Animal Planet's show Emergency Vets should not have an episode titled "The Bon Appetit Episode." very wrong sounding. (July 1 @ 5pm EDT, for any doubters who want to look it up).

The teaser trailer for Star Trek Nemesis, the upcoming 10th Trek movie, will debut at Starbase 21's Trek Expo in Tulsa, Okla., on June 22, the official Trek Web site reported. The trailer will debut on TV and online shortly before it hits theaters in time for the July 4 holiday weekend, the site reported. Nemesis opens Dec. 13.

Téa Leoni (Jurassic Park III) and actor-husband David Duchovny (The X-Files) announced the birth of a baby boy, the couple's second child, the Reuters news service reported. The 7-pound, 10-ounce baby was born on June 15. No other details, including the child's name, were announced. The couple have a 3-year-old daughter named Madelaine West.

soon after, Duchovny disappeared without explanation.

and ya know, i just realized who Téa Leoni is and that she's not the Wayne's World chick (or should i call her the Relic Hunter chick now?).

some changes in the enforcement of the internet use policy in the Tulsa office and the reporting of whatever it is they're reporting here will be keeping me from doing much posting during the day for a while. because i do little posting in the evenings, posts will be infrequent until someone around here can answer my questions about what is an acceptable use and duration of use of internet time.

they're making individual determinations about what sites we're allowed to visit: so far, CNN is ok. Ebay is ok. Metafilter is not. Toys 'R' Us is ok. Gamespot is not ok (which is moot, because the Cybersense thing blocks it anyway). TVGuide Online, of course, is ok, and so is Gist TV. then there's the general, unspecified "research is ok" but they didn't tell us which (or whether) search engines are ok. we were also told that websites that have anything 'adult related' in the title bar are not ok. this means my own website is off limits right now.

in other news, i'm sleepy.

there's been lots of uproar among fans about Tara's death on Buffy. entire posting boards are filled with nothing but profanity, invectives and promises never to watch any Joss Whedon show again, all because, they claim, Joss is a terrible man who is obviously homophobic and misogynistic, and he fulfilled the Hollywood cliche of the lesbian death and tragedy and anger, or something like that. many articles have been written on Joss' evilness, and most of them point to the Celluloid Closet for their evidence of the lesbian-death-and-evil thing.

i disagree with all that, and finally, someone has responded well to the Lesbian-Killing Evil-Joss talk.

(linked article now copied here)

Death and the Single Girl: Buffy Grows Up

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER


by Andrew Gilstrap
PopMatters Associate Music Editor

Death and the Single Girl: Buffy Grows Up

"Something, isn't it? One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. It ripped her insides out... It took her light away. From me. From the world."
— Willow, "Villains"

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about death. It is about losing loved ones and struggling to carry on. It is about finding happiness, or some semblance of it, and having it snatched from you. That might seem pretty obvious. After all, this is a show where vampires, demons, and other assorted bugaboos kill and are killed on a weekly basis. Its body count is unparalleled on TV (unless you count its spin-off, Angel).

I'm not sure, though, that the show itself came to terms with death until its fifth season, when Buffy's mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), died of an aneurysm. That episode, "The Body," is possibly the finest hour of television I've seen, bar none. It concentrates on the aftermath of Joyce's death, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) finding the body and going into shock, of her friends failing to cope with it in various ways. It is an incredibly moving episode, one that finally admits that you don't walk away from death unscathed. It also shows that, for all the group's slaying experience, they really weren't prepared for death when it stole a loved one.

Oh sure, Joss Whedon and company had been tweaking the whole tormented life-of-the-Slayer thing, and even raised it into sharp definition by playing Buffy against Faith (Eliza Dushku), a second Slayer who got a literal sexual thrill out of the hunt. But until Joyce's death, they only rarely dealt with the raw impact of death, as when a newly demonic Angel (David Boreanaz) kills Giles' (Anthony Head) new girlfriend, Jenny (Robia LaMorte). But that pain passed pretty quickly, in the show's memory. The effects of Joyce's death have lingered.

