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The X-Files: “Nothing Lasts Forever”

Cool: An episode about a Latina vampire slayer.

Plus we also get to see Mulder and Scully discuss religion.

And a handy -- though more than a bit horrific -- metaphor for cultural assimilation.

And yet another handy catchphrase for the show's aficionados.

And the most memorable use of a certain Maureen McGovern song since the original Poseidon Adventure.

Not So Cool: There is no real ending given to the Latina slayer's story arc. No hint as to why she did not immediately go to jail or suffer any fate worse than a sad look at her photo from her own mother.

For that matter, it would have been nice if the Latina slayer had been played by an actual Latina but then nowadays even Guillermo del Toro is not that politically correct in his casting decisions involving Latin characters so it seems silly for me to expect more from the likes of producer Chris Carter.

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The Simpsons: "The Kid Is All Right"

Wait a minute!

The writers of The Simpsons never even tried to introduce Lisa Simpson to a Hispanic friend until the show's 25th season and they have the nerve to kvetch about conservatives?

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The Wild Wild West: "The Night of the Assassin"

U.S. Secret Service agent James West rescues Mexican president Benito Juárez from an assassin who was dressed like a priest. Considering President Juárez's real-life attitude toward the Catholic Church, there's some dramatic irony there -- though whether it was intentional or not is something only the writers know.

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Night Gallery: “A Matter of Semantics”

At long last it's Cuban-American actor Cesar Romero in the role he was born to play.

Then again he was pretty good when he played the Joker on TV's Batman.

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The Wild Wild West: “The Night of the Inferno”

The Wild Wild West used to be one of my favorite shows in high school thanks to syndicated black-and-white reruns that used to be broadcast every weekend on a late night program called Night Moves. (And yes, that program used the Bob Seger song of the same name as its theme.) Eventually I got the chance to watch the series all the way through and my enthusiasm diminished but I still have fond memories of the show's earliest episodes.

However, this episode -- the first of the series -- was not one of those episodes.

The episode begins with U.S. Secret Service agent James West (played by Robert Conrad) getting arrested on a charge of desertion, only to find out that it was a setup ordered by President Ulysses S. Grant himself. His mission: travel to the American Southwest in order to track down a dangerous Mexican revolutionary named Juan Manolo. Along the way, he runs into his partner Artemus Gordon (played by Ross Martin) as well as King Tut (aka Victor Buono) and Bob Newhart's wife (aka Suzanne Pleshette).

This episode is shamelessly politically incorrect by today's standards but it is difficult to think of any spy show this side of the Atlantic that was not. Besides, it is not likely that even the most liberal writers of the era would have found a way to make a Mexican revolutionary sympathetic to a predominantly Anglo-American audience -- though after seeing West comment on the size of a Chinese individual, one has to wonder just how ignorant of other ethnic groups this episode's writers presumed its white viewers to be to think that they would find this unusual.

Oh, well. At the very least, the episode gives today's viewers an interesting look at the way TV writers thought back in 1965 (the date of this episode's initial airing). And hope that today's TV writers might have learned better since then.

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Dexter: “Those Kinds of Things”

At long last the truth about Dexter Morgan is out! He's an atheist. Not that most of us didn't see that coming. But it is interesting to see yet another admitted atheist on the air now that House M.D. has finished its final season.

That said...

A former cast member of The George Lopez Show -- i.e. Aimee Garcia -- is joining the show to play Angel Batista's little sister Jamie -- and Dexter's nanny. (Apparently there is some law in Hollywood that almost every TV show has to have at least one nanny played by a Hispanic actress--perhaps because having a nanny played by Scarlett Johansson would be too unrealistic.)

Lt. LaGuerta is finally getting a promotion, but alas, she did not exactly secure it through honorable means. For shame!

On the plus side, Vince Masuka is actually acquiring some interns this season -- and some smarts to go along with them. However, one of the interns might not be what she seems...

Anyway, in this week's episode, Dexter Morgan goes to his high school reunion in order to avenge a woman who had been nice to him back in high school -- and finds himself to be surprisingly popular. No, that last part was not meant to be a meta-comment on the show's popularity -- though it is tempting to take it that way.

In addition, his sister Debra stops an armed man wearing body armor from shooting up a crowded restaurant. And no, I did not make up that last part. And given that this episode first aired last year, it can't be blamed on recent events.

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Modern Family: “Game Changer”

Oh, cool. A TV episode which is also an infomercial for iPads. And when the writers of this episode can spare the time, there are also a few good jokes.

