TV finales this season

It's that time of year when a bunch of shows end their runs, either for the year or forever. Recently we had some good ones, and pehaps some that were overdue, and now I'd like to rundown my reactions to the ones that mattered to me.

Castle - This one was sad, but also quite overdue. The major arcs since Castle and Beckett got maried have stretched crediibility, and that's saying a lot for a show that requires a suspense of disbelief that a mystery writer is equal to three of New York City's finest. In addition to Castle's amnesia and Beckett having a secret life, individual one shot episodes inluded an invisibility suit, an immortal, a genie and the antichrist. Allow me to reiterate that three episodes this season left us with the possibility that Castle actually encountered supernatural entities, the genie episode literally left us with the possibility Richard had three wishes and since he used them for things that actually happened (the survival of his friend's wife and their neweborn child) we'll neve know if it was just coincidence or if that was actually the genie following up on that wink she gave him as she left, and the one guy did not die despite three fatal experiences and each time he was bored. I really hoped that the finale would have been for Castle to reveal that everything since his wedding was actually the first draft of his last Nikki Heat novel and that he had used everyones real names in the draft and that after reading it to everyone for the last two years he would change the names in editing. Instead they gave us a neat epilogue that was clearly thrown together in a few minutes, possibly the day of. Seriously, they had considerd coming back for another season and didn't declare it a series finale until the announcement came during Dancing with the Stars within an hour of airtime, and it's quite possible that the final scene was filmed during the first hour of that show. For those who don't understand how TV works, the show appeared to end with Castle and Beckett both being shot, which could have been left with "To be continued..." and open next season with Castle surviving and Beckett not because Stana Katic had the sense to quit already, but finally somebody had the sense to know the show should not go on and they filmed the epilogue which, if only one take, could have been shot, edited and tacked on while the show was airing. I did like Castle, but they jumped the shark and suffered from Moonlighting syndrome, when a show that relies on "will they or won't they" tension answers the question and there's nothing really left to work with.

Once Upon a Time - Thankfully only a season finale, I still like this show, and it's got some good points and bad points. For one thing, plot armor is pretty darn thick on the Charming family. For those who don't know, plot armor is a term used to refer to when a main character seems to be unkillable for no other reason that that the writer needs them alive. Hook actually became the first character to cheat death even when all hope seemed to be extinguished, but Robin Hood died. This was unfair for Regina, but they played out her story in an interesting way with Jekyll and Hyde and may have a very interesting arc next season. So far the main story is very good, my problem is what they are leaving out. First of all, Nova, Grumpy's love from the first season, when the hell is she coming back? Speaking of lovers, now that Red and Dorothy have broken the homosexuality barrier, are we ever going to see Mulan get her girl? We know damn well she was into Aurora, what about Merida? There was something there. And another thing, what about Emma's promise to help her friend find her father? They skipped that for a whole season, I'm assuming the Dragon is he guy, but they're gonna drag that out forever.

Blacklist - Speaking of plot armor, so Liz isn't dead? Was anybody actually surprised? The whole show is about the relationship between Liz and Red, if she actually died, the show is over. It was very creative to take this angle, but while they could fool the characters in conext, the audience should know better by now that the series would not actually go that way no matter what they say. Above all, this is a TV show, anything can happen if the writers want it to, never believe anything, especially in this series that has been nothing but deception and revealing deceptions and having deceptions within deceptions. As Red said in the pilot "Of course [you shouldn't believe me or trust me]. I'm a criminal, criminals are notorious liars."

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - Plot armor failed someone here, Lincoln died and Ward appears to be gone for good this time. It was clever though for them to put out the red herring about that cross necklace and leave us wondering who would be wearing it, assuming we knew the answer only for the final episode to be a game of hot potato. It was also sad that we saw the headline saying Agent Carter died, a nod to the series cancellation, not that it actually connects because it was in the past. Sadly Marvel's Most Wanted also got the ax which leaves Bobby and Hunter in the air, so next season actually is going to be a complete surprise. One thing, they said six months later, but the season premiere may not be a full six months away, and since it kind of has to be in real time to keep with the movies, that means next season could open with some flashback/flashforward action leading up to exactly what is going on in that final scene.