Why does that matter now? Because as horrific and numbing as Joyce's death was to Buffy, during the last season, an even greater seismic shock rocked the characters and caused more controversy among viewers than anything else the show has done. Tara is dead.

As the past season wound to a close, the increasingly-annoying-and-increasingly-evil geek Warren (Adam Busch) fired a gun at Buffy. He hit Buffy, but he also accidentally hit Tara (Amber Benson), and killed her. All we see of the shot hitting Tara is Willow (Alyson Hannigan) being splashed with her blood. It's a shocking moment. Tara and Willow had just reconciled after months of hardship, and were taking a breather from days of marathon makeup sex.

This, of course, sent Willow on an unparalleled course of vengeance, in which flaying Warren alive and incinerating him was her idea of just getting started. The two-hour finale was a non-stop knot of tension that found Willow going head-to-head with everyone in the Scooby Gang (and kicking every square inch of their collective asses, to paraphrase Dark Willow) until Xander (Nicolas Brendan), of all people, kept her from destroying the world.

The controversy over Tara's death and Willow's reaction has been amazing. Whedon has been accused of misogyny and homophobia because he killed Tara, and that his subdued portrayals of the gay couple's sexuality didn't mirror the swingin' heterosexual sex that dominated several seasons of the show. Todd Ramlow, in an article on this site, contends that Whedon's answer to the problem of presenting Tara and Willow was to "code lesbianism as witchcraft, and specifically, lesbian sex as spell-casting."

I think that's a fundamental misreading of what was happening. The portrayal of Willow and Tara's relationship was in keeping with their personalities. Since Buffy started, the show has had fun with Willow's wallflower tendencies ("leather-clad ghost Willow" and "evil Vampire Willow from another dimension" come to mind). Historically, she simply hasn't been prone to overt displays of sexuality; when she was dating bandmember/werewolf Oz (Seth Green), we never saw them making the beast with two backs atop an amplifier at The Bronze. In fact, Willow's tentative steps into sexuality and her "first time" were very tender moments, especially compared with Buffy's full-on passion with Angel.

Willow's relationship with Tara followed the same course. Extremely tentative, it bore the telltale signs of a friendship that was growing into something more. As both Tara and Willow were witches, Whedon used scenes where they collaborated on spells to mirror their growing affection towards each other. Some of those scenes were downright erotic, which is probably why some folks feel like Whedon was ciphering an equation that read: lesbianism = witchcraft. Spell-casting might have been the bridge that allowed these two to come together, and Whedon might have played the magic angle (a kissing Willow and Tara floating above the dancers at The Bronze, etc.) a touch too heavily at times, but there's nothing in the show to suggest that lesbianism is a gateway to witchcraft, or vice versa. At least initially, Whedon used scenes of magic to get past potentially troubling and overt representations of lesbian awakening, but by the time Willow became addicted, the landscape had become markedly more complex. Her lesbian identity was always a liberation; the same couldn't be said for her witchcraft.

Willow's descent into a magic junkie had very few erotic undertones (the only obvious one was where fellow witch Amy takes her to see Rack [Jeff Kober], a pusher who specializes in magic fixes). Rack is into "little girls," it's later revealed, and Willow's first rush of bought magic is undoubtedly sexual. Overall, though, her reliance on magic to manage daily life -- to wash dishes, turn on lights -- are free of sexuality. It's like any junkie's increasing dependence on the crutch of choice. Even as Willow and Tara's relationship became known to the rest of the group, it remained a fairly private affair. Stolen kisses, furtive holding-of-hands, post-coital snuggling in bed. Admittedly, it paled in comparison to Buffy's passionate coupling with Angel, her repeated bedding of Riley (Marc Blucas), or her dark and compulsive trysts with Spike (James Marsters) -- and we all know how well these relationships turned out. Buffy, as the show's focal point, has naturally enjoyed the most on-screen sex, but those scenes rarely exemplify mental health.

