(Title courtesy of MC Chris).

I’ve mentioned the “Clone Wars” series on here before, but it’s always along the lines of “No really, it’s better than you’d think.” It’s been pushing my buttons, but you know it’s still a cartoon TV series aimed directly at kids.

This week’s episode was called “The Manadlorian Plot” and had Obi-Wan Kenobi going to the planet Mandalore (Boba Fett’s home world!) and engaging in some The Thin Man-style banter with a duchess there before uncovering a terrorism plot staged by a suicide bomber, after which they flew to the planet’s moon and took speeder bikes to visit a long-abandoned mining station that was taken over by a renegade guerilla force of Boba Fetts plotting to bring down the government on account of its neutral stance in the war. After a series of near-miss escapes and explosions, Obi-Wan gets in a lightsaber duel with the head of the rebel group, who’s using a black, katana-style lightsaber that he got as a spoil of war from a raid on an ancient Jedi temple.

That sound you hear is 12-year-old me having an aneurism.

I’m not sure anymore that this series is aimed at kids; I suspect it’s aimed directly at teens and pre-teens in 1983, and it’s just taken them 27 years to broadcast it.

I’ve got an entire season’s worth of “Castle” recorded, not really out of a desire to watch it so much as I wanted to test the DVR and ABC is one of the few networks I get via my antenna. I’m sure I fit squarely into some demographic or other: I first heard of it because any show with an ex-Firefly cast member gets a ding on my radar, so I planned to watch it eventually. But it looked like any other of a billion police procedurals, indistinguishable from your Laws & Orders or CSIs or Boneses or NCISes.

And really, it kind of is. The cases are fairly predictable, the references all a little dated, the situations all a little bit cliched and predictable. But there’s a big difference, and surprisingly, it’s not just whether or not you like Nathan Fillion. (That’s only about 85% of the draw).

The difference is that there’s a genuine chemistry between the characters. And not just the two leads (although they’re the most obvious), but everybody in the cast. It really does seem like it’d be a fun show to work on. Even when the story seems to be coasting, it’s just pleasant to coast along with them.

And even more appealing to me: everybody likes each other. I’ve been watching several episodes back-to-back, and it was starting to dawn on me that there was something odd about this series. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, until there was a scene where Castle went back to his apartment and… had a pleasant, clever conversation with his mother and his daughter. It’s the standard template for every single TV series that you can’t have drama without conflict, so you always get the tough-as-nails police chief reining in the lone wolf cop, or the detective with a dark past, or a tension-filled home life. “Castle” seems to get that when you’ve got a homicide every episode, the tension is already built in. You can have all the characters just being nice and supportive of each other, and as long as you’ve got the writing chops for it, it doesn’t have to be dull.

It sounds like I’m damning the series with faint praise, but I’m really not: that kind of believable chemistry not just between your will-they-or-won’t-they? leads, but between the entire cast, isn’t just something that happens. The whole show is just charming and occasionally goofy, without being completely unable to take itself seriously like “Psych,” and without being self-consciously quirky or wrapped up in false romantic tension like “Moonlighting.” I’d say it’s more like The Thin Man without the booze, instead of “Law & Order” with more jokes.

And the writing’s pretty sharp in places, too. My favorite bit from the most recent episode (spoiler if you haven’t seen it and are interested): there’s a tense as-close-as-this-series-gets-to-drama moment in which Beckett is being hit with feelings of self-doubt, and she’s worried about making a mistake on a very important and very personal case. To reassure her, Castle says, “Do you know why I chose you as my inspiration for Nikki Heat?” “No, why?” Pause. “Because you’re tall. Now get in there and do your job.”

Last week I made the prediction that the conclusion of the series-long storyline in “Dollhouse” wouldn’t make a bit of sense, but would at least show us a ton of cool moments along the way.

After seeing the next-to-last episode (“The Hollow Man”), I see that I was wrong on both counts. What I didn’t expect was that they’d come up with a resolution that actually kind of sort of made sense, at least in “Dollhouse” terms. What I did expect: everything else.

I kind of feel bad making fun of the series over a weak episode, considering it has had so many genuinely cool moments. But the team behind the series has managed to do this so well so many times in the past — getting screwed over by a network, facing cancellation, losing an actor or actress, having to rework the format of the entire series at the last minute — and ended up with something that wasn’t just serviceable, but memorable. This was just a string of predictable moments followed by the hero running away from an explosion. I can’t help but be disappointed by my own unreasonably high expectations.