Seriously, this episode would be a lot more exasperating if it did not make fun of early adopters as often as it did late adopters. Besides, as I have noted before, I'm really beginning to warm up to the characters to the point that I'm not sure what I'll do for an entertainment fix if this show ever goes off the air. I mean, it's bad enough that they took away Buffy, Ugly Betty and Veronica Mars. Worse yet that the powers that be are fixing to put an end to Desperate Housewives and House M.D.. I don't know what I'll do if this show bites the dust as well.

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Modern Family: “The Incident"

Actress Shelley Long of Cheers fame is now not only old enough to play a mother but also a grandmother. Now I really do feel old.

On the plus side, Modern Family has turned out to be one of the smarter and funnier sitcoms on primetime American TV. So that's a good thing.

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Dexter: "My Bad"

Wow! Time for another season of Dexter already? How time flies!

When we last left Dexter Morgan, he had just found that a certain much-beloved character had been found murdered in her own bathtub. At the beginning of this episode, said character was still dead, doomed to return to the show only in flashbacks. Given that said character was one of my favorite characters on this show, it's hard to pretend that this made for an especially fun episode.

That said, the most memorable part of the episode was Dexter's oddly emotionless response to the death of said character. One character on the show describes his 911 call as a "lab report" and for a while, it looks like Dexter is going to attract some unwanted attention. But years of covering up his true self pay off and Dexter gets away with not being suspected of one of the few murders in the Miami area he had nothing to do with.

In addition, we get an in-joke reference to Dexter star Michael C. Hall's former role as an undertaker on Six Feet Under. Only this time around, Hall gets to play the client, not the undertaker.

Moreover, we get to witness the clumsiest murder in Dexter history. A murder so ill-conceived it seems a miracle Dexter got away with it. Is Season 5 the season we find out Dexter Morgan has a death wish?

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Room 222: "I Love You Charlie, I Love You Abby"

Apparently I spoke too soon when I described the title character of the "El Genio" episode and his girlfriend as the only Hispanics on this series. During the last five minutes of this episode, one of the title characters of this episode was called by the name "Charles Moreno" -- and Moreno, of course, is a popular Spanish surname. Which, of course, means Charlie was Hispanic -- although not necessarily Mexican.*

Whether or not it was intentional from the writer's point-of-view that the audience saw the character in question as Hispanic seems doubtful. After all, the character was rarely described as being Hispanic the same way the title character of "El Genio" was. Nor was he given any of the conventional "Hispanic" traits that sloppy TV writers like to give to Hispanic characters. (For example, bad accents, frequent use of Spanglish, etc.) Nor was his impending marriage to what seemed to be a rather WASPy white non-Hispanic girl seen as being especially controversial. I would like to give the writer the benefit of a doubt and assume that this was the way he chose to make up for the more contrived elements of the "El Genio" episode but alas, there was no commentary on this episode so I guess I will never know for sure.

Anyway, the main concern shown during the episode concerning Charlie and his would-be bride Abby was more about their age than their ethnicity -- and the closest the episode came to a conventional ethnic joke lay in the fact that tacos were served at Charlie's impromptu bachelor party. Mr. Dixon and his girlfriend Ms. McIntyre were greatly concerned about Charlie and Abby's plans to get married at the end of the school year -- but the first attempt they made to get them to change their minds only resulted in Charlie and Abby moving up the date of their elopement. It was not until after the above-mentioned bachelor party and Abby's bachelorette party that Dixon and MacIntyre found a way to convince the young couple they were not ready to get married yet -- and even then it was a close call.

So the idea of a Hispanic character on a TV show dealing with issues which were not necessarily ethnic issues would seem to be a good thing, right? Even if I find myself preferring the way such issues were handled on old I Love Lucy episodes.

* Contrary to popular belief, Hispanic is not a political euphemism for "Mexican" and can be used to describe almost anyone with Spanish-speaking ancestors. Of course, since it is often considered a political term, it is not always used that way but it should be.

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Miami Vice: "Free Verse"

Geez, you can tell a TV show is old when director Michael Bay appears in one episode as a bit player so unimportant that he's only listed as Goon #3.

It's even more embarrassing to realize how old a certain show is when you're old enough to remember when this same show was the subject of magazine cover stories and endless hype about how said show was the way of the future. Oh, well...Time does have a perverse way of putting artistic pretensions into perspective. However, I must admit that I can't help wondering how much of director Bay's current directing style was inspired by what he witnessed while working on the set of director Michael Mann's Miami Vice TV series.

