackson could have realized that when miley said she was awake she could not have been sleepwalking since she can only tell the truth when she is sleepwalking and therefore would have to say she was asleep (his failure to acknowledge this led to his clanking of pans and dumping water on miley for annoyingly trite comic relief).
sorry if this made no sense. i'm a bit flustered/frustrated.

i'm off to watch entourage. expect notes on that soon.