The invisible secretaries

In the real world, much of what happens in the business world wouldn't occur without the hard work of the secretaries. In the legal profession, for example, it is sometimes joked that it is the clerks, couriers and secretaries who actually make justice happen. Yet, in the legal dramas on television, secretaries are conspicuously absent.

Sure, on Ally McBeal there is Elaine Vassal (Jane Krakowski), but from my understanding of the pilot episode, she's a secretary only for the title character, who is a new associate at the firm. Since she's a busybody, it is easy to get the impression that she's the secretary for all the lawyers in the firm. But with all the different people milling about the offices of Cage & Fish, surely John and Richard each have their own secretaries, too.

On The Practice it made sense for Donnell & Associates to only have one secretary in the first season: Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who later turned out to be a law student going to school at night who then gets to try cases, and whose secretarial duties are taken over by Lucy Hatcher (Marla Sokoloff). Perhaps it is Boston Legal which has come closest to showing how vital legal secretaries are to the success of the lawyers they work for. For Alan Shore (James Spader), his secretary's desk practically had a revolving door through which went several people, including a young woman who accused him of sexual harassment, golden girl Catherine Piper (Betty White) and Clarence (Gary Anthony Williams), a cross-dressing black man. The latter turned out to also become a lawyer, as if perhaps to suggest that only as attorneys do legal professionals reach their fullest potential.

JAG is not a David E. Kelley production, but even there we see only one true secretary: Lt. Harriet Sims (Karri Turner). I know about Chegwidden's yeoman (first the Smithersly Tiner, then Coates), but that was more like a receptionist than a secretary; it was Sims who had the real secretarial duties.

It is understandable that we don't see secretaries much on the various incarnations of Law & Order. Maybe New York's court system can afford secretaries for the district attorneys, but likely not for the public defenders. When the cops barge in on private defense attorneys, the writers and/or directors choose not to show us the cops bypassing the receptionists and secretaries. In the episode in which former Will & Grace star Eric McCormack appeared as a 'sugar daddy' suspected of killing his 'sugar baby,' however, we did see the rich man's secretary running interference between the cops and her boss.

Disappointing choice for Yoda, Carl is

I was very disappointed by the choice of Carl as Yoda in "Something, Something, Something, Dark Side," the Family Guy parody/homage to Empire Strikes Back. Even with the choice of many characters fixed by "Blue Harvest" (the parody/homage of A New Hope), there was still plenty of Family Guy characters left to choose from (contrary to what Seth MacFarlane says on the DVD commentary). Now, if the characters have to be fixed in relation to Chris as Luke, then Darth Vader should be Peter and not Stewie. Besides, some of the mappings were chosen in relation to Peter rather than Chris: Lois as Leia and the Giant Chicken as Boba Fett, rather than Meg as Leia and perhaps the Evil Monkey as Boba Fett. Heck, they even felt free to remap some characters, most notably Meg went from being the trash compactor monster to being the asteroid monster.

What do I have against Carl anyway? I can believe the character as a convenience store manager, but as a sage old Jedi master, the mapping is incongruous, but not enough to be funny.

Another time I will go over nits in this installment uncovered by the IMDb staff, and maybe some of my own.

A note about spoilers in this blog

Just in case anyone is wondering, this blog has no policy on spoilers. Nits may occur at the end of a movie or episode, and in such cases nitpickers need not walk on eggshells. If they want to give a spoiler alert for such nits, it's entirely up to them how exactly to do it and what level of prominence to give to the alert. But for the most part, contributors here will assume that readers who recognize the movie or episode under discussion is one they have not seen and want to see will stop reading at that point, but will hopefully come back after they've seen it for themselves and then there is thus nothing to spoil.

Our valued friendship

The show: The Big Bang Theory
The episode: "The Bozeman Reaction," first aired on CBS a couple of days ago.
What happened: I can pretty much repeat what Bill said in a post yesterday: "Thieves break into the apartment where Sheldon and Leonard live and steal computers, external hard drives, some video game consoles and several video games. Predictably, Sheldon and Leonard get a ridiculously elaborate security system installed in their apartment." After "getting trapped and electrocuted by the security system he had [Howard] Wolowitz install," Sheldon gets the "idea to move to Bozeman, Montana," where his bags are stolen immediately upon arrival, quickly convincing him to return to Pasadena.
What has me wondering: After deciding on Bozeman, Montana as his new home, Sheldon records a farewell video message for his four friends, or, to be exact, three friends and one acquaintance. Upon returning, his friends are actually happy to see him, and all jokes about wanting Sheldon gone or killed are duly forgotten. Howard is the first to greet Sheldon, prompting Sheldon to tactlessly remark that "the acquaintance" was the first to greet him.
This made me laugh, as that line sounds like vintage Sheldon. But now it gets me to wondering if Sheldon forgot how differently he valued his friends in the episode "The Friendship Algorithm." In that episode, eager to have Barry Kripke as a friend so he can have more time on a supercomputer, Sheldon decided that having five friends would be too much for him, so he decided to 'defriend' Raj. He carefully explained his decision, and even though Howard does not have a PhD, his "cologne is an assault on the senses," and he's "not available for video games during the Jewish high holidays," Sheldon decides to keep Howard as a friend.
At some point between "The Friendship Algorithm" and this episode, Howard was demoted from "friend" to "acquaintance" while Raj was promoted from expendable friend to valued friend. Apparently Penny was also promoted in Sheldon's estimation. I do remember I spent a whole blog post on Monday reminding nitpickers that humans often behave illogically. But that caveat almost seems to not apply to Sheldon. Could Sheldon's friendship revaluation have taken place as he lay twitching on the floor on account of Howard's security system?