In any event, the episode in question concerned an assignment by the Miami Vice Squad to safeguard a visiting Latin American poet. Why was the Vice Squad being assigned to play bodyguard to a poet? The story never really explained why but then few people back in the day ever watched Miami Vice for the story.

One of the funniest bits in the episode occured early on when the appearance of two pretty female Vice Squad detectives provoked the visiting poet to ask whether all the police in Miami were as attractive. Then scar-faced Edward James Olmos' Lt. Martin Castillo character showed up and the poet noted that his question just got answered.

The rest of the episode was a cat and mouse game between the Miami Vice detectives (especially Don Johnson's Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas' Tubbs) and the various assassins sent out to kill the poet. Crockett proved especially disillusioned to learn that the poet was not only the target of a right-wing death squad but of left-wing assassins as well. And of course, one of the assassins proved to be working with an inside man whose identity wasn't revealed, natch, until the last minute.

The episode also went out of its way to note the poet himself was not as squeaky clean as his would-be martyr status would indicate. His own daughter was disgusted by some of his past actions and it wasn't until the very end of the episode that father and daughter experienced anything close to reconciliation.

Not that happy endings last long in Michael Mann world. But then one shouldn't really expect much cheerfulness on a show called Miami Vice.

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: “Gnothi Seauton”

The title of this episode is Greek for “know thyself” and is derived from an old quote by the Greek philosopher Socrates. Sarah Connor mentions it at the beginning of the episode and then goes on to note how difficult it is to know one’s self when one is continually changing one’s identity to survive.

Shortly afterward, the cyborg Cameron Phillips gives Sarah a lead as to where to acquire new fake I.D.s for herself and her son and for a change, it does not involve the Hispanic community. Instead it involves a group of kindred spirits sent back by the future to help out the anti-Skynet resistance. Unfortunately, someone meets up with them before Sarah does and that someone succeeds in doing away with all but one member, who is not to be found.

So instead Sarah ends up going to an old connection in the local Hispanic community after all, only to find out that her contact is officially retired. The contact, however, does suggest that Sarah contact his nephew who has taken over the family I.D. business. This nephew proves to be more mercenary than his uncle and Sarah is forced to break into a safe left behind by the dead time travelers in order to find funds with which to pay him off.

Along the way, Cameron learns to imitate the posture of the nephew’s Latina look-out, proving -- among other things -- that it is just not white Anglo-American humans that the young cyborg learns from. In addition, Sarah learns from the nephew about the infamous 9/11 incident of September 2001 -- and her reaction to that proves to be most interesting. Moreover, both Cameron and Sarah prove to be multilingual, giving both of them an unexpected break when their knowledge of Spanish allows them to eavesdrop on the nephew’s bodyguards. As a result, Sarah soon realizes that her old connection is not quite the reformed felon he claims to be but rather an informant who may or may not be giving info to the feds. Sarah confronts him with this information and he comes up with a convincing alibi, but Cameron kills the guy before Sarah has a chance to verify it.

Not that it matters in the long run. Before the episode is over, it becomes quite evident that the contact really was not quite the guy he claimed to be and even in death, his existence proves to be quite inconvenient to the Connors. Which proves -- among other things -- that knowing herself wasn’t Sarah’s biggest problem this time out after all.

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Dexter: “The Getaway”

Oh no, they didn’t.

No, they didn’t.

No.

They didn’t.

I’m tired of seeing my favorite characters offed by writers eager to make a point about how serious the world is. Especially since there appears to be something cynical about the way this particular character was chosen. Most of Dexter Morgan’s other acquaintances and his sister are probably going to be immortal as far as this series is concerned. But poor you-know-who? Apparently she got the short end of the stick.

Damnit, if they were going to write her out of the series, she deserved a better ending than what she got.

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Dexter: “Hungry Man”

In a special Thanksgiving special, Dexter Morgan gets together with his would-be mentor for Thanksgiving dinner and discovers said mentor’s family life is not quite as blissful on the inside as it seems from the outside. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone having a more dysfunctional Thanksgiving than the one Dexter has in this episode.

Perhaps they should have just called this episode, “So You Thought Your Thanksgiving was Bad.”

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Dexter: “Dex Takes a Holiday”

Wait! Dexter Morgan is going to take an entire season to catch up with the Trinity Killer but he manages to off a killer cop in one episode?

It is a pity because it seemed good to see Dexter presented with a challenge for a change. Or at least a challenge which did not involve sleep deprivation and silly new father tricks. But unfortunately, said challenge was not provided by a special guest star so it is no big surprise how this episode ends up.

