Thursday, November 29, 2012

In Memoriam

In late October, my Dad's best friend, my honorary uncle, and pretty much the coolest guy I've ever known passed away.  I've been depressed.  I've let myself mope around and be unproductive.  I've stopped doing the things that make me happy, like writing, and let myself get caught up in my feelings of anger and sadness.  But then it occurred to me that what I was doing is the opposite of the way that Curtin lived his life.  I figure it's time to pull myself out of my funk and get back about my life the way I want to live it.  If there's one thing that I learned from my "Uncle" Mike, it was how to be searingly sarcastic and humorous in the face of absolute tragedy.  His health was poor for over a decade, and his death wasn't a surprise, but it still seems impossible that his laugh and his smile are no longer around.  Despite how sick he was, and how many roadblocks he faced in his life, he never seemed to feel sorry for himself or angry about any of it.  If only we all could be so graceful in the face of such tribulations.

In honor of Michael Curtin, here are my picks for the Top 5 TV episodes that deal with death:


Beware of spoilers for One Tree Hill, Angel, and Buffy if you haven't watched those shows.




5. One Tree Hill, Season 3, Episode 17, "Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them"

Sometimes it is not the moment that a death occurs that is the most painful, but the aftermath, the unanswered questions that will never be resolved.  One Tree Hill dealt with a real issue facing America, school shootings.  But it wasn't the shooting episode itself that was the most powerful, it was the episode afterwards, where you see how differently everyone experiences the emotional aftermath of the tragedy.
"The truth is, every day I have to come from this school is a day less I have to come back" -Jimmy Edwards... Before he brought a gun to school.  But we all know (at least those of us who made it through high school), that after that, things get better.  If only he had been able to get to that point too.
Denial, Anger, Fear, Acceptance, Grief.  These are the stages we all go through, no matter how we are confronted with loss, and we go through them in their own order. This episode captures the confusion felt when such a shocking and traumatic event occurs.

 

 

 4.  Fraggle Rock, Season 5, Episode 7, "Gone But Not Forgotten"  

As I've said before, my parents didn't let me watch a lot of TV as a kid, but what I did watch was heavy on animation and puppetry.  Between Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Muppet Babies, and Fraggle Rock, I probably learned more from puppets than I did people growing up, and Fraggle Rock was always my favorite.  In this episode of Fraggle Rock's final season, Wembley encounters the rarest creature in the world and befriends him, only to lose him.
While exploring the caves of Fraggle Rock, Wembley becomes trapped in a landslide.  To his surprise, he is saved by a strange creature called Mudwell The Mudbunny.  They find that they have s lot in common, and become fast friends.  However, the next morning, Mudwell yells at Wembley, driving him back to his fellow Fraggles.  Confused as to while his new best friend would be so mean, he goes into a depression.  Finally, Wembley's fellow Fraggles convince him that if he and Mudwell were truly friends, that he should go back and talk Mudwell and find out was acting so mean.  Wembley returns to discover that Mudwell did truly car about him, but was afraid to become close to someone only to say goodbye.  It turns out that he never knows when his mud will be ready, and when it is, he will have to die. 
Unfortunately, Mudwell's mud was ready, and Wembley got to forgive his friend just in time for him to die.  Unable to be consoled by family and friends, Wembley eventually returns to the site of Mudwell's death.   There, he meets a lizard creature who hatches from Mudwell's mud-mummified remains.  Although he is not Mudwell, the lizard was born from Mudwell's mud, and knows the water song the Mudwell sang when Wembley begins humming it.  In the end, Wembley finds closure by acknowledging that a piece of Mudwell would always live on in his heart and in the world through the lizard and the song:
"Feel the river flowing,
Feel it coming,
Feel it going,
In the river,
In the rain,
or in the sky.

One day it's an ocean,
One day ice in motion,
One day it's a teardrop 
In your eye.

Once I wasn't there,
And then I suddenly appeared,
And now I seem to be at home
In Earth and air.

Just like the river flowing, 
I know where I'm going,
Look beneath your boots
And I'll be there.

