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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 1, The Works of Stephen King

8/27/2013

Hello readers, and welcome back to my month-long tribute to pop culture endings that have confused, disappointed and even infuriated me. Thus far we have seen entries based around young adult classics (# 5), hour-long procedurals (# 4), foreign horror films (# 3) and syndicated science fiction programs (# 2). Today, however, I draw my attention not to any singular work of art, but to the works of one man…

The one and only.

This one is going to be rough, because I am a huge, huge Stephen King fan (I won't say I'm his # 1 fan, because that would just be creepy). I’ve got one bookshelf dedicated to a set of first (and nearly first) editions of his work, and hope one day for the full set with the intent of ultimately reading every word the man’s put to paper. I’ve read The Stand more times than I can count (and even brought a copy of it along when my wife and I took a cross-country road trip several years back), regularly watch Under the Dome in spite of its colossal stupidity, and consider The Mist among my favorite horror movies of all time due to its reverence to King’s terrifying source material.

Try telling me this isn’t scary.

And yet… yet… as much as I love the man’s work, I have to admit that his track record with endings is pretty poor. Sure, he knocks it out of the park sometimes, but more often than not fails to completely stick the landing. This comes as much from his awesome setups as it does the endings themselves, as no ending could ever really match up to some of the amazing stories that preceded them.

I mean, how can you top God randomly showing up to nuke Vegas? And why do I get the feeling this caption’s getting me on some sort of government watch list? Also, to those of you who make said government watch lists, hi! My name is Matt Carter, I'm an author and my book, Splinters, comes out in late 2014! Buy lots of copies!

Other times, though, the endings just fall apart, or even manage to be wildly insulting to the readers who had invested hundreds of pages of time getting into the story and characters. Instead of going through and listing every single ending that he’s botched or disappointed with, I’m just going to give a quick rundown of my Top 3 below.

# 3: THE STAND. King's ultimate tale of good versus evil takes place in an America ravaged by a virus that has killed close to 99% of the population. Those who survive have been driven into one of two camps, one good, led by the aged Mother Abigail, and the other evil, led by the personification of darkness itself, Randall Flagg. After some minor conflicts and skirmishes, four men from the good side take part in a journey to Las Vegas to face Flagg and fulfill an almost biblical prophecy. By this point in the story, you're probably thinking, man, this is awesome! This Stand is going to be great!

Eh, not so much.

Stu, the man who has been for all intents and purposes the main character since the beginning of the book, is taken out of this journey early by a broken leg, and despite King's insistence throughout the remaining pages of the book, his story
is basically done here. The other three then go to Vegas to confront Flagg, where their "Stand" basically consists of getting forced into a public execution whose sole cosmic purpose seems to be to collect all the bad people in one place so God can nuke them. Instead of the battle for the ages between good and evil, we get a bunch of people standing around yelling while a crazy guy brings in a nuke to his false god while the real God blows it up. While not his worst ending, it is tremendously anticlimactic given the amazing setup that came before.

# 2: IT. Stephen King's It is without a doubt one of his most bloated, featuring tons of unnecessary side stories and clocking in at close to his longest book. It gained a following mostly around the superior miniseries and Tim Curry's terrifying portrayal of Pennywise the Clown, I think, but for most of the book itself I was really enjoying the ride. Its many vignettes are filled with some of the creepiest images King has ever put to the page (leeches, frickin' leeches), and it has an awesome backbone that is built around this great friendship of the books seven main characters. These kids, by circumstance or divine intervention, have been drawn to one another, forming these great bonds that have to remind anyone reading it of their own childhood friendships, bonds that will help them defeat one of the greatest evils put on the page.

Pennywise: Ruining every positive memory about clowns you might have ever had since 1986.

And once they've served their purpose (and had a very uncomfortable to read about orgy; don't ask), that's it. Their friendship is done. It turns out that their friendship that gave them the power to overcome this ancient evil was set in motion by an ancient god, and once they've done their job they're all sent on their separate ways, cursed to forget that they ever knew each other. Their friendship was a sham, and as a reader I couldn't help but feel cheated out of nearly 1,200 pages of my life.

Dear lord get that thing away from me!

# 1: INSOMNIA. This one really pisses me off, I can't stress that enough. Insomnia isn't one of King's best known books, but like many it is overlong and unnecessarily padded with extra characters and mysticism, but I have to say I enjoyed myself for most of the run. Its story of a couple retirees whose powerful insomnia has helped them tap into another dimension and bizarre powers is trippy, and has a lot of fun imagery, and when we find that the main character has gotten these powers for the purposes of stopping a terrorist attack, I had to say that it sounded pretty cool.

