<\/p>\n
I shaved off a good chunk of my beard because my ex girlfriend Eileen
\nthinks it’s funny to pop up outside the bathroom window and scream my
\nname. So I let her in to putter around the kitchen while I shaved the
\nrest of my face in a dark frenzy. I was planning to anyway, but I
\nwanted to do it on my own terms. I grew the beard while on vacation and
\nhad meant to get rid of it, but people started calling me “sir” and
\nnobody carded me for booze. Without it, everyone thinks I’m an 18 year
\nold Mormon. I was glad for the image shift.<\/p>\n
Eileen wasn’t in the kitchen making food, mind you. I don’t
\nthink she could successfully reheat a pizza. But she sure does putter.
\nAs far as I can tell, she just opens all the cabinets and rattles the
\npans around. I’ve always thought of it as some compulsive female
\ninstinct, like she needs to affirm to herself that she is a skirt
\nsince, generally speaking, she’s unable to perform any household
\nwomanly duties. My old friend James says she does this because she’s
\ncrazier than a squirrel that’s been dropped from a biplane. Regardless,
\nI forgive her eccentricities because she has a killer body.<\/p>\n
She wanted me to take her out to dinner, which was fine. Now, I left
\nEileen for a reason and, yes, it’s because she’s crazier than a
\nsquirrel that’s been dropped out of a biplane. But when she wears a
\nsummer dress and wants to go out on the town, I always say yes. I
\nusually agree to these weird platonic dates because I enjoy taking her
\nto Ledo’s up at the strip mall and watching all the sad daddies stare
\nlongingly, trying to ignore their little wives and wailing children.
\nEileen knows men stare hard at her and she can rarely last five minutes
\nwithout hiking up her dress and asking me to identify an imaginary
\nblemish on her inner thigh. Though that may also be designed to confuse
\nme.<\/p>\n
After half an hour waiting for our pizza, my ability to converse on an
\nintelligent level started to fade. Eileen was on politics and smart
\ngirl things, which is useless since I know what she looks like naked.
\nSensing my mental drift, she brought up a topic that really warmed me
\nup.<\/p>\n
“Best finale to a TV show,” she said, sitting back and smiling.<\/p>\n
“Any show?”<\/p>\n
She nodded and smiled, crossing her arms over her lovely breasts and pushing them up slightly.<\/p>\n
I watched her fox-like face for a moment, then I cleared my throat. Three shows came instantly to mind: Newhart<\/em>, MST3K<\/em> and Magnum PI<\/em>.<\/p>\n Magnum ended it’s sixth season with an open ended finale that suggested Magnum’s seventh season was an experiment in dark depression. Every Newhart<\/em> ended in 1990 and has the most clever ending I’ve seen. He wakes up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, the actress who played his wife in The Bob Newhart Show<\/em> which ended in 1978. Looks like the past 12 years have all been a weird dream, honey. Talk about creativity — there you go.<\/p>\n Mystery Science Theater 3000<\/em> put together a perfect finale. Mike By the way, that’s not on the greatest finale list because I think Patrick McGoohan was just being bitter and weird.<\/p>\n I think Eileen is turned on by all this movie and TV talk…or maybe the
\nthe main character’s demise, but left the actual facts open to
\ninterpretation. Upon hearing about this, the fans all had a meltdown
\nand a powerful public outcry caused the studio to put together a
\nknee-jerk seventh season. However, this was against the will of
\neverybody involved. The compromise was to make an abbreviated season –
\nabout 12 episodes – and provide a more fitting exit. Leaving in the
\noriginal death finale as a cliffhanger, Magnum and crew returned for
\nthe final season, but, throughout the handful of episodes, it was
\ncontinually hinted that Magnum did die, that he’s a Sixth Sense<\/em>
\nstyle ghost. In fact, they took it a step further and suggested that he
\ndied a long time ago, earlier on in the series. There was a fifth
\nseason near death episode that was mentioned several times in the sixth
\nand seventh seasons. Though I doubt Magnum enjoyed a Joss Whedon-style
\nforesight, there’s a feeling in that fifth season episode which, taken
\nin retrospect, makes me wonder if there was an attempt to create a mood
\nfor the final years of the series. The cast and crew planned on the
\nfollowing season being the last and, from the beginning, the sixth
\nseason was all about death — peppered with the often violent
\ndestruction of supporting characters. To add to this theory, the sixth
\nand seventh seasons also re-introduced a supporting character as a sort
\nof “is he or isn’t he” ghost\/spirit-guide. He’d been blown up in a car
\nbomb meant for Magnum, and there were whole episodes devoted to the
\nghost routine.<\/p>\n
\nloose end was moodily tied up over the course of the 12 episodes and
\nthe two-part finale opens with Magnum staring at graves and monuments
\nin Northern Virginia. He’s called back to Hawaii, against his will, to
\nhelp an old friend. Another open ended death scene wraps up the final
\nact and, looking back, this was probably intended to be ghost Magnum’s
\nrealization that he had died long ago. So cut to commercial, then we
\nreturn for the epilogue. Magnum appears at a friend’s wedding (ignored
\nby everyone) in Navy dress whites, stepping out from a hedgerow. End on
\na comic note, fade to black, then open up with Magnum in dress uniform
\nwalking on the beach with his young daughter (murdered early in the
\nsixth season). The camera pulls back and we see Tom Selleck watching
\nthe final beach scene on TV. He takes a sip of beer, then raises the
\nremote control and turns off the TV. A reminder to all of us that the
\nseventh season was forced and, in the end, it was just a TV show and we
\nshould have let it go.<\/p>\n
\nAfter years as a retired shrink running a hotel in Vermont, his
\nseason-long battle with the golf course developers comes to a comical
\nend when Bob is hit on the head by an errant golfball.<\/p>\n
\nand the bots finally escape their imprisonment on the Satellite of Love
\nand what do they do? They get a basement apartment in Minneapolis (it’s
\n“right on the bus line!”) and settle down on a ratty couch to watch a
\nbad movie. There’s a pause while the camera pulls back so we’re
\nwatching from the familiar position, then they start making wisecracks
\nand the scene fades into the credits. What’s the message there? We’ll
\nnever escape cult cinema? Or, maybe, it’s an homage to the ending of The Prisoner<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\nshrimp pizza wasn’t settling with her. Either way, we left on good
\nterms and I went home to rub my beardless face, watch the last episode
\nof Red Dwarf<\/em> and think about blemishes on Eileen’s inner thigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353],"class_list":["post-2548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2548"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2922,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2548\/revisions\/2922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}