Saying more requires spoilers for people who haven’t seen it, or people who aren’t as cynical as I am and enjoyed the penultimate episode just fine.
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I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction: the ending of “Dollhouse” is not going to make sense.

That’s not just a case of my continuing to moan about the ending to “Battlestar Galactica,” or an attempt to be too-cool-for-school, or an attempt to steel myself against the oncoming hand-waving. They’ve already guaranteed that it won’t make sense, with the last pre-Christmas-break episode. (Spoiler for “The Attic,” in case you haven’t seen it): While building up to the final epic showdown, they had the characters meet one of the masterminds of the whole evil plot that drives the series, and he says that he did computer projections of the technology they were using, and almost all of them resulted in the end of the world.

Now, the idea that you can store all of a person’s brain patterns on a hard drive and then imprint that onto another person — that’s ludicrous technology, but it’s the central premise of the series. It’s the thing that you just accept so that the story can go forward. You can even extend that to the whole idea of a Matrix of connected brains, fine, since it’s all part of the main concept. But a computer simulation that could’ve predicted all the twists and turns of this series would be impossible, even for science fiction. Too much of the series has been based on surprise reveals and unexpected developments. To claim that a computer could’ve seen it coming is enough of a stretch; claiming that there’s an evil mastermind orchestrating the whole thing is ridiculous.

And it’s not just that it doesn’t work on an anal-retentive nerdrage “there’s no sound in space!!” level; it’s that the whole series has been inherently reactionary. You don’t have to have been keeping up with the fansites and blogs or listening to the commentary tracks, either — just watch the series and you can see all the changes in direction. Both seasons kind of meander as if they were episodic television for a few episodes and then suddenly shift into overarching storyline mode. The end-of-the-world business, for example, was introduced in the season one post-apocalyptic finale “Epitaph One,” which was made because they didn’t know whether or not the series would get picked up for another year. And now the whole premise of the series finale is trying to get the two ends of the story to meet up. It’s based on the idea that the characters in the show can predict events even the creators of the show couldn’t see coming.

I’m just saying don’t expect it to all get tied up neatly. If I’m proven wrong, then I’ll gladly retract everything. They already did an unexpectedly great job of tying up one of the storylines in the most recent episode: the whole flashback about Bennett and Caroline not only made sense, it fit perfectly into the continuity and was a really well-done story. Their motivations were clear, they turned into real characters instead of just “hero” and “creepy scientist with a dead arm,” and it actually ended up being pretty poignant. And I’ll bet you anything that they had the completely story planned out from the moment of her first introduction, and that that’s what made all the difference.

But even if (when) it turns out that this whole thing doesn’t make sense, that’s not a bad thing. This series is the quintessential example of the sum of its parts being better than the whole. There have been plenty of fantastic moments — cooler than “Buffy” and “Firefly”, even, which I never would’ve expected — that remain cool even though they don’t all fit together neatly. And last week’s episode was so absolutely over-the-top ridiculous in its surprise developments (it seemed like there was one series-changing reveal for each commercial break) that it shouldn’t have worked at all. And yet it did.

But to explain why I’m skeptical it’ll work in future episodes, that’ll take bigger spoilers.
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I’ve already documented the horrible destructive powers I have over popular entertainment. I can bring about the end — not just abrupt cancellation, but slow, painful decline — of bands, TV series, and movie or book series just by liking them. To date I’m responsible for the break ups of The Pogues, the Pixies, and Soul Coughing, as well as the downfall of “Alias” and “Battlestar Galactica.” I suspect I had something to do with “Lost”‘s weak second season as well. So it was with some trepidation that I recently started to watch the first season of “Mad Men”, after hearing people rave about it for the past few years.

It turns out that I didn’t need to worry, because I watched the first three episodes last night, and I just can’t get into it. Now, fans of the show should be thrilled, since I’ve just guaranteed it’ll run as long as “Desperate Housewives,” “Gray’s Anatomy,” “American Idol,” and “Survivor,” just to name a few other long-running series that have managed to avoid my Galactus-like gaze. But you can’t tell someone “I don’t like that thing you’re a fan of” without its coming across as a challenge or an insult, so I feel obliged to explain.

