Happy Trails, Kids

It's been real, and it's been fun

A Media Shmedia column

by Scott Patrick Wagner

When Diana Rigg left The Avengers – a seminal TV series for any 1960s media baby – I got choked up. Actually, that's giving me decorous spin. When her character, cat-suited super-Brit Emma Peel, spoke her final line to the also-ran who took her place ("He likes his tea stirred anti-clockwise.") I didn't just get choked up, I cried my little prepubescent eyes out.

I don't much like endings. To paraphrase deceased gunmonger Charlton Heston, you're not messing with my status quo unless you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

But sometimes endings can be done with enough style that they distract me from the inherent loss. Take, for example, the final episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Newhart, and St. Elsewhere. These staples of bygone decades turned their narratives on their respective ears for the finales, leaving their histories inexorably altered – any "home" a viewer might have longed to revisit wasn't there any longer. Of particular impact was the St. Elsewhere capper, wherein the entire six years of labyrinthine medical and personal storylines were revealed to all exist within the mind of one autistic boy. Trippy, man.

And in current times, the last season of ER is proving to be an elegant and relentlessly watchable thing. Ghosts from the past are showing up right and left as a kind of tribute to this 15-season stalwart. As a testament to how good this show can be, the tributes are neither superfluous nor cloying. Last week's episode featured four long-departed, original cast members (including small-screen-boy-makes-good George Clooney). The stomach-in-throat pacing of ER at its finest has not dissipated, and neither has its ability to also reveal the humanity at the epicenter of its tempests. It is a rare series that can make your adrenaline rush one minute and your tear ducts evacuate the next.

All of this, of course, is my way of avoiding a finale much closer to home. This will be my last column for the VC Reporter. There are various and sundry reasons for this, but the preferred one is that I am off on a new venture, which I will mercilessly plug for two sentences. As regular readers may know, I am what might be called a spiritual fellow, not to mention a gay one. Invoking both of these traits, I have started up an online dating service for spiritually minded gay men called EnlightenMen.com – which you are most welcome to visit, and even consider joining if you find yourself of a compatible set of tenets and genitals.

Before I leave, I would like to clear up one bit of awkward business. In my previous column, which dealt with Battlestar Galactica, I provided the title "I Am an Epic Nerd." The editorial staff here decided instead to title it, "White and Nerdy." This is, apparently, the name of a "Weird Al" song, but being oblivious to that factoid, I found the title oddly offensive at face value, bringing race into an article that had nothing to do with race. If any of you, like me, found that title bothersome or offensive, I would like to offer my apology, on behalf of those who did not think one was necessary.

Beyond that, I would like to thank the publisher and staff of this paper for giving me this opportunity for the past 19 months. It has been a great pleasure, and an exhilarating ride. For those of you not yet ready to exit the bumper car, the ride will continue -- in forms both more and less dignified -- at Multiple Personality, my peripatetic blog (blog.scottpatrickwagner.com).

Thank you for reading my words, laughing at my jokes, and tolerating my rants. I can only hope that a phrase or two in this column might have been, in some sidelong fashion, as memorable for you as Emma Peel's anti-clockwise line was for me.