Izzie Gotta Die

A bit of a preamble. Somewhere around Tuesday of this week, this blog – an Editor's Blog – was branded as spam by Blogger's word robots, and a warning was posted to respond to the claim within two days or see this entire blog evaporate within 20 days. There was no room to type any reply; just send a request to have the blog evaluated by a human, in case the robots made a “false positive.”

Happily, the deletion order was rescinded, but seriously: spam? Exactly what triggered the word-bots to auto-generate the kill order is a mystery, but it's kind of insulting to be lumped with the binary detritus I block daily in my mailbox. There's never been mention of male emboldening pills, designer watches, diplomas, doomed bank accounts, Nigerian financial crises, or below-the-belt toys in this daily series of blathering, nor misuse of the term boobies, so I don't get it. I'm glad the kill order's been fixed, but there's something eerie about being anonymously threatened prior to human intervention. That ain't the way a webhost should behave.

Nuff said.

This week is season finale time, and Wednesday meant we who follow Lost would learn some needed factoids before the whole mystery is resolved in the 2009-2010 TV season. Was the finale satisfying? Yes. Did it explain the four-toed statue? No, BUT we did learn that Jacob lives in a pseudo-Egyptian foot.

We also learned that everyone has been touched in some way by Jacob prior to the group taking that Oceanic flight to Bermuda Triangle Hell, and that the older interracial couple are still alive and well. One supporting cast member died (although she too could return next year if the big kaboom not only reset time but flipped her back to being a gynecologist somewhere on the continental United States), and another cast mate lay dying because he was largely useless (although it's a good thing his familiarity with military electronica included rigging an atomic bomb to blow on impact).

Lost seems to have gotten rid of some deadwood, although the flashback structure always leaves the door open for a return, given there were two major time portals at play, separated by a thirty year gap. There was also Jack's reasoning for blowing up the shaft (he luv Kate) that seemed kind of feeble, but the finale was a genuinely magnetic event.

What lies ahead for the cast of Grey's Anatomy is something else, because that show is one that has been tumbling into that danger zone because everyone in the cast has affected another in virtual every conceivable way, leaving little innovative storylines left to tackle.

I call it the Dallas Syndrome, because within a few years, every affair, divorce, illegitimate child and double-cross on that show had been done – leaving nothing to experience except retreads or variants via new characters.

The nadir or extreme of the formula actually happens quite often on daytime soaps, but on a prime time level, nothing was better/worse than Dynasty/The Colbys, wherein Fallon Carrington Colby (Pamela Sue Martin) was abducted by aliens in a flying saucer designed by Star War's John Dykstra. That idea, as well as more lost/illegitimate children and affairs and re-affairs, was pulled from the asses of the show's screenwriters who knew there was nothing left for the show's characters to do except get weirder, sleazier, or meet aliens.

Grey's Anatomy ain't there, but it's now in Little Rascals terrain, where the Whole Gang at Seattle Grace are banding together to save a character that became irrelevant two years ago (or was it three?).

She's one of us. She's our own. We have to save her. She's family.

Nuh-uhn.

Izzie gotta die because she has no function in the series beyond a few cutaways for minor humorous moments, and contractual fulfillments for actress Katherine Heigl. When Izzie got the millions and established the Denny Duquette clinic, that was the beginning of her demise, because as a caretaker of cuts, bruises and burps of poor folk, there was a lack of sexy trauma. Dragging her into a few emergency procedures (like triaging a deer) were her only career highlights, and the writers, whether due to Heigl's desire to leave the show for big screen ventures or not, decided to give her cancer, and drag back the character of Denny as a ghost who was revealed to be a vision caused by her brain tumor.

Really?

So if we trace back a few episodes into this season, Izzy's tumor not only made Denny exist again and perform great sex, but reason within Izzy's brain: see, she kept asking him why he was here, and his response was “I'm here for you,” which she later discovered/reasoned was as an agent of the Angel of Death to tell her something bad's going on inside her physical vessel.

Really? Cancer helps you create an alter-ego in the form of a dead lover with whom you can argue, copulate, and learn you're physically ill?

Having not yet seen how the two-hour finale this Thursday evening will end, I'm still standing by my stance that Izzie gotta die. I liked her character, but she's irrelevant, and has to. More on the finale in tomorrow's blog (unless the bots think I'm an agent of the ABC network).

Tomorrow I'll also post a review of Adam Rifkin's underrated drama Look (2007), but while I'm on the topic of the Idiot Box, I'd like to congratulate CTV for going HD. They've already run a noontime report on how awesome the local news will be with its new anchor set, new backdrop of a bluey T.O. panorama, and widescreen framing for HD sets. The daily bumpers have started in the ad breaks, and we should all be excited the same banal news larded with charity pleas, anchors in tracksuits, insipid 'My Toronto' vignettes and talking head shots of daily news will be wider and clearer.

The question is will it be more relevant in HD? I think not.



- MRH