But then this guy had to show up.

It is revealed that stopping this attack, indeed the point of this whole book, was not to save the lives of hundreds of people. No, it was just to save the life of one young boy in the crowd who we'd only had a few paragraphs of the entire book dedicated to. This is fairly King in nature, and wouldn't warrant a spot on this list, but to go that extra mile, we are told that somewhere in the future this kid is going to help Roland, the hero of King's Dark Tower series, which basically transforms this 600+ page book into a prequel for one of The Dark Tower books. When I'm reading a book, or watching a movie, I want to view it for its own merits, I don't want to see it as the lead-in for a completely unrelated work of art. By making the whole point of this book about another book that hadn't yet been written, I felt tremendously cheated, and could not resist putting Insomnia as my least favorite of King's endings.

Sorry, Steve. I still love you, though.

Stephen King is my favorite author, and as many problems as I've got with his work, I will still read whatever he writes. Call it masochistic, call it crazy, but that's just how I roll.

So what say you, dear readers? Are there any other Stephen King fans out there? Any haters? What are your most and least favorite King endings? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 2, Star Trek: Enterprise (Series Finale)

8/20/2013

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Hello one and all, and welcome once again to my month-long countdown of least favorite pop culture endings. If you haven't already taken a look, please check out my # 5, # 4 & # 3 entries!

Today we're going to cover one of the most difficult kind of endings to pull off: the television series finale.

For the last time, no, it's not going to be Lost! I like this ending!

Series finales are a really tricky beast to pull off. If your show's been on the air for more than one season, you're going to have a fair few number of storylines and characters that need some form of closure, and the bigger the show and the bigger the cast the more difficult that becomes. Fans will come to expect so much out of the finale that, when it doesn't match up to every hope and dream and doesn't answer every single question their only response will be anger. Most of the times I think people blow this out of proportion. Yeah, there's a lot of series finales out there that are underwhelming, but they otherwise get the job done. Then there are those accidental series finales, where shows get cancelled on a cliffhanger, and those really can't be blamed. And then, yes, there are the truly godawful series finales. Like this one.

There's a good chance that I'm the only Star Trek fan out there who actually likes Star Trek: Enterprise. I'll fully acknowledge it's faults, with haphazard writing, lack of full cast utilization, and massive destruction of pieces of Star Trek canon (i.e. meeting the Borg and the Ferengi hundreds of years before their real first contact), but for the most part I found it an enjoyable, charming little series. I liked its sense of curiosity in its first few years as it went back to the exploration roots that Star Trek was always meant to be about. I liked the idea of exploring how a lot of the institutions of this universe were founded. I even really liked the cast, for the most part; Scott Bakula brought a sense of wonder and optimism to Captain Archer, John Billingsley brought lighthearted whimsy to Doctor Phlox, and Jeffrey Combs' recurring Andorian ally/antagonist Shran was always good for a fun plot.

It's the antenna. And the creepy as hell voice.

I'm not going to go into Enterprise's well documented ratings issues, but it's below-average quality didn't lend itself to a long shelf-life. After the first two seasons got middling ratings, seasons 3 and 4 started pulling greater and greater stunts to try and gain more viewers, with very little success. When word came down that season 4 would be it's last, I had some faint optimism that, quality issues aside, they would pull together for a satisfying finale that would send off the crew with a little class and dignity.

Instead they used stunt casting and a pointless framing device to flush the series down the drain.

Right in here.

These Are The Voyages... is based around the last mission of this first Enterprise as it is about to be retired and her crew is going on to greater things. It was also meant to jump around in time some, ending with the founding of the Federation itself. All in all, not a terrible set of ideas, and they could have gone well with a little care. Sadly, there was no way to do this with care. Why? Because instead of making this episode all about the crew of Enterprise...

These guys.

...they made the episode about Commander William Riker. From The Next Generation.

Beard power, engage!

The frame story for this episode is that Riker is having a crisis of conscience and is spending time on the holodeck, watching how Captain Archer dealt with a similar crisis. In the end, Riker spends a lot of time in the simulation, gets to interact with the crew, dispenses magical advice and gets a higher understanding of how to solve his problem. There's cameos from Troi and Data as well, probably to try and get people to remember how much better Star Trek used to be back in the day.

Though contrary to popular belief, Trek did have some low points before Enterprise came around.

Now, I love Riker and I love The Next Generation. The problem with this, is that this is not an episode of The Next Generation. This is an episode of Enterprise. What should have been a fond goodbye to the cast and characters of this particular series was hijacked by guest characters who had absolutely no reason and no right to be there. Instead of being about the last voyage of the original Enterprise, we get Riker and Troi complaining about how much smaller the old ships were and spending time interacting with the crew like the very worst kind of Mary Sue characters in fan fiction. Instead of going out with some modicum of dignity, this finale was made into an awkward and unnecessary crossover event that made a terrible ending for what was otherwise an alright entry into the Star Trek pantheon (and makes it that much harder for me to argue that this series wasn't that bad.)