I don’t care about any of the characters
The first episode is very well-structured, so by the end of it I felt that I knew what the situation was and what all the characters were about. I just didn’t care at all about what happened to them. Contrast it with “The Sopranos,” another series about a bunch of deeply flawed characters with no obvious “good guy:” I could see what the characters’ problems were, but I was intrigued about how deep the problems went and how they were going to resolve them. And I gave up on that series when the characters became more annoying than intriguing; why watch a show about people who just keep doing stupid or downright awful things and never learn from them?

Hello, My Name Is Sexually Manipulative Office Woman
Just after the first 45 minutes, I could make a fairly reasonable prediction of what each character’s story arc was going to be — and after checking out the Wikipedia version, I could see that my predictions were depressingly accurate. (To be fair, there’s been a good bit of cultural diffusion going on as well; even without watching a show this popular, I knew going in that infidelities and secret identities and babies were going to come into play, and that one of the characters grows a beard).

It’s not as bad as something like American Beauty, where each of the characters seems to be a cliche whose depth turns out to be a different but just as shallow cliche. But the characters still have their one note that they keep hitting, from Painfully Good-Looking Ad Exec Who’s Conflicted And Has a Mysterious Past, to Mousy Girl From the Steno Pool Who Doesn’t Want to Be Limited In Her Life Choices Just Because She’s a Woman, to Young Asshole and Closeted Gay Guy.

The Epcot Effect
Disney parks, especially Epcot Center, are my ideal vacation, but whenever I mention this to anyone I get the reaction “I’d rather go some place real.” I can see where they’re coming from, and the reasons I disagree would fill a whole other post. But I get the same feeling from “Mad Men.” The set design, costumes, and music choices are all just about perfect. But it’s not as if the 60s aren’t well-documented. If I want to watch a show about ad men in the 60s, why don’t I just watch “Bewitched”? If I want to see demeaning attitudes towards women, why not “I Dream of Jeannie?” If I want to see excessive smoking, there’s “The Twilight Zone.”

At least in those series, you get a better idea of what people really put an emphasis on. “Mad Men” feels to me like everything incidental about the 60s crammed together and made the focus. The pavilions in Epcot’s World Showcase aren’t really the countries, they’re the first thing that someone in America thinks of when he thinks of those countries, all crammed together in one small place. And “Mad Men” isn’t really the 60s, it’s how people in 2007 imagine the 60s: “hmm, people were sexist and racist and smoked a lot, and the clothes and the cars were really cool.”

Did I mention I’m casually racist?
And I don’t want to imply that the series is all just about the incidental stuff — clothes and cars and architecture and cigarettes. But when they deal with the deeper aspects of America in the 60s, it’s given the same treatment. Scenes feel to me like a TV biopic, where the screenwriter is desperately trying to cram a chapter’s worth of thematic material into one scene. The end result is that the ideas that would have resonated with me if they’d been mentioned casually or incidentally, I instead feel like I’ve been bludgeoned with. The characters don’t just smoke; the plot of the pilot episode is about selling cigarettes while knowing about the health risks. A woman can’t just be subtly reminded of the double standard of sexual promiscuity between men and woman; we have to see a Cronenberg-like scene with a leering gynecologist whose every single line of dialogue repeats the point. Closeted Gay Guy is completely established as such in his first scene, but we still have to see him in a strip club leering at other men in case anybody didn’t catch on. Again, kudos to them for not going with the most obvious cliches, but I still felt myself, in scene after scene, yelling at the screen “OKAY YES I GET IT LET’S MOVE ON.”

I’m still a 14-year-old boy in a 38-year-old man’s body
And yeah, it’s got to be acknowledged: I like plot-heavy stuff, and have never been a big fan of character studies. I’ve jokingly said that a show’s got to have robots, spaceships, time travel, or magic to hold my interest (and Tony Soprano’s dreams were just supernatural enough to keep me occupied), but what I really want is something that keeps everything moving. Again, all of the stuff in the first few episodes of “Mad Men” felt like incidental stuff made focus: these characters’ quirks might interest me if they were doing something more interesting than being 60s people.

So I can definitely understand what other people see in the series. Like I said, the music and the costumes and the production design are just outstanding. And I’ll gladly watch an hour of “The Clone Wars” no matter how weak the story, just as an excuse to see cool sets and costumes. (And a huge part of why “Lost” is such a big deal for me is that whole early 70s aesthetic that they get just right). There’s just not much else there for someone like me. So all of you “Mad Men” fans can breathe a sigh of relief; it’s probably going to run for a decade at least.