Grimm - I don't know how many people are actually watching this show, but you should, it's awesome. The finale was perfect, wrapped up a lot of crap happening this season while leaving plenty for next season. I really hope Nick and Adalind work things out, but is Juliet finally fixed? God I'm shipping now. Think of the children, I mean really, Diana WTF? I mean really that kid is seriously...I don't know but we need that situation under control. Oh and Monroe and Rosalee are expecting, while most parents wonder boy or girl, we're wondering blutbad or fuchsbau. Or both? It was mentioned Renad was part Zauberbiest, but nobody else seems to be part anything so can somebody please explain these breeding rules, they make no freaking sense to me as a biologist!

I know Game of Thrones just started, but I need to comment on this; plot armor saved Jon Snow. Deep down, we all knew it was going to happen, but some how still the most WTF I have seen on TV. Actually, the most WTF was learning the truth about Hodor. I want to talk about it, but...ok, I think that's about all I can handle for now. Oh one last thing, my prediction for how GOT will end, Daenerys will return with her dragons to stop the White Walkers and reclaim the Iron Throne. She will take Jon Snow as her husband as his family leads the fight. I predict no more Starks will die and the only Lannister who will be safe is Tyrion because he's just too damn awesome to kill. If anyone deserves plot armor, it's that dude. Okay, now I'm done.

Final Fantasy V

Okay, so I've gone over every other Final Fantasy game I've actually played, this would actually be the last one I've got to cover. Number five is a pretty good one as far as I'm concerned, especially since it was quite possibly the best use of the job system and inclusion of elemental crystals. Also, it was the first to spawn an anime, which I hope to see some day. The job system was very special because if you had an end game in mind you could create a super character, nay a super party. Every time you master a job, its traits become a permanent part of the character when they go jobless. Arguaby the ultimate physical character would be monk, ninja, hunter as monk gives counter and higher HP, ninja gets you two weapons simultaneously, and hunter give you the ability to attack four times, which means you can hit eight times in one turn, ten if counter gets triggered. Magic characters get a boost from red mage's doublecast and if you set them with mime they get three slots which means doublecast and it can be applied to two other types of magic. The possibilities are endless!