Sorry Frakes, your beard won't save us today.

So what say you, dear readers? Are there any other Enterprise fans out there? Are there any other series finales that have ticked you off over the years? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)

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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 3, Haute Tension

8/16/2013

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to my month-long countdown of five of my least favorite endings in pop culture.

SPOILER ALERT! This isn't one of them!

So far we have covered an ending that has disappointed me (#5) and an ending that irritated me (#4). From this point on, we're going to be covering the endings that have actively pissed me off. As always on this list, from here on out, assume massive SPOILER ALERTS.

Suffice it to say, he did not take the news that Jar Jar was his father very well.

Twist endings are really tricky to pull off. Do them well and your film becomes a revered classic. Don't do them well and you'll probably end up with the occasional 2 am showing on the SyFy channel, no matter what genre the film was originally done in.

Alternate Tagline: "We'll take anything!"

One of the most popular, and therefore one of the easiest to get wrong, is the classic "Split-Personality" twist, where it turns out that the hero and the bad guy have been the same person all along. Fight Club did it right, though pretty much every other example that comes to mind did it poorly. Movies like Hide and Seek, Secret Window and My Bloody Valentine 3D all attempted to pull this off, and were all more or less completely forgotten after the fact. However, the movie that has always ticked me off the most for pulling this twist, is Haute Tension (or High Tension or Switchblade Romance depending on where you're from.)

A French import, Haute Tension is actually a pretty promising, gruesome little horror movie throughout about 70% of the run (minus the horrible, horrible dubbing in the American release). Two twenty-something girls, Marie and Alex, visit Alex's family's country home after exams. They're best friends, and all seems to be well, except of course for the trucker who watches them in the distance, sometimes while "enjoying" the company of a woman's severed head.

No. I'm not going to look for a picture of that.

Needless to say, the trucker breaks into the country home, kills Alex's whole family in a series of wildly over-the-top, improbable means, and kidnaps her, leaving Marie to chase down the killer and save her friend. Marie and the killer are both smart, each playing an excellent game of cat and mouse as they try to evade or capture each other, but ultimately Marie kills him after beating him to death with a wooden post covered in barbed wire. Hooray! All is well, right? Well, not so much. When she goes to save Alex, Alex stabs her, revealing that Marie was the killer the whole time. And was in love with Alex. And used all of this as an excuse to get some time with her.

Ummm... all right. Under most circumstances this could almost work; it may have been a bit clumsy here, but they could still save themselves if they-

No, wait, no they couldn't. Why's that? Well, here's the killer:

And here's Marie:

Notice anything different? Yeah, the killer is at least twice Marie's size, which makes up for a lot of the more improbable kills in the movie, i.e. the one where Alex's father is decapitated after having his head shoved between the posts of a stairway and then broken off when a bookcase was shoved perpendicular to him.

I'd rather not find a picture of that either. Here, enjoy these puppies.

This death would seem laughable with the main killer, but with Marie, who looks like she weighs all of 75 pounds soaking wet, this is impossible. I can only suspend so much disbelief in cases like this, and I can only excuse the hero actually being the villain if it's done right, but this movie does not do it right. We see the killer before he strikes, even though there would be no reason to see him because he's all in Marie's head! We see the killer do things that Marie could not physically do! This ending makes absolutely no sense!

I'll need to calm down now. Here, have some more puppies.

Sloppily handled, this twist ending will always rank highly among the twist endings that have always irked me, and it will take some time before anything can top it.

So what say you, movie fans? Are there any twist endings that have particularly ticked you off? Are you as tired of split personality endings as I am? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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10 Random Things I Love About The Room

8/9/2013

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The Room is awful. Absolutely terrible. Probably one of the worst movies ever made. It's incompetently made, incompetently put together, with some of the worst acting, writing, editing, music, directing and probably even set design in recent memory. It should be reprehensible, but instead it is somehow one of the most hilarious movies I've ever seen, and may very well be a contender for the movie I've seen more times than any other.

I guess this requires some explanation.

A friend of mine, Mario Lanza (one of the funniest guys alive, in this humble author's opinion), had been spreading the word about The Room for some time before I truly knew its greatness.

No, he's not this Mario.