Apart from Anya (Emma Caulfield) and Xander (or Cordelia [Charisma Carpenter] and Xander), whose sex lives were portrayed mainly for laughs, Willow and Tara were the very picture of sexual normalcy. And, apart from Joyce's death, they hold a monopoly on the show's most heartbreaking moments. It's impossible to forget Willow's anguish as she nursed an addled Tara, her sanity taken by a voracious Glory (Clare Kramer), Tara's breakup with Willow, or, most recently, their reunion. At that point, when Tara haltingly asked Willow if they couldn't just skip the awkward parts and get right to the kissing, it seemed like everything was perfect. Willow was off the magic and her emotional lynchpin, Tara, was back. And then, Tara died.

Willow tried to bring her back, failed, then embraced dark magic, absorbing magic books and viciously draining Rack of his energy. She was the most powerful witch in the Western Hemisphere, and unstoppable in her quest for vengeance. Her every action following Tara's death was fueled by grief. She reacted in the same way that many of us would have (straight or gay), except that she had a pipeline to the dark powers at her disposal.

Willow's torment was free of any links between magic and lesbianism -- quite simply, Willow had lost the love of her life. While she was with Tara, Willow blossomed both as a lover and as a witch, but the two paths were always running parallel -- not intertwined -- and they eventually diverged. It was Tara who tried to talk Willow out of relying on magic, it was Tara who broke up with Willow because of her magical abuses, and it was Willow's ditching of magic that brought Tara back into her life.

True, it's unfair that Willow and Tara suffered like they did, but is any character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer free of grief? Giles lost Jenny, and later exiled himself to England for the good of his surrogate daughter, Buffy. Buffy had to say goodbye to Angel. Buffy lost her mother. Buffy died. Buffy worked at the Double Meat Palace. Things got so bad for Buffy that she briefly preferred an alternate reality in which she was insane. Anya and Xander's engagement dissolved at the altar. Spike has been reduced to a neutered version of himself, his love for Buffy culminating in an attempted rape and a mystical quest for revenge that's taken a really wild twist. Who hasn't suffered to insane degrees on Buffy?

Willow and Tara were treated like anyone else on the show -- they tried to live their lives and got smacked around by fate in the process. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that, as everyone else on Buffy seems to be drifting aimlessly, Willow and Tara were the last characters who still seemed rooted in something tangible. Now that's gone. To think of Willow and Tara only in terms of their lesbianism is to do a disservice to lovers who were fully realized, regardless of their gender or orientation.

Proposing that Willow's magic addiction is somehow a punishment for being a lesbian, or that Willow and Tara were degraded simply because the complexities of "real life" assailed them, is to ignore seasons worth of episodes that argue the exact opposite. Attaching veils of nonexistent symbolism and sexual politics obscures what the couple really was, right up until the end: the very model of healthy stability in the Buffy universe. But nothing good can remain in Sunnydale. As Whedon himself put it in a post to Buffy fans: "Willow's story was not about being gay. It was about weakness, addiction, loss... the way life hits you in the gut right when you think you're back on your feet. The course of true love never did run smooth, not on my show."

Willow had gotten back on track, she was clean, her lover was back, and then her lover was gone. In the end, Willow and Tara were not treated any differently than anyone else, and that's the way it should have been, the way it always was. One of the refreshing things about Whedon's treatment of the couple was that Willow and Tara's lesbianism was largely a non-issue, free of impassioned speeches or "very special episodes" about discrimination. It simply was.

The sixth season of Buffy ended with pure, uncut sorrow. For one night, Willow became pure vengeance, and it had nothing to do with magic addiction, and it had nothing to do with lesbianism. She was never going to have Tara again, and someone was going to pay. It was a hell of a finish. Whatever the seventh season brings, it will include mourning. Willow will mourn the evil she's done, she will mourn her weakness, and she will mourn Tara. So will we.

— 10 June 2002
(article originally found here)

saw Scooby Doo at a matinee this weekend. it was well worth sitting in a theater full of kids.

"Variety reports that Jerry Bruckheimer has greenlit a sequel [to Coyote Ugly] to be penned by the original film's writer Gina Wendkos.

because the first one didn't suck enough. feh.

Xbox Buffy the Vampire Slayer game's official website. /drool

and Hunter: The Reckoning is a second reason to get an Xbox (more on the original H:TR, which is very Buffy-like).

