One of the most fun things about spending time at a place like Comic-Con is the opportunity to watch new episodes of shows in giant rooms full of major fans. We were able to have that experience with Eureka, which was made even better with an episode that featured nerd-god Wil Wheaton and a special guest appearance by, you guessed it, Mr. Wheaton himself. Eureka was the first show I ever wrote about for the blog, and for me it will always represent summer television at its best, so it was really, really fun to watch with a lot of cheering people.

The episode that aired last week was a funny, well-made zombie episode, featuring the poor guinea pig employees of Global Dynamics as a horde of irrationally angry zombies bent on…well, it was never really made clear, but one assumes it was BRAINS. It was a classic Eureka form, introducing the zombie transformation as a Monster of the Week and once again trapping our heroes into a tiny room while they desperately try to find a cure before the zombies break in. Wheaton did a nice job as zombie patient zero, and there was a side plot line with Henry that seemed to be going nowhere but had a nice payoff at the end. Funny, Comic-Con appropriate, and a good time for all.

Zombies!!

But the big story about Eureka this season is the new organizing gimmick, which was introduced in the season premiere and which has yet to be resolved. Rather than let its main characters continue to trundle along their merry destructive ways, Eureka reset the clock for this season by sending several of its main characters into the past – back to the 1940s for the founding of Eureka, to be precise – and then let them return to the present only to discover that everything has shifted slightly. Carter is sheriff, Jo is head of Global Dynamics security, Henry is married, and in the ultimate twist of unexpected strangeness, the accident-prone lab monkey Fargo is now head of GD. It’s a familiar plot device, probably best established by Back to the Future, and it’s a fun way to play with Eureka’s penchant for turning things on their heads.

Still, it would be well within Eureka’s typical format to resolve the Bizarro-Eureka plot line in relatively short order – one episode, or maybe two episodes would be the standard length of time that something this disruptive would be allowed to continue. And yet here we are, four episodes into the season, with still no resolution on how Carter, Allison, Henry, Jo and Fargo will return to their own timeline or whether time traveling 1940s noir scientist Dr. Grant will be sent back to his own decade.

It’s nice to see the show try something different with its long-arc plot line, particularly when this one demonstrates a willingness to fiddle with even the most well-received pieces of the show – Jo was about to get engaged to her boyfriend when she was sent back in time, and returns to discover that they barely even like each other in the new timeline. Allison’s son Kevin, whose autism combined with flashes of inexplicable genius have made him a long-term source of mystery on the show, has been transformed into a regular, Xbox playing, mildly obnoxious teenager. Of course, the alternate timeline problem also helps Eureka delay its own inevitable will-they-or-won’t-they scenario, as Carter and Allison finally kiss back in the 40s, but Carter returns to Eureka to find that he’s still together with his ex-girlfriend Tess.

I think the long-term alternate timeline is a strong device to keep Eureka on its toes, and am pleased that the show has chosen to use the conflict it creates rather than immediately dial everything back to the norm. My only concern is that I can’t find a way to finally resolve this whole mess without a very clichéd “they can go home now, but do they want to?” situation. Still, that’s a long way off, and for now I’m happy to watch everyone flounder around in bizarro world.

So, Comic-Con is one of the crazier places I’ve ever been. We tried to prepare ourselves for the impending bizarre hilarity, but nothing really prepares you for walking fifteen minutes just to get to the end of a line, and passing five women dressed as Slave Leia in the process. Unfortunately, we only had tickets for the first two days, which means I missed several of the awesome TV panels on Saturday and Sunday, but did manage to make it to a few really great panels, including the Girls Gone Geek panel I mentioned in my post last week, and the nerd-stravaganza that was the Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams panel on Thursday.

The Whedon/Abrams panel was probably the panel highlight of my Comic-Con experience, and it particularly stood out after the long string of much less exciting movie release panels that we had to sit through in order to guarantee we’d have seats. This is of course a severe reduction, but my impression of the big name movie panels we saw (including RED, Battle: Los Angeles, Salt, MegaMind, and Tron Legacy) is that most actors are pretty boring (except for Will Ferrell and Tina Fey for MegaMind), most of the screened questions from the audience are repetitive (“What kind of fight training did you have to do?” “How are you dealing with this as an adaptation?”), and although the idea of using Comic-Con as a platform for previewing new things is a good one, everyone has a higher level discussion when we see enough from a preview to actually talk about it. (“So, we really didn’t see any glimpse of what the evil aliens will look like in this film, but… could you talk about them?”)

Seriously, look at Mary-Louise Parker's face as she listens to Bruce Willis.

Which is why it was such a relief, and so completely awesome, to have Joss Whedon and JJ Abrams come out and be able to talk about well-known work, about narrative and storytelling, about inspiration and the production process, and about their own experiences as fans. It was fascinating to hear both of them talk about the differences between making movies and making television, and to hear Joss Whedon say that although movies are hugely satisfying because they have firm and final endings, he feels that long form storytelling is more rewarding and much harder. The moderator, Doc Jensen, also asked about serialization on television, and both men admitted to understanding the financial motivation for non-serialized shows but having absolutely no creative interest in them. “Stories imply time,” said JJ Abrams. “Stories imply inevitability and some kind of progress.” “I don’t think the networks will ever, ever ask for that,” added Whedon. “The networks will never admit that people want that, because they do see the cash cow of ‘The Mentalist! Let’s all do The Mentalist!’ And when Lost first hit and was blowing up huge…they were still like, ‘We don’t want that. That successful, Emmy-winning thing? No, we don’t want that.’…And it’s very weird, because ultimately, the serial is always going to be the thing people remember. What do they remember about Cheers? It’s Sam and Diane, not a great joke from Cheers.”