I was told time and again that it was hilarious and life-changingly bad, and being a person who rarely listens to such suggestions, I more or less just let it roll off my shoulders and continued following whatever empty pursuits I had going on at the time. Fast-forward a ways to Fall of 2011, Fiona and I get married. A good time was had by all, and in attendance was Mario. He's always had a fairly unique sense of humor, so of the three presents he gave us (wrapped in hot pink paper and SpongeBob Squarepants stickers), one of them was a book I had loaned him a few months prior, one was a copy of A Fish Called Wanda (one of the greatest movies ever), and the other was a copy of The Room. Once the honeymoon was over and we started going through our gifts properly, on a whim, we popped in The Room.

And our lives were changed.

Watching this movie for the first time is like a surreal drug trip of hilarity. People don't talk or act as they should. Plotlines are introduced to be immediately forgotten moments later, which is impressive because some of them do seem quite important. Half of the movie is made of stock footage establishing shots, another quarter from poorly-choreographed softcore sex scenes. All of this is led by director/writer/lead actor Tommy Wiseau, who is clearly quite mad and desperate to convince everyone that he is an average American Joe, when he looks, sounds and acts like he only recently came to Earth after intercepting an intergalactic transmission of one of Ed Wood's movies and thinking, "Hey, I think I can do this movie-making thing too! That's the idea!"

How hard can it being?

He advertises the movie as a riveting black comedy, when in reality it's clear he was trying to film a melodrama, probably trashing an ex-girlfriend and trying to make him look as awesome as possible (SPOILER ALERT: He fails). It is inept in every way possible, and yet this ineptness has formed a great cult following, full of parodies and midnight showings (where it is customary to throw verbal abuse, and plastic spoons, at the screen) that have gained a near Rocky Horror style following. My wife and I have actually attended a midnight showing of this film with Tommy Wiseau himself in attendance, and let me say that it is truly an experience of a lifetime (if this article gets a good response, I'll probably post some of my long, rambling notes on this experience).

I have made it my goal in life to share with everyone I know the greatness of this movie, so, all terrible rambling aside, let me share with you, dear readers, 10 of my favorite things about The Room.

Once this has been seen, it can't be unseen.

1. The Constant Establishing Shots

Close to 30% of the movie is made up of shots like this. I am not exaggerating.

The movie was filmed in Los Angeles on a soundstage, but was supposed to take place in San Francisco. How to fix this? Why, with constant establishing shots forcing the viewer to see that yes, this is supposed to take place in San Francisco! And some terrible rooftop green screen work showing the San Francisco skyline (with absolutely no wind, of course). And why not show Johnny (our lead vampire Tommy Wiseau) doing such traditionally San Francisco things as riding the cable cars! Regular non-tourists do that, do they not?

2. Claudette's Admission

Johnny's future-wife (never fiancée) Lisa's mom, Claudette comes over periodically to try to meddle with her daughter's life. On one random visit, we get this gem of a conversation.

CLAUDETTE: I got the test results back - I definitely have breast cancer.

LISA: Don't worry about it, mom. They're curing people all the time.

CLAUDETTE: Oh, I know.

This plotline is never mentioned again. Fiona and I like to believe that this is due to Claudette being a pathological liar and people have learned to ignore her.

3. The 90's Sex Scene Music

There are four frighteningly long sex scenes in the room, two between Johnny and Lisa, two between Lisa and Johnny's best friend, Mark. They're all clumsily put together, mostly since the actor for Mark, Greg Sestero, was nervous and refused to remove his pants, and the actress for Lisa, Juliette Danielle looks absolutely terrified to be around a naked Tommy Wiseau (so terrified that most of the footage from their second sex scene was recycled from the first). These are baffling enough on their own, but the fact that each of them is the exact length of a perfectly generic, mid-90's sounding smooth jazz song (this movie was filmed and released in the early 2000's, making this weirdly anachronistic), has always led me to believe that Tommy Wiseau didn't know how to edit music, or had some deal with the artists, where the music had to be played in full or else.

This picture doesn't come from one of the film's main sex scenes, nor does it contain any characters of consequence or music, but holy hell is it one of the most hilariously awkward faces to be put on screen in a love scene. I could not not include it.

4. The Thing on Lisa's Neck

Now as a general rule, I try not to make fun of people for any physical traits as that is not cool, and is usually unrelated to the quality of the movie itself. I also try not to make fun of Juliette Danielle because she clearly had a really hard time with this movie, and from what I've been able to gather has really made the best of a bad situation after having been forced through this movie. All that being said... WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING ON THE SIDE OF HER NECK?!?!?

