Finale

Spoiler warning, I'm going to be talking about Homeland and some other shows, but not just yet.

December has a funny way of making you reflect on life, I mean, just because it's the final month of the year, it shouldn't really hold any great value for retrospective. But it does, and I always find myself looking back over the years accomplishments and failures, which in turn usually leads to me summing the year up by one positive or negative factor. 2008 saw me getting a good job, starting university, and turning 18, but it also saw me getting dumped in January, and so now I always think of 2008 as a bad year, when if I think about it, it held many more positive memories than most years.

So when I turn my gaze back over 2013, I foremost find myself thinking that I never really got the hang of writing 2013 down. It may sound foolish to most people, but I thought that if I mocked the whole "mayan 2012 doomsday" thing, then life would go about enacting it out of spite towards me. So for a few years, I didn't know if I would make it to 2013, and now that we've come to the end of it, I never really thought it would happen.

But more importantly, I find myself thinking that 2013 has been quite a waste. Even though I've written and illustrated a graphic novel (which I promise is still finding it's way into the public), worked my way through a Masters degree, and got myself a job I genuinely enjoy everyday, I still think of the year on a whole as a let down. I feel like I haven't taken the chance to properly squeeze this year for what it was worth, perhaps because there have been more than a handful of negative moments peppered throughout the year, and I just can't take my mind off them, or perhaps its another sign that I'm becoming a different person. In July I wrote down a list of 10 things I wanted to do in the next year, and I planned to make at least half of them a reality. So far I have crossed off 2 of them; get a job and make new friends. Frankly I didn't expect to cross that second one off so soon, or at all, but I guess that I have my job to thank for that. I know I work with some truly bizarre and wonderful people, and I'm really happy to have met all of them. Some of the things on my list I know won't happen. Number 6's "Live in York or somewhere nice" I know can't happen if I still want to work in my current job, with it's apprentice wage I can't afford to spend the money I make renting somewhere. But I knew I wouldn't get all of them done, and that is the magic of it. Whilst most people make their yearly resolutions in the December/January period, I didn't want to be stuck with that constant reminder every time I saw a calendar, and I didn't want to get to next December and think about all the stuff I didn't manage to do... which I'm actually doing now anyway, so maybe I need to tweak the system a little.

But I'm a silver-linings kind of guy. If I'm feeling down now, then I want to use this memory as an example in the new year that by December 2014 I will be on my way to the person I want to be. The moments I spend doing things that aren't taking advantage of my full potential will be the moments I purge from 2014 me, then by 2015 I'll be able to look back at this year as the year I corrected my course. I want to be able to look back at the things I don't like about myself, like the fear I feel when an opportunity presents itself, and be relieved that I overcame that. I want to Carpe that Diem right in the face!

Anyway, I did say I would talk about Homeland, and I've been psyching myself up all week to talk about this, so here goes. (Spoilers ahead Cap'n!)
The finale of season 3 of Homeland aired last sunday, and if I hadn't already been told that they were commissioned for a fourth season, I might have come away happier. I wasn't angered that Brody was hanged in the Middle East in front of the mother of his unborn baby, to be honest it was the only real ending he could have had. When his name was picked out of the raffle of life, Brody got a shitty deal, and whilst everything he did in season 1 was done out of manufactured, misguided love to a terrorist's child's death, there wasn't really any kind of redemption that would allow him to walk the streets of America as an innocent man. He had to die, I understand that, I accept that, but knowing that season 4 is going to continue a story that revolved around him just seems wrong. Sure, the first half of the season did a pretty good job at showing a world without Brody, but that was only because everyone was sat on the edge of their seat waiting to see how Saul and Carrie would end up crossing paths with him in the future. To continue the story with him dead would just seem fractured.
I mean, they could always do the old classic "he didn't die really" in the first few episodes of the next season, but I feel like Game of Thrones has bullied all the other shows into packing that in. Either you kill your characters off for good, or you're a pussy! But sometimes that's what we need from a show. We watch these programs to escape from our lives, same with gaming or reading books, we need to experience something other than the lives we were given. But does that mean we have to be tied to the same shitty circumstances that keep our real lives in line? We loved Brody, we knew he was fucked up from all the crap he went through, but he was the reason we watched. Carrie had her suspicions, and we watched to see whether she was right or wrong, and that has been the defining quality of the show. Even in the penultimate episode of season 3, no one could be sure that Brody hadn't decided to shun his homeland and just stick with the people who had welcomed him in with open arms. I don't know what the show would be without that, and I imagine a lot of people will feel the same way.

So maybe Brody will make a return to our screens next September, until then we have Sherlock on new years day, Game of Thrones next spring, hopefully the new series of 24 sometime in the summer/autumn, and the finale of How I Met Your Mother in March. Maybe I will have the time to watch these shows in-between my new uber-productive life.

Have a great christmas guys, I might try and make another post before next year, but if not then I hope we all make 2014 the best damn year ever!

Toodle Pip!