They had to do the episode in which they get robbed

With last night's episode titled "The Bozeman Reaction," the shark gets ever closer to The Big Bang Theory. Thieves break into the apartment where Sheldon and Leonard live and steal computers, external hard drives, some video game consoles and several video games. Predictably, Sheldon and Leonard get a ridiculously elaborate security system installed in their apartment. When I read the episode description on TV Guide, I immediately thought, "Oh, they're doing one of those."

In theory, there is a small, finite amount of basic plots writers can draw upon for their stories. This means that the best that writers can hope for is that they've put enough ornaments on the basic plot so that the story's familiarity does not bother readers too much. But when a sitcom starts falling back on overused plots like the overreaction to a home robbery, it is a clear sign of trouble for the show's quality.

To be fair, Sheldon's idea to move to Bozeman, Montana, is a fresh idea, at least compared to his getting trapped and electrocuted by the security system he had Wolowitz install. After the interview with the policeman, Leonard seems somewhat nonchalant about the fact that his apartment was just broken into. Though I suppose that getting regular sex with an attractive blonde is for a guy like Leonard a much greater priority than worrying that the thieves might return for a second helping. And of course, as a character, Leonard has to act as a balance to Sheldon and his hysteria.

Jealousy: illogical, yet boring and predictable

Nitpickers occasionally need to be reminded that humans don't always act logically and that characters in a story sometimes say things that don't really advance the story.

A perfect example of this came up last week when my girlfriends and I were watching Lie With Me, from Jamaican-born director Clément Virgo, who makes movies as boring as those of some French directors. In the movie, Leila (Lauren Lee Smith) seduces David (Eric Balfour) by having sex with a nervous guy (Michael Facciolo) as he watches from his car, where he gets serviced by a woman who thinks she's his girlfriend. After being a tease for a good majority of the film's first act, Leila and David finally get together and have sex several times. Then they go to a club where Leila dances provocatively with two men she does not know. Back home, David questions Leila about the way she dances. Surprise, surprise, he's jealous. At that point in the movie, my friend who's also named Lisa, says to me: "I've got a nit for you."

I had to tell her that's not a nit. I would not tolerate that kind of crap from my boyfriend, but there are lots of men who get jealous when their woman dances with another man, so it's not unrealistic in any story when men get like that. In the case of the characters in the movie, it's absolutely ridiculous because the way Leila got David interested in her was by doing more than dancing with another man. But like your typical Neanderthal, David gets all jealous about the dancing just the same.

Maybe you can't get nits from jealous outbursts, but you can mine them for comedy, as Ellen DeGeneres realizes. She had Jake, from The Bachelor as a guest on her show yesterday morning, and asked him about the incident with Rozlyn. It seems that soon after the Bachelor gave Rozlyn a rose, the show's producers became aware that Rozlyn had slept with one of the show's staffers. Apparently, what Rozlyn should've done is wait to be chosen the Bachelorette so she could sleep with several different men. By the show's rules, the title single person is the only one allowed to sleep around. But where Ellen got the comedy from was Rozlyn's assertion that her personal life is none of anyone's business, forgetting for a moment that she's being confronted about her personal life precisely because she has allowed her personal life to become the business of a TV show's producers. Jake on Ellen didn't express any jealousy towards the staffer who slept with Rozlyn, but I won't be one bit surprised when on The Bachelor he complains of feeling betrayed.

Let old Admirals retire

I was watching a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation and it got me to thinking about a potential nit. As a rule, I don't want to post nits to this blog about Star Trek episodes or films completed prior to this blog's inception. But I couldn't find any mention of my nit in the standard nitpicking texts.

It was about the first season episode "Too Short a Season," in which Admiral Mark Jameson (Clayton Rohner), old, frail and weak from the effects of Iverson's disease, came aboard the Enterprise on a mission to solve a hostage crisis on a planet he'd been to decades before. Picard is obviously concerned that the wheelchair-bound old Admiral might not be up to the mission, but at the same time gives him all due military courtesy. Picard doesn't know that Jameson obtains a rejuvenating drug untested for humans. By the time of the final confrontation, the old Admiral looks more like a teenager than a seasoned flag officer.

As far as I can tell from this episode, Jameson continued to serve in Starfleet after being diagnosed with Iverson's disease, which, to Dr. Crusher's knowledge, is incurable. My question is: how come Jameson didn't retire from Starfleet after his diagnosis? Or get some kind of medical discharge? In today's military, a serious and incurable ailment like Iverson's would be a completely understandable reason to be released from duty.

In the 24th Century we imagine that the monetary aspect of retirement would become irrelevant; Jameson would get medical care, and food and shelter, regardless of the facts of his service record. But the reason for retirement would still exist, even more so than today: when people live long enough, they will inevitably reach a point when they are no longer able to do their jobs.

Phil Farrand does point out in the Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers that the transporter pad does not have a wheelchair ramp, and yet Jameson came aboard the Enterprise with a wheelchair. Clearly there are many varied obstacles to Jameson's continued service. But I don't see anything in either the Nitpicker's Guide nor at NitCentral suggesting that Jameson ought to have retired from Starfleet. Sure he can be recalled for one last mission, but his wearing of the uniform suggests that he continued to serve. When Admiral McCoy showed up the first episode, he was wearing civilian clothes. And though much older in years, he was in better shape than Jameson at the beginning of this episode!