5. The Chris-R Subplot

Johnny's a really nice guy. How do we know that? Because among his many other great deeds, he has taken in a mentally handicapped boy, Denny, given him a place, put him through college, etc. However, at one point in the movie Denny gets in trouble with local drug dealer Chris-R, and that is when the magic happens. Chris-R confronts Denny on the roof of the apartment complex and threatens to shoot him in the head. Naturally, Johnny and Mark fly to his rescue, beating Chris-R up and saying they will take him to the police. Lisa and Claudette magically appear on the roof to criticize Denny's life choices (it's a deep movie), and not 30 seconds later, Johnny and Mark magically appear back on the roof with no sign of Chris-R.

My leading theory? They killed Chris-R offscreen and disposed of his body and vowed to never speak of it again (since this subplot never comes up again in the course of the movie). This in turn leads to the dissolving of their friendship.

Like I said, this is a deep movie.

6. The Peter Switcheroo

For half of the movie, Johnny and Mark have another friend spending time with them named Peter. He's the awkward-looking guy with the glasses right above. Halfway through film production, the actor for Peter had to leave, and so Tommy Wiseau replaced him with another actor. The guy in the photo below.

This replacement is seamless, if you ask me. (Also, yes, I am aware that he technically plays a different character, "Steven", but the replacement is still obvious and awkward and since his new name is unmentioned it's still really weird.)

7. Tossing the Old Pigskin Around

In a constant bid to impress upon us how regular and American Johnny and his friends are, they are constantly playing catch. However, in a bid to keep all the characters in frame, they're usually playing catch from about five feet away from each other. And they still manage to fall out of frame most of the time.

Brilliant filmmaking.

8. Mark

Johnny's best friend, Mark (we know they're best friends because this fact is mentioned close to 20 times throughout the movie), is played by producer Greg Sestero (seemingly against his will much of the time), and though his role is as poorly done as anything else in the movie, I gotta give him a lot of credit for being a good sport. His character is the most wildly all over the place, seemingly an idiot one moment and a devious mastermind the next, boiling with rage and sadness and constantly commenting on how "people are very strange these days" and asking things like "Do you think girls like to cheat just like guys do?", and yet he brings an odd charm to the character that makes him very hard for me to hate. Having met both Tommy Wiseau and Sestero at the midnight showing we attended, I was impressed by how genuinely nice Sestero was, and how apologetic for Wiseau he seemed. Later this year he's putting out a book on the insane making-of story of this movie, and I cannot wait to get a copy of it.

9. The Stairway to Nowhere

In a movie full of baffling, weird goofs, this one is my personal favorite.

As stated earlier, the rooftop of the apartment building this magical film takes place in was actually a set on a soundstage with a green screen providing the skyline. This provides a rather interesting goof, as the orientation of this stairway, which clearly goes down to the left, would actually end just outside the building, presumably sending characters to their death every time they try to go downstairs. In the universe of The Room, this makes perfect sense, and is probably expected.

10. The Tommy Wiseau Experience

His accent is mysterious, his dialogue is almost all dubbed, and he looks like he's probably a vampire. It's impossible to accurately encapsulate the greatness of The Tommy Wiseau Experience in a blog, so instead I'll just treat you to some of my favorite quotes of his throughout the movie.

(In casual conversation in a coffee shop, Mark asks Johnny about a new client of his)

JOHNNY: I cannot tell you, it's confidential.

MARK: Aw, come on, why not?

JOHNNY: No, I can't. Anyway, how is your sex life?

(Johnny goes to the rooftop to think after Lisa falsely accuses him of hitting her, only to find Mark there.)

JOHNNY: I did not hit her, it's not true! It's bullshit! I did not hit her! I did naaaaaaaaaaaaaht! Oh, hai Mark!

(Johnny and Mark are talking about women.)

MARK: Yeah, man, you'll never know. People are very strange these days. I used to know a girl; she had a dozen guys. One of them found out about it... beat her up so bad she ended up at a hospital on Guerrero Street.

JOHNNY (laughing hysterically): What a story, Mark!

(Johnny is talking to Peter.)

JOHNNY: I have a serious problem with Lisa. Um, I don't think she's faithful to me. In fact, I know she isn't.

(Johnny arguing with Lisa.)

JOHNNY: YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA!

(Johnny overhears Claudette and Lisa talking about him.)

JOHNNY: How can they say this about me? I don't believe it. I show them. I will record everything.

And for my personal favorite quote...

(At Johnny's birthday party.)

JOHNNY: Thank you, honey, this is a beautiful party! You invited all my friends. Good thinking!

"Hai doggie!"

Like I said, this movie is awful, but it is amazing in its awfulness. If you think you're ready for an experience of complete madness and insanity like this, I cannot recommend The Room highly enough.

Still, consider yourself warned.