Just a dream away,
You've got to leave to stay,
We'll meet again someday,
Just a dream away." 
And isn't it true of everyone, that no matter how much we love them or they love us, we'll have to say goodbye.  It's what stops many people from caring, but you have to embrace life and make relationships despite certain death looming over your head and the head of everyone you know and love.  That's the reality of being human, and it's dealt with in this children's show with absolute mastery.

 

 

3. Angel, Season 5, Episode 15, "A Hole in the World"

Winifred Burkle is one of the greatest Whedon characters ever written.  I'd say Top 5, easily, but that's another list for another time.  Her story is both horrible and inspiring, a comedy and a tragedy.  In the universe of Buffy and Angel, someone with no superpowers usually doesn't last very long on their own.  Fred, on the other hand, somehow lived through being thrown through a portal to Pylea (a hell-dimension) by a jealous professor, and sold into human slavery for years.  Even when she's rescued, it was by a dreamy guy who turns into a monster and is absolutely romantically unavailable.  Needless to say, her transition back into L.A. and modern life after Pylea was pretty rough.  But somehow, by season five, Fred had gotten pretty much everything she ever wanted.  She had unlimited funds and resources for her science lab, she and Wesley were back together (Finally! Team Fresley forever) as a couple and out in the field, burning up demon bugs, and her life was looking like less of a nightmare than it had been until then.  Everyone around her was also moving on from their issues.  Fred's ex-boyfriend and colleague Charles Gunn had forgiven her and Wesley, Spike and Angel were bickering like an old married couple about whether cavemen or astronauts would win in a fight, and the former Angel Investigations team was finally looking like they had settled into Wolfram and Hart without being too compromised by the power.  If fairness or karma or any of that really made a difference, Fred and Wesley would have walked off into the sunset together, grown old and died at 115 holding hands in their sleep.  But instead, as Spike had been insisting all episode, "cavemen win".  Despite Wolfram and Hart's unlimited technology, magics, firepower, and funds, Fred's body is slowly taken over by an ancient god called Illyria.  After all she had been through in her life, Fred is taken out by what is basically, as she calls it, a "Demon flu".  She burns up from the inside and dies, leaving only the shell of who she was. 
Joss Whedon loves to kill off characters that fans love, especially after building them up in the audience's eyes but it's more than just a gimmick.  I appreciate when writers and showrunners do this in their shows despite the fact that I hate loving a character only for them to die (umm, T-Dog?!? I'm still not over that one.)  It is far more realistic to have characters die for no reason, or in unfair ways, because that is how the world works.  In my experience, there is no fairness or reason in this world, and we just have to love the people we love for as long as they're around, because you really just never know.

 

 

2. Six Feet Under, Season 1, Episode 1, "Pilot"

The whole series deals with death, obviously, but the pilot sets the stage for the entire series going forward.  Alan Ball seamlessly interweaves humor, tragedy, fantasy, and philosophy into this universe and the characters that live in it.  The Fisher family has dealt with death their entire lives, but when they must bury one of their own, the reality of the family business begins to set in for all of them.  If you haven't watched this series, just go do it immediately.  There's really no excuse.

 

 

1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5, Episode 16, "The Body"

"The Body" is probably the most realistic episode about death I have ever seen.  The similarities to my boyfriend's father's death have added to the impact of this episode to me, but even before that, it was always the episode that would get to me the most when watching season 5.  A lot of people die in Buffy's life, but her mother is taken from her not by monsters but by nature.  Buffy struggles for the whole season with not being able to fight what is killing her mother, having to leave her mother's life in the hands of doctors.  She even tries to prove that her mother's illness is somehow mystical, so that she can do something about it.  Finally, Joyce undergoes surgery to cure her cancer, but several weeks after her seemingly successful brain surgery, Joyce Summers dies suddenly alone at home.
The episode has no music behind it, and is simply a raw, realistic, heartbreaking depiction of what someone must go through when they discover a loved one dead.  I won't really go into detail, because I believe this episode speaks for itself.  It is a piece of art that stands up just as well in the context of the series as it does alone.  Even if you've never watched Buffy, and don't plan to, you should still watch this episode.  It really is that powerful.

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