What came out of their discussion of serialization, including Joss Whedon’s trials with the cancellations of Firefly and Dollhouse and the unrepeatable structure of a show like Lost, is a huge disconnect between the stories people like Abrams and Whedon want to tell on TV and the capacity for network television to produce those shows. Recently, Abrams has been more successful than Whedon in creating television for the networks, but as he mentions in his descriptions of both Fringe and his new show UnderCovers, it’s because he’s been careful to balance the standalone aspect of an episode and his own dominant interest in longer story arcs. One of the most interesting moments for me was when Joss Whedon admitted that in making Dollhouse, he just had not realized how much the networks have changed, and had not come to terms with the idea that he has a cable rather than network mentality. “I definitely was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

Whedon did talk about preparing to do The Avengers, and insisted on describing to JJ how fully he loved Star Trek. “I have had actual moments of sheer fucking panic because I love Star Trek so much.” In turn, Abrams talked about the process of rewriting, and when Whedon mentioned that he doesn’t really write second drafts, Abrams shot back “You bastard!” But however much fun they had joking around and teasing each other, it was hard not to come away with a sense of how tricky the television landscape is right now, and how swiftly the networks are changing. I can only hope that when Joss Whedon is done with that silly Avengers movie project, there will be a new Whedon show on cable.

I can also hope that next year, after we figuring out some of the basic Comic-Con ins and outs this time around, we get to attend more panels like this one.

I am sitting in one of the smaller panel rooms at the San Diego Convention Center, waiting for the start of the Girls Gone Genre panel with Felicia Day and Marti Noxon. In the past two days I watched the JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon panel, saw Tina Fey manhandle a Brad Pitt cut-out, took a photo of William Shatner, and, most awesomely, got to say hello to Alan Sepinwall after the Hawaii 5-0 panel. (Eeee!) It’s been an overwhelming, crazy-making learning experience, and I look forward to putting this knowledge into practice for the already-purchased 4-day pass for next year’s Con.

I’ll write longer impressions and post pictures when I have more time and more power outlets, but overall, it’s astonishing how powerful the TV presence is here. By far, the craziest lines are for Ballroom 20, which was almost entirely full of TV programming today (True Blood, Bones, Big Bang Theory, etc). Nowhere is it more obvious that pop culture is TV culture than at Comic-Con right now.

So, this weekend was a big weekend. An epic weekend. A weekend to end all weekends. Announcements were made, questions asked and answered, celebrations commenced and pictures were taken. Jeffster! performed. Wait, what?

That’s right. This weekend was Comic-Con.

You thought I was going to go somewhere else with that, didn’t you?

Yes, this weekend was the annual San Diego nerd prom, which I did not attend but avidly followed because if nerds know how to do anything, it’s blow up the internet. There were the usual vague Lost spoilers (long-dead characters returning!), an adoring crowd at the Chuck panel run by Alan Sepinwall, and lots of sexy double entendres from Torchwood’s John Barrowman. If at all possible, I am totally going next year.

The Guild: Avatars and actual people

Felicia Day aka Codex - Actress, girl gamer, Guild writer

Inspired by Comic-Con, though, I spent this weekend watching a show I’ve heard about for a long time but never got around to watching – Felicia Day’s internet webisode minishow The Guild. The show is about a gaming guild, The Knights of Good, whose internet relationships begin to bleed into their physical lives. Each episode is only about five minutes long, and crammed full of World of Warcraft references, deeply awkward comedy, and low budget video. Xbox sponsored The Guild’s second season, so the budget and the video quality dramatically improve, but not so much that it looks like an episode of 24. Other than high def quality and the sudden presence of PCs rather than Macs, The Guild seems to have remained its nerdy, in-joking, socially inept self.

I don’t play World of Warcraft, so a significant chunk of my viewing experience was the persistent knowledge that I was incapable of appreciating what were probably very funny jokes. Some of it’s not too difficult to make out – when The Guild manages to take down one of their members’ mother in the season one finale (“Boss Fight”), Felicia Day’s character Codex gets stuck with the now-homeless Guildie. “Worst. Loot. Ever,” she complains to her webcam. But many of the jokes require a vocabulary that takes hundreds of hours of gaming, or at least some determined googling, to grasp. QQ! Tank’d! Let’s make the pull, DPS, nasty crit, aggro, I need to be buffed, grinding, etc. etc.

Guild leader Vork - I also make this face when the internet goes down

What’s impressive about The Guild is that even though the specific references don’t always land for me, it’s still hilarious. Much more than a show about a particular game, The Guild depicts collapsing boundaries between a virtual life and a life in the real world. The problem of what happens when relationships inside an online community completely overtake the physical world is equally applicable to any number of all-encompassing virtual groups, and the jokes about addiction, social ineptitude, confused value systems, and stealing WiFi are aimed at a much broader audience. Perhaps my favorite moment is when the game’s servers go down, and the Guild’s leader Vork yells, “It’s like phantom limb pain!”

One question is definitely up for debate – is it fair to call The Guild television? As a video series built for the internet, about the internet (although you can buy it on DVD and download it on Xbox Live), labeling The Guild as “television” seems to miss the point. It’s certainly not a movie, and it is episodic, which I would argue as one of the important defining TV characteristics, but is it too short? Does its original medium make it a significantly different creature than Law and Order or The Simpsons? Or is this just television from a new source?

No, seriously, I’m not sure. Take a look for yourself:

Watch the Guild