I can't get no satisfaction.

The last couple weeks of television have been rough. Let's just admit it together, now: the strike crippled TV as we know it and now we're all struggling to catch up. I think this is especially true with serious character dramas, like House, MD. Sorry, fans, but Grey's Anatomy doesn't actually have character development to be affected, nor does Two and a Half Men or Law & Order, but House and its ilk does. You can feel when you watch that the writers and producers are working with half time and thusly trying to shove all they can into a few short episodes, which means it ends up feeling false. House doesn't know, at least in what we've seen, that 13 is bisexual. Since when have Chase and Cameron still been together? And don't get me started (again) on Amber and Wilson.

With the season finale being a week away and Amber's mysterious illness building to its conclusion, I am pondering not the season but rather the series finale. A friend of my feels that it's "unfair" that Amber should get sick and (possibly) die, because it's already a show about misery and someone (Wilson) deserves a happy ending. I argue that the misery is the best part of the show.

In fact, I would argue that it's so much the best part--and so integral--to the show that there are only three ways the series can actually end without being the least satisfying piece of tripe imaginable. And here they are.

1. House dies.
   The cyclical nature of the season finales have worked this way thus far: House loses someone he loves (Stacy); House gets hurt (shot); House loses someone he loves (the fellows resigning or getting fired); House gets hurt (bus accident). House puts himself in some of the most ridiculous and dangerous positions imaginable and never seems to expect that he'll die or almost die. There's also the argument that with episodes like "97 Seconds" (House electrocutes himself to see if there's anything "there") and "House's Head" (House self-medicates and goes into cardiac arrest), his self-destructive behavior is amping up. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine a finale in which House dies. It could be in the tireless pursuit of knowledge and a cure for a disease, but I think it's more likely to happen that he destroys himself. House is surprisingly adept at putting himself in danger, and wouldn't it be just like him to get in a bad motorcycle accident and be lying in a coma while the team has to scramble to save the half-diagnosed patient of the week? The patient lives, House dies, and the show ends (in a way) as it began. It is, after all, the pilot in which House gives his "dying isn't dignified" speech. It would be a strong coda to the show, too.
   
   
2. Wilson or Cuddy dies.
   The cyclical nature of the season finales being as they are, House could possibly lose someone he cares about. But who does he care about? The two people he most is connected to and cares about are his two close friends: Wilson and Cuddy. The fellows dying would be bad but not necessarily touch him the same way losing either of these two would, and in the same way, I don't think there's going to be an emotional connection to any new character in the next few seasons that will rival the connection he has to these characters. I'd go beyond calling it unlikely to calling it "impossible."
   But if House is going to be affected by a death, anyone's death, it's going to end up being either Cuddy or Wilson. Frankly, I think that Wilson is a more likely candidate. Cuddy and House are close, but not like House and Wilson. If House is going to lose someone who he cares about, Wilson will be this person. It may crush House worse than anyone else he knows--it may be worse for House than his own death--but it's a possibility. Especially since I get the feeling that House is very much the kind of person who "don't know what he's got 'till it's gone."
   
   
3. It's all a dream.
   In "Three Stories," arguably one of the best season one (or perhaps overall) episodes of the series, we discover that House underwent surgery for his infarction after he was put into a drug-induced coma. From the point of view of the show, he comes out of the coma with his injured leg, but as we watch the show, we realize that "time is not a fixed construct." The show slides through time almost fluidly, when three months and three minutes can all take place in the same episode. It's never been perfect reality. Plus, we get to see inside House's psyche several times ("No Reason", "House's Head", even "Three stories" to an extent) in a way that no other show does. It's entirely possible, perhaps even logical, that he could still be in the coma and this reality we see as the viewer is actually the drug-induced reality of House's head. We know what his mind is capable of. Why would this not be a expanded a few beats further into it being all one giant, drug-induced dream? Reality is not a fixed construct in the House universe, either.
   

It's not that I want my show to end. It's not that I like thinking about the series finale. But I think, in a way, the show is edging along a terrifying cliff. Finding a satisfying ending is going to be a challenge, but there's no room for "happily ever after" in a show that is about, in its essence, misery.

It's just the level of misery we find at the end to mitigate the misery we've had from the start. Maybe it won't be warm and fuzzy, but it will be a little less frigid. At this point, that's the best we can hope for.

The Princess and the Peach.