Relma's a resbian?

correction to a yesterday post: my Buffy s2 DVDs have three Buffys, not two. still, there's one Spike and no Angel (neener)

hey, let's go with more Joss (last of the day, promise)! “There are no plans to put [Spike] on Angel.”

i'm soooo relieved. i was so worried about that happening that i really haven't been able to sleep lately.

not really. i'd never thought they would, and i hadn't heard the rumor. really, what kind of show would that be? Angel and Spike: The Ensouled Vampire Duo. Fate made them vampires. Fighting evil and brooding alot has made them brothers.

ok, so i don't think Spike is going to brood. i think he'll be the one to realize that he's not the same creature that did all the terrible things that Angel seems to get all broody about, and that, hey! even without a soul he was turning into a good guy. maybe it'll play into that Spike cockiness. "I was a souless vampire and fighting against the evil within. William is da man!"

i wouldn't mind seeing some Spike/Angel encounters though. you know, showing off the shiny new soul he's got.

Spike: "See, I've got one too. And guess what, ya ponce? Mine's not a curse, which means I don't have to worry about losing it for shagging Buffy."

::Angel gets growly::

Angel: "You stay away from her. She'd NEVER let you touch her."

::Spike circles slowly around a motionless Angel, looking more-than-a-little smug,. He stops at Angel's side and leans in close to his ear, whispers::

Spike: "She already has, mate. Many times."

::Big fight breaks out. Spike laughs a lot. Angel growls a lot.::

Joss talks to Sci Fi Wire a little about next season [which means it's SPOILERY to a degree, but it's very general].

also, Joss puts to rest a rumor about Angel [this link also SPOILERY in the strictest sense, but only if you'd read the afore metioned rumor or concluded it on your own]

and for the Joss triune (because Joss is god), a little about a disagreement between Fox and Joss over the direction for Firefly. to Fox, i say, leave the guy alone, 'cause he knows his shit.

yippp! the season 2 DVDs look great. each disc has one of the characters on it, two with Buffy but none with Angel. one has Spike though. ha ha! (no Giles or Cordelia, either, but that doesn't give me joy).

there's an ad for the the Buffy Xbox game, and it looks kick ass. i'm seriously thinking of getting one.

sadly, the insert for the third season DVD set says Winter 2003 *sob*

ok, so "The Gift" is showing on FX tonight, so after that, i'll watch all the season 2 eps that have commentary.

via Dark Horizons:

a new Supergirl movie? please, not this one.

also: "Whilst talking with E! News Live, actress Kelly Hu revealed her character [in the second X-Men film] is more than just your standard bad guy's sidekick - in actuality she's the somewhat well-known Wolverine nemesis Lady Deathstrike." if she looks like the comic book Lady Deathstrike, i'll be very happy. her costume was 'feh' but the hands were great!

winners of the Saturn Awards have been posted. highlights (or You-Know-Where-This-Is-Going):

Face of the Future (Male): James Marsters, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.
Best Network TV Series: BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER


also, the 2001 Bram Stoker Awards were given out a few days ago. highlights:

Work for Young Readers •The Willow Files 2 by Yvonne Navarro

Buffy comic news from Dark Horse: "In the weeks to come we also have Buffy: Reunion, Jane Espenson's smorgasbord of Buffy action. She tells the story of Buffy's post-death reunion with Angel from the point of view of the Scoobies." (some of us have already speculated on that)

also released last week: part three of three in the "Death of Buffy" story arc (telling how the Scoobs decided to resurrect Buffy).

towards the end of this month comes Fray #7 (of 8).

the end of next month should see the debut of Scott Lobdell with Buffy #47, kicking off a four-issue arc that has my interest piqued.

todays the day! it's like Christmas, only no drunk aunts and creepy old uncles! btw, i'm happy they changed the box art. i didn't like SMG's hair in the old box art (scroll down to the bottom to compare) .

brief Joss Q&A on season two.

Buffy season two, btw, will be out on DVD tomorrow (as if you didn't already know, because i know that you'll be waiting in line at 11:55pm tonight at the local VideoMart).

Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, with Vincent Price and Frankie Avalon. rent it, see it, love it.