The waiting Game
When it comes to the battle between the forces of good and evil my two favorite recent fictional sagas are Joan of Arcadia and the Harry Potter series.
Alas, even Joan's powers were insufficient to overcome the banality of the Neilson ratings, and her show was cancelled just when she was about to finally confront the evil one. In the last two shows (ever), when she was around the dude that personified the devil, the background music would segue into the introduction of 'Sympathy for the Devil' - the Rolling Stones oft-misunderstood classic. Maybe it wasn't exactly subtle, but as a big Stones fan, I enjoyed the reference.
Sadly, as I stated earlier, we'll never know. The fate of the world apparently means less to CBS than it does to some of us out here in the hinterlands.
Meanwhile, my favorite read this summer has been the latest Harry Potter epic. This one, the penultimate offering in the series, finally lets us know officially what we have suspected all along: There's gonna be a 'high-noon, big-ass, portentious-all-time' showdown with Lord V, which of course will come in the next and final installment of the series which means we have to wait another freaking year before we find out how all this turns out. Given the sales figures for the series, cancellation of the final 'episode' seems rather unlikely.
The Potter series is just so readable. That sounds stupid, but even for non-fantasy fans such as myself, the characters have evolved into such interesting and believable teenagers. The latter two books have been a bit darker, considering that Ms. Rowling is knocking some major characters into the arms of permanent Morpheus, but I enjoyed the Half-Blood Prince as much as any of her other books and probably more than any other book I've read this year.
Go get em, Harry...R.I.P Joan of Arcadia...
