I just watched the Season 4 True Blood finale, and the only thing going through my head right now is this:

What… The…. Fuck…..?

I actually considered not writing the above out of fear of alienating potential readers of Stratasfear.com’s ramblings that might be offended by the vulgarity.
But you know what… fuck it. Those are exactly the words that came to mind at the closing (and who am I really kidding, anyone who knows me knows that I tend to drop a casual F-bomb or 10 in typical non-professional colloquial conversation).

For the sake of not spoiling the show for those who haven’t seen it… yet… let’s just say that there’s a whole lot of death going on and there may be some cast members who do not return next season – that said, there are also some past characters who’ll be making a reappearance. This really got me to thinking recently about my ongoing research for my own television project. I’m not going to be delving into the pseudo-sci-fi world of VOLERAK in this post – that would take way too long to explain in a single outing. Suffice to say that I’ve been plotting this thing out for the better part of the past decade and don’t have any intentions of slowing down.

I tend to excuse away my countless hours wasted watching serialized television as research towards that project. Sure I watch contemporary stuff like Dexter, Fringe, Burn Notice, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad, but in university I marathoned everything from Battlestar Galactica and Sliders to serious sci-fi anime like Fullmetal Alchemist, Ghost In The Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Dragonball, for countless hours of television.

Two years ago, when I first moved to Toronto, I dove into Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel in their entirety (including crossing them over episode-for-episode as they overlapped with original airing date), which all accounted for 12 seasons of television watching. Last year I marathoned all of Stargate: the movies, SG-1, Atlantis, and the recently cancelled Stargate Universe. That accounted for 17+ seasons of television alone.

My current endeavour involves going back to my childhood roots: Star Trek. I’m currently closing in on the first season finale of Voyager (probably by Friday) and it’s interesting to see how each of the series develops when you get to see every single episode in a really shortened span of time. The Next Generation ended with a very open finale: everyone continued on with business as usual and their sights on the horizon, before spinning off into the films (Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis).

Deep Space Nine was centered around the evolution of a group of crewmates and their trials together in war times before they each moved on in their own ways in the finale at the conclusion of the war – new career placements for several characters, romantic involvements for others, Jake Sisco grown up and longing for new direction in his life, and his father Cpt. Benjamin Sisko disappearing into a different dimension to return at an unforeseen time in the future.

Not having watched all of Voyager in its initial run (what with high school conflicts with viewing times, and the lack of decent internet in Northern Ontario for downloading/streaming in the early 2000s) I expect it will end somewhere closer to the ending of Deep Space Nine; the whole premise is based around the ship trying to return home to Earth and I’ve heard that’s how it ends. But this all makes me wonder if I should be rethinking VOLERAK once again, as I never truly came up with an ending for the saga. It was more like a bunch of introductions and mid-points that converge on the central story, but I never really thought up a resolution to the whole thing.

It’s probably about time I get on that.

Fuck.