My previous post was about video games, too. Clearly, I am just on a roll in this department.

As I said in the previous post, I've been a gamer since the inception of gaming. My most recent system is the Nintendo DS, Nintendo's answer to the next generation of hand-held consoles. I love my DS. The games are unique and a number of them are quirky, but hey, I like a healthy dose of quirk with my gaming. Especially given that the Super Mario Brothers franchise has been healthily recreated for the system.

One of these new Mario games is a game called Super Princess Peach. The plot is simple: Bowser, the great and evil cretin of the Mario series, has kidnapped Mario, Luigi, and most of the Toadstool people. Because there is no one left to defend the Toadstool Kingdom, Princess Peach and a talking umbrella named Perry set off to save the Toadstools and rescue the Mario Brothers.

At a surface level, I was exceedingly excited for this game. I may love the franchise, I may adore Nintendo, but the facts are these: most Nintendo protagonists are male and those who are not tend to be painfully androgynous. (Samus, anyone?) The classic "princess is captured, man must rescue" plot is followed by a number of the games, and even the Mario franchise's newest version--The New Super Mario Bros.--follows this cookie-cutter outline. It's a formula, but the formula works, and I'm not overly offended by it. I mean, it's a video game, and while I would have loved Tetra in Legend of Zelda: Windwaker to be a little more like Shiek in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I can't complain that she's not. It's the nature of the game.

But here is Super Princess Peach, a game that promises to have a female protagonist and give Peach a chance to shine for the first time in Nintendo's history. I want to say that the game was all that I, almost a feminist but not really a feminist, if you catch my meaning, was craving.

It fell short.

For one, Peach's abilities and "powers" aren't the usual head-stomping, fireball-shooting fare. While Mario jumps on creatures, Peach uses her umbrella to smack them, and many of her enemies don't die as much as they are smushed down and wander harmlessly around. (She can jump on the enemies, but the results are not the same.) There are no flowers for fireballs or raccoon tails for thwacking enemies, either. Peach's powers come from emotion. Let me repeat this: emotion. She can cry and drown enemies, get angry and set them on fire, feel calm and restore her strength, and be happy and fly through the air. None of these are actually as effective at hurting her foes as they are at destroying blockades that hinder progress through the stages. But then again, that's all right, given that the enemies are never hard to beat and power restoration gems are, quite literally, everywhere. If you do "die", there's no immediate repercussion other than restarting the level, either; there are no lives, and if you die, you just start over. That's it.

Another of my issues lies in the fact that the entire game is "cute". It's not subtle, either. Even the big baddies are adorable, like the smiling caterpillar in the fire level. Mario games are no paragon of terror, but the ghosts and some of the creatures in the later games were at least a bit menacing. Peach's world is sunny, happy, pastel-colored, and with soft corners. I was shocked in a recent level that spears were being thrown at me because it was the first time that it wasn't something cute and harmless trying to cause my downfall.

The talking umbrella, Perry, is just as ridiculous. Mario never needed a talking piece of rainproofing to help him on his quest. Sometimes, he had his brother, who kicked equal amounts of butt. That was it. Now we have talking umbrellas? Oh, come on. At least give her an animal companion or something else that has a prayer of, well, being menacing to the forces of evil.

I know that Super Princess Peach is and was marketed to girls in the sort of eight to twelve range. I'm all right with that; my cousin, who I think is ten now, got it two Christmases and so did I. But the fact remains that it characterizes girls as emotion-drive "cutiepies" who need help from any and all sources possible, up to and including animated inanimate objects.

I'm not sure I can really tolerate this as a creative movie. Shiek in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a woman taking her own fate into her hands, but she was a.) androgynous for most of the game and b.) not a playable character. Several other popular games have playable female characters or, indeed, female protagonists--Touch Detective and its sequel, Nancy Drew and the Secret of Olde World Park, the Mia Fey level of Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, a number of the other RPGs available for the system, Trace Memory, and probably others that I've never played--but the fact remains that they all end up tripping over this fatal flaw. I'm a character writer and a character buff and frankly, I love stories and series about and heavily featuring men. But I also want to be able to look at a girl and see more than a cute thing in a pink dress running through puffy worlds of clouds and defeating the big bad lizard with an umbrella.

Don't get me wrong. The game is addictive in a way that only Nintendo can manage. I just wish there was more to it for me to appreciate. Or, barring that, no umbrella.