Moves in Curves

I’ve noticed something this season on tv. Characters hallucinating. Usually they see dead people (how cliche!), sometimes they see something really bizarre, like cartoon babies (not in an Ally McBeal kind of way though).

At least Scrubs was open about J.D.’s daydreams-slash-hallucinations. Remember the pimp ones? I love that show. It’s not going to be the same after Zach Braff leaves. Removing the central character didn’t work on That 70′s Show and will work even less on Scrubs. We need J.D.! These other shows haven’t featured daydreaming as a major storytelling element, so the fact that everyone and their dog is hallucinating this season makes me very annoyed. Can’t we think up anything else, writers? Clark Kent hallucinated an entire episode like two seasons ago. Been there, done that.

It seemed to start with the Dead Denny storyline on Grey’s Anatomy. Really not a fan of this. Denny was all right when he first was on the show, yes. I liked him. I liked Izzy back then, too. The last two seasons I can’t stand her. I really hoped they’d go ahead and write her off. Keep George! Get rid of Izzy! Izzy spent most of this season hallucinating about Denny, courtesy of brain tumors.

Next we saw it on Bones. Booth started having hallucinations of dead people. Then, maybe to one-up everyone else’s dead-people hallucinations, Booth started seeing Stewie from The Family Guy. Now, I can’t stand that show 90% of the time, but I do find Stewie funny on most occasions. It may or may not be the accent. Booth’s was, in a thirty-second diagnosis from Brennan, from a brain tumor. It was weird the way they did this, like they slapped on this five minutes of extra plot when they realized they weren’t keeping up with the full audiovisual hallucination trend (hey, Izzy had TACTILE hallucinations, too! So there!).

Dead people popped up again on The Tudors, in the form of murdered peasants stalking Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. He never gets good storylines this season though, so this one seems to have been completely forgotten about. Maybe he found a Tudor therapist, who knows. Probably he just needs a better agent. Fortunately he’s been kicking some political butt since the writers forgot about his hallucinations (eat that, Cromwell!), so at least he’s still having some screen time.

A friend pointed out that House is a repeat offender in the “Entire last plot arc was a hallucination” category. Remember when that dude shot him? He only hallucinated like two episodes that time. This time I think he hallucinated a good half a dozen. I’m tired of seeing Amber. She was interesting alive, not so much dead. If House does time in a mental hospital, they will never be able to get malpractice insurance on him again. But who needs realism?

If Lost turns out to all be a hallucination by whiny-ass Jack, I’m going to be really pissed off.