Plotwise it's not bad, kind of straightforward and not terribly original, but not bad. The main character is Bartz who rides a chocobo, wields a sword from the get go and is probably the most generic RPG hero in the franchise, if not the entire genre. One day Bartz meets Princess Reina and an old man who can't remember anything except that his name is Galuf. The Princess was out looking for her father who had gone to look for the Wind Crystal when a meteor interrupts her travels and draws Bartz's attention. The three go to find the king together because the amnesiac thinks that's something along the lines of what he was doing before he lost his memory and Bartz has nothing better to do. They need to get across the sea and since the wind crystal stopped working, nobody can sail except one mysterious crew of pirates led by Faris who catches the party trying to steal their ship and surprisingly agrees to help. As it turns out, the pirate ship still works because rather than wind in the sails, it moves by being pulled by a sea serpent. They get to the wind crystal but it breaks and the crystals call out for these four to save the world and to this end grants them the power of jobs so they can use magic and other cool abilities. Their next stop is the water crystal, and along the way, they discover that Faris is a girl. Again they are too late to stop the crystal from breaking, but they get more jobs. Then they leave the mountain locked region they've been stuck in to look for the fire crystal. They are pormptly imprisoned where they meet the game's Cid who helps break out and once again they are too late to save the crystal and they discover someone is actively destroying the crystals. Now the crystal of Earth is the only one left, and aong the way to find it we get the big reveal, Faris is actually Reina's long lost sister Sarissa! So as you can imagine, this crystal does not have a much brighter future than the others, and it would seem the world is in for a bleak end, but it's not over yet. As it turns out the crystals were used to seal an evil bing known as ExDeath and now that they are broken, so is the seal and now he is ready to destroy the world again. A mysterious girl arrives to help out claiming to be Galuf's granddaughter Kara, and Galuf remembers he was one of the Warriors of Light who sealed ExDeath and no he wants to send ExDeath back to the world they came from. Galuf succeeds leaving Bartz, Reina and Faris behind, but they don't give up, they follow Galuf back to his world through a meteor portal with the help of Cid. shortly after they get to Galuf's world they are captured by ExDeath's henchman Gilgamesh. That's right, the Gilgamesh who keeps showing up in every other FF game, but more on that later. The whole group goes on a desperate quest to find a way to defeat ExDeath once and for all, and along the wya they find out Bartz's father was also a Warrior of Light who fought alongside Galuf against ExDeath. Galuf has a final showdown with ExDeath which is impressive because you can't lose this fight, even if Galuf hits 0 HP the battle continues until ExDeath is defeated, the downside being that Galuf actually dies after the battle, the party even tries using phoenix down and white magic, but Galuf went beyond his limits and he's dead for good...but Kara inherits all of his job mastery so it's cool, you just trade an old guy for a little girl with the same stats, if that makes any sense at all. Also, the party accidentally destroys the crystals of this world without realizing what they are and then things get really wierd. Apparently, the two worlds were one but were seperated by breaking the crystals in two, which was done because a wizard created a powerful void magic that could only be stopped by putting it between the two worlds that resulted from seperating them. Now that the two worlds have become one, there's a whole bunch of new crap which is actually good because most of it is stuff you can use against ExDeath. Oh did I forget to mention, he's not dead after all? Yeah apparently under his armor the bastard was acually some sort of tree demon and he left a twig on the party so that he could regrow later, and then he took the power of the void and actually puts holes in the world, I mean he literally just zaps spots and they become empty holes that water just flows into and it's gone. Many of the targets are places that the game designers just didn't want you going back to this late in the game and if you missed something important, screw you, but storywise the big deal is Bartz's home is one of the first places hit and he goes berserk. Ultimately there is a big showdown...blah, blah, blah...

Gilgamesh gets thrown into the void and from there he randomly falls out into other dimensions and makes appearances in various other games including FFVIII and FFXII, and yes this is actually the same Gilgamesh, he apparently is forever stuck between dimensions dropping out randomly for cameos as the most prolific single character in the series. It's also believed that Lone Wolf and Gogo who first appear here are somehow the same guys that reappear in FFVI but with just that one appearance they pale in comparison to Gilgamesh and Omega Weapon who apparently also crosses dimensions after it's first appearance in this game. One more fun fact, You must get collect hte spells Ifrit, Titan, Holy and Flare in order to complete the game, but they are the only spells you have to collect and you could get through the game without getting any other spells, though you're stupid as hell if you do try that. Go ahead, do it, let me know how it goes. Originally released on SNES, it was re-released on PS1, GBA, and iPad.

Supers

So I had an idea for another story, which sadly will remain on the back burner because I have half a dozen other stories to write before I get to this one, but I thought I'd just put it out there to test the waters, see if any of you like it, and remind myself of what I came up with in case I forget it later.

So there are many superhero stories out there that talk about what happens when superheroes just happen with no real reason and there are a bunch of them. X-Men is the biggest one, then there's Heroes, the Tommorrow People and others. The big problem with most is that they all revolve around a mutation which is eventually described as being a single common mutation among all mutants that accounts for an infintite number of powers. I realize that superhero stories require some suspension of disbelief but by now we should know that if there were a gene that allowed for some sort of superpower that it would either be a common power to all mutants or a variety of genes giving a variety of powers. A man who has magnetic powers would not sire a son who has super speed. A man who can absorb powers who has a child with a clairvoyant, wouldn't produce a son that could fly, and if he had a child with a pyrokinetic that child wouldn't have regenerative powers and she most likely wouldn't have a son that inherited a power that skipped two generations without inheriting any traits from the generations in between. Tommorrow People had it much more accurate with everyone having the same power set, but the variety of powers within thta set and the ability to keep it secret seems unlikely. My new story idea, Supers, is what I feel is the most likely scenario, which I will go into detail now.