If you now need a palette cleanse after this madness, please check out my 10 Random Things I Love About Jurassic Park and 10 Random Things I Love About Back to the Future lists. These are much better movies. And if you've seen The Room, please sound off in the comments with your favorite moments & quotes! I know I only just scratched the surface with mine!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into
liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 4, Bones, Season 3 (The Gormogon Plotline)

8/6/2013

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Hello everybody, welcome back to my blog's tribute to pop culture endings that have confused, disappointed or even infuriated me. This will be a month of frustration (as my # 5 entry, here, can attest) and a month of laughs, some intentional, some unintentional.

Much like any episode of Under the Dome.

This week I'm going to turn my attention to one of my favorite guilty pleasures on television: Bones. As always for these entries, please consider a hearty dose of SPOILER ALERT!!! in advance.

Bones is one of the many forensic-themed shows that popped up in the wake of CSI's unexpected success, and aside from its unique focus on forensic anthropology, it's pretty much a standard Sexy People Solving Crimes TV show. I won't by any means call it a good TV show, as it's far from it. It's premise is slight, it's lead character is unlikable as often as she is likable, pretty much every crime is solved using magic, and it probably should have ended about one or two seasons ago once Booth and Bones finally figured out that they were a Meant-For-Each-Other TV Couple and got it on.

You say there's no magic in the show? Then what the hell do you call the Angelatron?

Despite all of this, I've found it an immensely enjoyable show in a trashy sort of way, because the people are sexy and they do have great chemistry with each other and the show does have a great sense of humor and heart, and really, I gotta love how gruesome a lot of the bodies get. It's mostly a serialized show, with a crime of the week that gets neatly wrapped up and has everybody learn something about themselves by the end of each episode, but every so often they'll serialize a plotline with a recurring serial killer, and these have, for the most part, led to some of the show's more memorable and creepy moments.

Which brings us to The Gormogon. The Gormogon was introduced early in Season 3 as a serial killer who targeted members of secret societies, cannibalizing their bodies and using their bones to complete a ritualistic skeleton before passing on the title to an apprentice whose job is then to make their own skeleton. It's convoluted, I know, but it was just silly enough and just scary enough to make for some pretty enjoyable television. The killer was smart, seemed to have unlimited resources, and was always willing to go that extra mile to just be the creepiest bad guy imaginable.

Seriously, who removes all their teeth just so they can use them as shrapnel in a bomb?

Sure, it wasn't the most compelling mystery in the world, but it was one you could clearly tell was building up to a big ending. It got you enthused to find out WHO The Gormogon really was, and WHO The Gormogon's newest apprentice was. And they even gave us a fair few number of suspects for people who could be either. Among the cast were Dr. Jack Hodgins, a conspiracy nut who had it out for secret societies, and Dr. Lance Sweets, a young psychologist who had just been added to the series this season, who happened to be a little odd, who happened to admire certain aspects of The Gormogon's psyche and who happened to look a lot like one of The Gormogon's previous apprentices.

And who, let's face it, looks like the kind of guy you'd see in handcuffs on the news after one of these sorts of things.

And so, in the season finale we finally get to meet The Gormogon and his apprentice! And we get...

This guy we've never seen before. Ever.

The Gormogon is revealed to be a nobody. Somebody we'd never seen before and would never see again, mostly because he was killed by the police ten seconds after he'd been revealed. But, all right, not everything wraps itself up so neatly in real life, maybe this is something new and edgy! Surely the reveal of the apprentice will be better, right?

Nope, not really.

The Gormogon's apprentice is revealed to be Dr. Zack Addy, a former student of Bones' who had been with the series from the very first episode. While edgy in its own right, this makes absolutely no sense and almost feels like we are being betrayed by the writers. Aside from a couple brief mentions of him suffering from some depression recently, there was absolutely nothing hinting at him being an apprentice, so this came out of nowhere. On top of that, until this point he'd been one of the sweetest characters on the show. I mean, sure, he was socially awkward (but that's hot and in these days, so we'll excuse him), but this is also a guy who gave Booth a robot to give to his son so he'd be the
coolest dad on Christmas. This is a guy whose entire family flew across six states just so he wouldn't be alone while quarantined on Christmas. This is the guy we'd seen awkwardly stumbling through the dating scene, and who spent most of a Halloween episode dressed as the back half of a cow. ZACK IS NOT A CANNIBALISTIC SERIAL KILLER, DAMMIT!

This is not Zack.