Edited to add:

It should not be necessary to point out this but I will anyway: the fact that one of the characters in this episode was named Zoey Kruger had no bearing on my opinion of this episode whatsoever. I do not even know any Zoey Kruger in real life and I certainly do not have any relatives by that name that I know of. However, I will admit that it seems like an odd coincidence and I am surprised I did not pick up on it sooner.

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Dexter: “Blinded by the Light”

That’s right, Dexter. Get tough with those security lights. Show them who’s boss.

But wait! Is that Rita over there, observing him? Could she finally be getting suspicious of him after these past three seasons?

Well, they do say that marriage tends to change people.

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Dexter: “Remains to be Seen”

Funny Dexter. Always losing body parts. Not his own, of course, but those of his latest victim. It's a good thing he's not a mortician though I suppose losing body parts is bad form for a serial killer too.

If only his new-born infant had a regular sleeping schedule but no, he doesn’t. Thus Dexter's problems with sleep deprivation. And missing body parts.

What fun.

And now Dexter Morgan has to explain away an auto accident to his wife Rita, a woman who may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but isn’t exactly a blunt instrument either.

Plus there’s that darn Trinity Killer played by special guest star John Lithgow. In past seasons, the guy would already be paying a visit to Dexter’s homicide table but alas, that seems unlikely to happen this time around. Plus he’s being played by a special guest star so I’m guessing he’ll be around a while.

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Dexter: “Living the Dream”

In the first season of this series, lead character Dexter Morgan met up with a serial killer who proved to be a kindred spirit.

Then in the second season, Dexter Morgan met up with a very eccentric British lady who also proved to be a kindred spirit.

Then in the third season, Dexter Morgan ran across a Hispanic prosecutor who, despite his obvious ties to the law enforcement community, also proved to be a kindred spirit.

So should I even try to guess what will happen in the fourth season?

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Room 222: “El Genio”

Whenever I am watching an old TV show from the late 1960s, I find it all too easy to focus on the easy stuff: the funny clothes, the eccentric hairstyles, the “hip” dialogue that rings so weird to the ear nowadays that the words might as well have been carved out of tin. What is not so easy is remembering that TV shows back then did not have to deal with the lenient -- almost nonexistent, it sometimes seems -- censors of today’s shows. They had to deal with a more harsher breed of censor.

Moreover, TV shows which tried to do something different back then did not always get the support you would expect. True, there was room for iconoclastic shows like Laugh-In and All in the Family -- but most of those shows were tolerated because they were hits. Even then such shows had to compete against more conventional shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and The Brady Bunch which generally avoided social commentary as much as possible.

Add to that the problem of adequately dramatizing a complicated social situation in half an hour -- minus the time needed for commercials -- and it is a wonder that the first season of Room 222 accomplished as much as it did.

That said, it was hard for me to watch the “El Genio” episode without thinking what a lost opportunity it was. “El Genio” is Spanish for “The Genius” and as you may guess, the episode with that title revolves around a young Spanish-surnamed individual named Salazar* who is a lot smarter than his grades indicated. Salazar was the first Mexican-American character I saw on Room 222 and apart from his girlfriend -- also a Mexican-American -- we don’t see any other Hispanic students on the series at all. An odd circumstance given the fact that even back in the late 1960s, Los Angeles had a substantial Mexican-American population. Even odder when you consider the fact that the Chicano movement was just getting started back then.

Of course, even the best TV show cannot cover everything and for a while, this episode -- which focused on student teacher Alice Johnson’s attempt to keep Salazar from wasting his academic potential by dropping out of high school -- seemed like it was making a valiant effort to deal with a complicated issue.

But then the episode got to the point where Salazar had the chance to get a scholarship from a white non-Hispanic who could not resist taking the time to point out the statistics concerning the large number of Mexican-Americans who drop out of high school. Instead of having Salazar argue against such statistics or point out the many social factors -- including discrimination -- which might have led Mexican-Americans back then to consider dropping out, the show's writers chose to have Salazar act as if the man was personally disrespecting him and then had him give up on the idea of an academic career altogether.

Salazar later gave in and took a college placement test in response to a dare from Ms. Johnson but once he passed the test, he went ahead with his original plan to drop out and marry his girlfriend, leading Ms. Johnson to feel like she was a failure for not being able to inspire him to do better.

