Inquiring minds want to sleep...

I watched two shows this evening that the TIVO had recorded earlier in the week. The first was the final episode of 7th Heaven. I always like to watch the final episodes of TV shows, to see how they end. Since I had not watched any of the previous episodes of 7th Heaven, however, this was a little challenging but I think I figured most of it out.

The series was about a father, who is a minister, and a mother, who appears to have popped out kids on a regular basis for about 30 years.

The story line of the final episode was that the gay son was supposed to get married that day, to a girl who was in love with some other guy. Much of the show consisted of people telling the gay son and each other why he should not get married. I kept yelling "because he's gay" at the TV but all of them appeared to be in total denial about that. At the very end of the episode, a woman who had not been seen before in the episode shows up with a baby and intimates that the gay son is the father. The infant looks nothing like him so a paternity test should pretty well resolve that issue. They also did incessant flashbacks to show that this guy had the same haircut when he was five years old as he does today. I'm not sure why that was important to the plot. Like many other things in the episode, the woman with the baby seemed like a set-up for a follow-up made-for-TV reunion movie.

There was also a young, hunky Scottish waiter at the wedding reception, which they held in spite of the fact that there was no wedding. His accent was so thick that Sean Connery would have had trouble understanding him. He was the only one who knew that fingernail-polish remover would remove the moustaches that the two youngest sons had drawn on each other -- oddly, he had fingernail-polish remover with him. I thought maybe he was going to be the love interest for the gay son in the reunion movie but they quickly paired him with one of the daughters.

In a scene that truly tested the limits of credibility, an older daughter reveals that she is going to be having twins, quickly followed by an older son saying his wife is going to be having twins, which led to the husband or boyfriend of yet another older daughter to reveal that they also were going to be having twins. The husband or boyfriend had clearly just gotten out of rehab where, oddly enough, they had confiscated his tie. The daughter was spliced into a couple scenes but I had the feeling she was no longer actually associated with the show. The birth of three sets of twins should fill at least one hour of a two-hour reunion special!

The one person that I did recognize in all this was George Stults, who played the husband of one of the daughters. He and his brother (Geoff) where on an episode of Trading Spaces at the very height of its popularity. They lived in a cheap apartment with no beds (mattresses on the floor). I remember it because Geoff jumped off the roof of the apartment building into the swimming pool. Kewl, very LA!

The other show that I watched was Gilmore Girls, which I have to admit that I have been watching since its first episode. It would not be tolerable without the TIVO since you can fast forward whenever one of the Gilmore girls is talking, rambling, babbling, whatever you want to call what they do. I believe the appropriate term is logorrhea -- "pathologically excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness that is characteristic especially of the manic phase of manic-depressive disorders" (also know as "diarrhea of the mouth"). I started watching because Edward Herrmann is in it, as Richard Gilmore, and also Kelly Bishop, as Emily Gilmore. They are both terrific, classy actors! It also has the guy whom Elaine decided was "sponge worthy" in a famous episode of Seinfeld. It was the last episode of the season so it was pretty much the Gilmore-Girl equivalent of "Who shot JR?"