Sorry, this ending just particularly bugs me. At least it, unlike most of the other entries on this list, has some pretty big reasons for being lousy. This season was filmed during the 2007-2008 writer's strike and the quality really suffers for it. I've no doubt that if given a properly extended season they probably would have introduced some real Gormogon suspects earlier and would have foreshadowed Zack's betrayal a lot earlier. Instead everything had to be compressed and rushed and, well, since I don't want to use the word crappy, I'll just go with disappointing. Wait, I did say crappy, didn't I? Ah well, I'm not going to go back and change it at this point.

Later seasons would retcon his history with the Gormogon, saying he never killed anyone or ate anyone, but these felt like blatant attempts at pleasing the fans. The damage had already been done.

So what say you, Bones fans? Do you agree with my sentiments, or are you fine with the ending as is? Were you as disappointed with the Gormogon ending as I was? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 5, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

8/3/2013

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Hello, one and all, and welcome to August. Yeah, I know, it's not one of my favorite months either. It's one of the hottest and ugliest stretches of summer, and it always brings back memories from when I was a kid, as this was the point that I'd usually realize that the fabled season of summer was about to come to an end.

But, now that I'm an employed adult and summer is completely irrelevant, I can look at it with a healthy sense of humor and cynicism; a healthy sense of humor and cynicism that tells me, "Hey, you can probably make a list out of this!" And so, in honor of the disappointing end of summer, I am going to dedicate the month of August to five of my least favorite endings in pop culture. As always, I must note that this is hardly going to be a comprehensive list, because let's face it, there's a lot of lousy endings out there. These five moments are ones that I've found disappointing, confusing, and in a couple cases even downright infuriating, and with one exception they all come from pieces of pop culture I've really enjoyed.

I also shouldn't have to tell you that this list is going to have SPOILER ALERT at the top of pretty much every entry, so take that as a warning now for this one.

So sit back, relax, and let us begin our # 5 moment with...

I came into the Harry Potter series fairly late in the game. My future wife, Fiona, got me a copy of the first book for my 21st birthday, and though I was hesitant to touch it at first, at her insistence (and, well, we were still just friends at the time, and I thought she was really cute, and I wanted to get in good with her...) I gave it a shot. Within three chapters I was hooked. I wound up flying through the first six books in about two months (the seventh having yet to be released), and loving almost every minute of it. Sure, there were more than a few slow spots here and there, and some plot contrivances that were pretty extreme...

"Let us never use this to fix things ever again!"

...but all in all I loved the series. Naturally, with anything you love and don't want to let go, I reread the series once or twice soon after, and though little of the magic had rubbed away, the way Rowling used some rather flimsily explained magic to rationalize almost every ending soon became apparent. But it's magic, so I excused it. However, when rereading the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I could suspend disbelief no longer at how little sense the evil plot actually made.

Mostly because of this guy. More on him later.

For a quick rundown of the plot, Harry has been forced into a magical tournament that will almost certainly get him killed. Through a fair amount of cheating and outside help, he has made it to the final round of the tournament in an excellent position. In the final stretch, he and another competitor, Cedric Diggory, grab the Triwizard Cup to claim a mutual victory, however the cup soon turns out to be a Portkey (magical teleporting device) that transports them to a graveyard. Death Eaters show up, Voldemort is brought back from the grave, Harry escapes back home and finds out before too long that a teacher he's trusted throughout the year was actually another Death Eater in disguise.

Also Edwa-err, Cedric dies.

Now, on paper, reading this the first time, this was all suitably dramatic and seemed to make perfect sense. However, hidden by the shock of Voldemort finally coming back from the dead is how very little sense all of this evil scheme makes.

First and foremost, why was it necessary to put Harry in the deathsport competition in the first place? Voldemort claims to need Harry alive in order to be resurrected, wouldn't putting him through a series of trials that could very well kill him (as it is acknowledged by multiple characters this tournament is quite good at doing) kind of defeat this purpose? And what if, heaven forbid, Harry actually loses, as he was very well about to when Cedric came along?

This is a perfectly sane part of an evil scheme to kill someone, not a scheme to keep them alive!

Second, there is the issue of Mad-Eye Moody, a.k.a. Barty Crouch Jr. With the help of the shapeshifting Polyjuice Potion, Death Eater Barty Crouch Jr. impersonates Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Mad-Eye Moody and becomes fairly friendly with Harry throughout the course of an entire school year. On several occasions, he is even alone with Harry for extended periods of time. Why did he have to wait until the end of the school year to get Harry out of the school when he could have just easily stunned Harry and kidnapped him on at least a half dozen separate occasions? (And don't say anything about Hogwarts not allowing apparition, that school has more security flaws and secret ways out than it has in). Why does he spend so much time in Hogwarts surrounded by people who actually knew Mad-Eye beforehand and would be likely to figure out he's not who he says he is the longer he stays?