Granted, it would have been unrealistic to show the teachers on Room 222 being successful with every student they tried to help but then again, it would have been nice if the first major failure of the show did not involve a Mexican-American student. It also would have been nice if the show had shown more than two Mexican-American students -- both conveniently in a relationship with each other -- if for no other reason than to show that not all such students were potential drop-outs like Salazar. For that matter, the implication that Mexican-American students like Salazar usually give up on higher education because they are too hot-headed or dysfunctional to get along that well with educated people was hardly the type of lesson I expected to see taught on a liberal TV show, even one as old as Room 222.

I would like to think things would be much different if Room 222 were to air today but who am I kidding? There seems to be even less chance of seeing a show like Room 222 on the air today than there was in 1969, much less an improved version, and I doubt that is going to change any time soon. Of course, it would be nice to be proved wrong but I am not going to hold my breath in the meantime.

* A name which was perhaps inspired by real-life Mexican-American journalist Rubén Salazar.

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Angel: “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”

I never really got into the show Angel while it was still on the air because it always seemed like a dumping ground for all the ideas that were not quite good enough for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show from which it spun off. Nor did it help that Angel was never one of my favorite characters on BtVS. He was more a character I tolerated for the sake of the other characters.

I finally broke down and watched the DVD for the fifth season a while back and found myself quite pleased with the result. Not every episode in the fifth season was a classic and not every plot twist a welcome one (for example, I believe what they did with the Fred character later in the season was a mistake but I can see why they did it) but as a whole, the season was a lot better than I expected.

One of my favorite episodes is “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco” which introduced a whole group of Mexican wrestlers into a show -- and genre -- that had been notably short of Hispanic characters. The wrestlers in question moonlighted as demon-fighters and had a history of battling both the natural and supernatural evils faced by the local Mexican-American population until all but one wrestler -- the “Numero Cinco”* of the title -- were killed. Fortunately, the wrestlers did not stay dead but came back for one last battle with their old comrade-in-arms Numero Cinco -- who, prior to this episode, had been working for Angel as a mail carrier. (Yes, it probably would have seemed unrealistic to see a former wrestler working as a paralegal or a file clerk. But a mail carrier? I guess we should all be happy that they did not make him a janitor.)

It would have been nice if the wrestlers had stayed around longer because I found the concept of Hispanic characters battling the supernatural quite intriguing. After all, it was not like you ever saw a whole lot of Hispanics on BtVS, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, etc., and apart from Numero Cinco, you rarely saw a Hispanic character on Angel as well. But it was not to be. They only lasted for a single episode -- after which they returned to the dead. And I suspect they were only introduced because the title character Angel was at a loss as to how to stop an ancient Aztec demon who was on the loose. (In short, some PC screenwriter figured it was not cool to portray Angel as the Great White Hope of Los Angeles by having him defeat an nonwhite demon so they brought in a group of token Mexicans to do his dirty work.)

Most of the show's fans criticized the wrestlers for being ethnic Mary Sues and indeed, I would have been nice to have seen more believable qualities displayed during their brief appearance. I do find it troublesome that a show set in Los Angeles (a city with one of the largest populations of Mexican descent on Earth) could not be bothered to find even one Hispanic character to show up on a regular basis prior to Numero Cinco's appearance at the beginning of the fifth season -- even if said character was a bothersome cop or a nosy journalist. Nor am I fond of the fact that when said characters did appear, the show's writers promptly wrote them off as soon as possible. (Okay, long-running character Cordelia Chase lasted about four seasons on this series despite being played by a Hispanic actress. But Cordelia does not really count as a Hispanic character.)

I realize that no one expects social realism from a show named Angel and that adding token ethnic characters to appease audience demographics would not necessarily have improved it. On the other hand, I get so tired of the notion that writers who put Hispanic characters on their shows are somehow doing us Hispanics a favor. That we have no stories to tell that are as interesting as the ones white non-Hispanics tell about themselves. That having a TV series whose characters never interact with Hispanics despite residing in a city with a large Latino population is somehow realistic because Latinos to the average screenwriter seem even more mythical than werewolves and vampires.

Oh, well. I suppose I could have more important issues to kvetch about than the characters on one TV show. And to tell the truth, I am not all that fond of the masked wrestler character in either American or Mexican culture.

But I did relish the chance to see a group of Mexican characters fight their own battles for a change -- and to actually save the day for the title character instead of waiting to be rescued like the Mexicans in Giant. And I'm kinda sorry that they never got the chance to have their own spin-off. At least it would have been interesting to see what the writers would do if they had to contend with a Hispanic character every week. And to see how such a show would compare with Angel.

* “Numero Cinco” is, of course, Spanish for “Number Five.”