There is one mutation which comes in two forms and expresses three ways. The most common and basic form allows humans to manipulate kinetic energy to counter gravity which quite simply allows one to fly, and through a quirk can also be applied temporarily to any object one touches which presents as super strength. The other two forms are the same plus something extra, the rarest form allows for electrogenesis/electrokinesis, but this trait is paired with meromelia (missing limbs) and only seems to work with direct contact with the undeveloped limbs so it's arguable that it's not necessarily an advantage over the standard mutation; the final form is when the mutant is pushed to the limit of their abilities and develop the ability to apply their powers to objects without having to touch them, essentially psychokinesis, but this form is also disadvantageous because it comes with reduced mental capacity, either one starts out expressing this way and has some form of autism or other mental disability, or they develop the powers later on and go insane. When this started people were unsure of what to do, many were afraid and the government stepped in. They determined that mutants outside of the government's jurisdiction could be a threat later on and it would be better to collect known mutants to be trained by the military at Area 51. Of course not every mutant was fit for this, most of the autistic psychokinetics that were located were sent to the National Institute of Mental Health, many others of both types were hidden by people who didn't trust the government and felt they were doing right by the children, which would become a problem later, and the one electrokinetic that was identified...well he's the main character sort of, so new paragraph as we get into more specifics.

Our hero, his nickname is Sparky. He was passed over for the military, but he wasn't bad enough for the National Institute for Mental Health, so he ended up going to MIT where he was used for research, but was also compensated with a scholarship and became a psychologist and ends up working at the New York City Police Department where he is reunited with Amber, a childhood friend who did make the military and has been placed in the police department to handle the crimes involving Supers, as they are being called, that slipped through the cracks. She has a partner, Captain Murica, and together they work to solve crimes involving Supers, recruiting a few more to their side including a couple of kids, Ray and Hope, that end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Dragon, a buddhist monk whose twin brother is in the Chinese Triad. Things continue to escalate until they discover the truth about the psychokinetics who have managed to remain a secret but are very dangerous, enough that the team may be the only thing standing between them and everybody else. Top villains include an Irish mobster from Boston that tracks down Sparky, and Teek, who has some history with Captain Murica.

Well, what do you think? It's gonna be a while, but it may happen someday.

Pokemon

Hard to believe I haven't touched on this one yet, but it's high time I gotta. Pokemon is the most ridiculously popular video game/anime combo to hit America, probably even bigger than Dragon Ball Z, not necessarily better, but bigger. I admit, I am a bit of a fan even though I haven't really kept up since the first generation, but I am rather happy that it lasted this long. Yes, I actually caught all 150 original pokemon in the red version and a few years ago I finally got the yellow version and tried again this time using only Ash's team from the first season (Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charizard, Butterfree, Pidgeot, and of course Pikachu). For those who don't know, you can halt evolution for pokemon that evolve at level up by pressing B during the evolution animation and they still level up, so Bulbasaur and Squirtle are actually on the same level with the rest of the team. Ash's team works pretty well except for Sabrina who is a bit overpowered and Butterfree seems to be the only one that can do anything and it took a lot of leveling up to pull that off. They can handle the first three of the Elite Four, Pikachu or Bulbasaur can take down Lorelei's water types with Charizard backing up on ice types, Squirtle or Bulbasaur can handle Bruno's ground/rock types while Pidgeot can handle the fighting types, Butterfree leads the team against Agatha's ghost team, it's Lance that kicks my butt and if I get past him, Gary takes me down. I wondered why it seemed easier when I played red, then I remembered using Zapdos, a level 70 legendary pokemon makes a difference and you just don't realize that until you try to go without.