"My lord, can't I just stun him and-"
"NO! THAT WON'T NEARLY LOOK COOL ENOUGH!"

I know all of this boils down to Voldemort being obsessed with making a spectacle of it, but when resurrection is on the line, being showy should really take a backseat to executing a plan with a high chance of succeeding.

The first three books had well-executed twist endings, and I think in this event, Rowling tried to outdo herself. In crafting an ending that looked cool, coherency was put by the wayside, and an already overlong and plot-hole-riddled book gets a few more massive holes punched in it. I won't necessarily call it a bad ending, but I will call it a very disappointing one.

But hey, at least Voldemort looks creepy.

So what do you think? Do you agree with my sentiments, or are you fine with the ending as is? Do you also think the Harry Potter books endings could have used less deus ex machine and a little more logic? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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So, What About Fan Fiction?

8/1/2013

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Sorry folks, it's time for another article on writing. It's not going to have many pictures, it won't be as funny, and it will have next to no pop culture references, and it's also going to be a bit shorter than usual. I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you, but will promise I'll be back on that line later again this week. Scout's honor!

I'm here today to talk about my opinions on a topic I've seen usually talked about with anger, embarrassment, or at the very least light confusion: fan fiction. I don't know what the general consensus is on it, but having seen the uproar after the recent announcement of Amazon permitting the sale of certain types of fan fiction, and mulling over the idea in my head some, I wanted to put my two cents out there.

In short, I think fan fiction is a good thing.

Mostly.

If you'd like, I can recommend a few good places to buy torches and pitchforks to use against me.

Avoid Phil's Pitchfork Shack, his prices are terrible.

Before I go any further, I will say yes, I did get my start in fan fiction. Elementary and middle school Matt would write vague stories for Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds and whatever other things happened to catch his short attention span for a moment or two. As soon as I discovered the internet and the thriving community of fan writing that existed there, I might have gone a little crazy. For a few years there I was a writing machine, writing stories for various horror movies, mostly as an excuse to get as horribly violent as I wanted to be and enjoy how squishy the human body is, but also to absorb adulation and inflate my ego after briefly making a name for myself in a fandom or two. I look back on those years now with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment. Fondness for those nights when I would just while away until the insane hours of the morning trying to figure out just how many more plot twists I could cram into a chapter, embarrassment at how much of an ego this gave me and how bad most of what I'd written actually was.

Not this bad, at least.

Still, all in all I think that fan fiction is a good thing. It's one of the easiest and best gateways to writing, lacking the intimidation factor of having to come up with a whole new world and new characters, and allowing those who want to write a chance to stretch their legs. Not all of those who want to can, but hey, at least the opportunity exists. And even for established writers, I think it can be a fun diversion or writing exercise. One day, should such a thing as free time actually exist in my writing schedule, I fully intend to write a tongue-in-cheek novella, Harry Potter and the Terror of Camp Crystal Lake with an adult Harry & Ron as aurors battling Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th series (stupid, yes; awesome, potentially).

Who do you think would win?

My one problem with fan fiction, really, is the increasing legitimization of it. As a diversion and a gateway for moving into different kinds of writing, I think it's fine, but if it's made into a viable career option we may see a sudden dropoff in creativity flooding the market, and that worries me. We see it already in movies where studios aren't taking any risks and are only really greenlighting established characters and franchises, I fear that happening in other forms of fiction as well. I still want there to be a world where people seek to put new and exciting stories out there with new and exciting characters. I don't want to live in a world where the only stories that can exist are ones involving people and places and things that have already existed.

But enough ranting. I enjoyed my time as a fan fiction author, I'm glad to no longer be one, and I'm glad anyone who wants to write has the opportunity to do so in this fashion.

(P.S. You'll note that I completely ignore the topic of erotic fan fiction in this article; I did this because I do not feel particularly qualified to do so, and am honestly a little frightened of it. I respect it's existence, but I have a harder time arguing that fan fiction should exist when said fan fiction involves Jean-Luc Picard and Inspector Gadget double-teaming a sentient Rubik's Cube, not that I've ever seen that particular grouping, but given the nature of Rule 34 it probably does in some dark, weird corner of the internet.)

Did you honestly expect me to try and find a picture for that?

So what do you think, dear readers? Are you for or against fanfic? Is its existence a sign of the apocalypse or a good, harmless form of fun? Sound off in the comments!

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor

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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 1, The Works of Stephen King

Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 2, Star Trek: Enterprise (Series Finale)

Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 3, Haute Tension

10 Random Things I Love About The Room

Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 4, Bones, Season 3 (The Gormogon Plotline)

Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 5, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

So, What About Fan Fiction?

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