Okay, now I gotta be objective, I love the game, but as RPGs go, this one had a weak story and relied almost entirely on the gimmick of "gotta catch 'em all". If you let the novelty of capturing all of the pokemon distract you, it's totally fun, but the story itself is pretty weak. There's basically three major plots running through the game, qualifying for the pokemon league, your personal rivalry, and Team Rocket. Team Rocket is potentially the most interesting plot regarding criminals who steal rare pokemon and use them to commit even more heinous crimes. Seriously, they have moments where they seem kinda badass, but somehow, they take a backseat to the other plots. The whole thing starts with a kid selecting his first pokemon which he will use to capture other pokemon by weakening them until they can't fight back and capturing them in poke balls. Then his rival picks the pokemon that has a natural advantage over the one you pick because there's a rock paper scissors relationship between them, water extinguishes fire, fire burns grass, and grass absorbs water, so no matter which one you pick, the other guy just picks the one that can hurt yours and you're kinda screwed. Both of you go off into the world to build your teams and every now and then your rival comes back to taunt you with his team. For the most part you just kind of ignore him and move on to your bigger goal of proving yourself against the gym leaders and collecting badges which qualify you to go to the final tournament at the Indigo Plateau and prove your the best, only to find out your rival beat you there and your final test is beating him. That really is the overarching plot that dominates the game, but fortunately some other fun stuff happens to keep things intersting along the way. First you meet Team Rocket between the first two gyms where they are stealing fossils(you'll find out just how valuable they are later on) then when you get to the next town you find a house where they have ransacked a house for no real good reason, they are just criminals commiting crimes because they are the bad guys. You have trouble getting into the next town geographically which is Saffron City so you have to take the long way around which involves getting the first of five special training tools called HMs or Hidden Machines which involves boarding a cruise ship, then it's off to Lavendar Town, known for the Pokemon Tower where dead pokemon are laid to rest and you meet the one pokemon in the game that can't be captured and doesn't belong to another trainer, the Marowak which is a boss at the top of the tower. After beating it you will get the Pokemon Flute which you will need to wake a Snorlax blocking your path later on, and you can get a Marowak by evolving a Cubone you can capture in the tower, and Team Rocket is there giving all of the pokemon a hard time. However before you can do any of that, you first need a Silph Scope from Silph Co. in Saffron City which is dealing with Team Rocket in their biggest scheme, takign the entire company hostage, but before you can get into Saffron City you first need to bribe the last guard who is thirsty by buying him a drink from the vending machine at the top of the Poke Mart in Celadon City which also has a casino that is a front for Team Rocket. Yeah, those bastards are everywhere. Once you manage to settle all of this it's pretty easy going as you got to Fuschia City and take a break to visit the Safari Zone to get another HM so you can surf to Cinnabar Island also you can collect some unique pokemon in the Safari Zone. Once you reach Cinnabar Island there's a wierd bit where you can go to an abanadoned mansion where you can collect some more unique pokemon, but if pay attention to the lab notes, you find out that the local gym leader actually captured Mew and bred Mewtwo who subsequently destroyed the mansion. Also, there's a lab where you can take your fossil that you recieved as a reward for fighting Team Rocket way back at the beginning and have a rare extinct pokemon brought to life from it, because apparently the scientists haven't learned their lesson from playing god. Then for the final gym leader who turns out to be the leader of Team Rocket, Giovanni, who you caught red-handed in the Silph Co. hostage situation, but for some reason, all you care about is the damn Earth Badge. I mean it's cool and all, but you just took down a criminal mastermind and the sport of pokemon fighting is somehow more important I don't know what's more disturbing, finding out that he's part of the league or that as badass as he is, he's not in charge of the league. So what should have been the final boss of the game is just another stepping stone to finish your sporting career, which by the way, when you stop and think about it, the entire game is basically a combination of Beanie babies and cock-fighting.

Oh yes, I just ruined your childhood, see you next week.