Kristen at E! Online has an interview with Rob Thomas, who is apparently excited about the idea of turning Veronica Mars into just another teen show:

What’s the plan for the rest of the season?
Well, you’ll be the first person to hear this. There has been talk—more than talk—about dropping the whole big mystery idea after this middle mystery and to do all stand-alone episodes and sort of a combination of a few things. The network is behind it, and I am interested in heading in that direction.

Really? Why the change?
One feeling is that the big mysteries keep away the casual TV viewers, and the other is that the thing that has been least successful since season one—meaning the things we get the most complaints about—are the big mysteries. My design in season one was that Veronica’s best friend was dead, and every season regular had an integral role in the mystery. And unless they wanted every year to kill Veronica’s friends, it’s hard to have the same emotional connective that’s worth spending seven, eight, nine episodes on a mystery. It’s one of the things we are deciding on right now.

Is this change something you are interested in or the network is interested in?
Both. Honestly, I brought it up to the network, and they jumped at the idea. But what I think we might do is the final mystery we were going to run instead of running it as our final five is just to play those as stand-alone episodes and maybe contract that big mystery into a two-episode thing with a cliffhanger as just a trial balloon. And hopefully before season four, we’ll see how it works. It seems like a good time to do it—a good fun test balloon. Try it over five and see how fans and non-fans react.

Will there still be some continuing story arcs?
Yes. I mean, we will still have ongoing personal life stories from Veronica, so there will be romantic relationships and the normal travails. We just wouldn’t have a mystery at the core.

In the first two seasons, there’s a feeling that the seasons are complete stories, and that’s largely because of the big mysteries. I know that there are television viewers who prefer to have every episode of a television show stand completely on its own, but I’m not one of them. Doing away with the big mystery either means that there will be no overarcing plot and that the season won’t build up to a credendo at the end, with a huge impact finale (heck, even this season’s first “mini season” had that), unless, of course, the big build up is which of the two men in her life Veronica will choose.

Sorry, that’s what every other show on television does, and I can get that elsewhere. Veronica provides (less consistently this season than previously, but still more consistently than any other television show out there) a nice, big, noir-ish mystery that is just fun to watch play out as the episodes roll by, and I’d hate to see that lost just so that Rob Thomas can try to appeal to the fans who’ve shunned him for two years. Sure, Veronica deserves to have more viewers, but if the show has to get them by Thomas’ thumbing his nose at the fans who’ve been watching it, is it really worth it?

With last night’s episode, Heroes jumped back in time six months, before the start of the series, to show some of the characters encountering their powers for the first time. In the meantime, the Hiro from the present day tries to save Charlie by making sure she won’t be there when Sylar comes calling.

I was a little put off by the idea of setting an episode six months ago, but it really works, and I loved it. I really can’t wait for the DVD set of this series so I can watch them without the week-long gap (and I’m dreading the longer gap after next episode).

More comments below. Warning: Spoilers!

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Remember when Democrats warned us back on ’04 that electing Bush would lead to a draft?

They might have been right.

Of course, they didn’t mention that it would be them trying to do it. Funny, that, huh?

(For the record: My own opinions on gay marriage are fairly liberal, in part because of my own personal experiences with committed homosexual couples, and also because I see homosexuals who want to marry as potential allies in the fight against the divorce rate in this nation. As long as we don’t let homosexual couples sue to force conservative priests/reverends/pastors marry them, I’ve got no serious issue with it.)

I keep hearing criticisms of Studio 60 that claim that Aaron Sorkin uses it as a way to attack people he thinks have wronged him in some way. Sarah Paulson’s character, Harriet Hayes, for example, is supposed to be a stand-in for Kristen Chenowith, an ex-girlfriend of Sorkin’s.

Harriet recently gave an interview to some magazine where she said the Bible is opposed to homosexuality, but it also says “judge not, lest ye be judged”, so she said that smarter minds than hers would have to take up the issue of gay marriage. The quote was cut off, making it sound like Harriet was opposed to gay marriage, so she’s suddenly found herself with a lot of angry fans who’re decrying her as intolerant. The network president is, understandably, concerned, not only for ratings, but for Harriet’s career, and has asked her not to appear in public with Women United Through Faith, a group that is, among other things, opposed to gay marriage.

All of those reactions are likely in real life. Here’s the thing, though. What Harriet did is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. It’s not gay bashing to voice an opinion that you think that allowing homosexuals to marry may not be the best thing for society — and that’s not even what Harriet said. So, when the people on the other side of the issue (presumably, the side of the issue that Sorkin himself is on) act like idiots (and between the “gay street toughs” practically attacking her on the street, and Matt’s utter refusal to accept that she was acting as anything but a homophobe, they were acting like idiots), I find it hard to believe that he’s using this show as a mouthpiece, because he’s really making a good case for the other side.

Dafydd ab Hugh has yet another interesting post about what he believes should be the Republican reaction to the elections.

Dafydd asserts (and I see no reason to disbelieve him) that there are only three grand, unifying items that most of the Democrats who won this week campaigned on. Here’s something that may shock some of you: Iraq is not one of them.

So what did they campaign on? I don’t mean each individual representative and senator; I mean, what grand themes did all Democrats invoke to nationally brand their campaign? So far as I can recall, there were only three things they all publicly agreed on:

• Raising the minimum wage;
• Increasing funding for stem-cell research;
• Implementing the few remaining pieces of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations that Bush hadn’t already implemented.

They could not come together on tax policy; they could not come together on immigration; heck, they couldn’t even come together on Iraq: many new Democrats elected Tuesday complained that we hadn’t “listened to the generals” (meaning generals like Eric Shinseki and Anthony Zinni) — and hadn’t sent enough troops to Iraq!

The entire post is absolutely worth a read, and possibly even worth mentioning in an e-mail to any Republican Senators/Representatives you might have.

I’m not going to comment on the bulk of the post, though, because Dafydd does a great job of making his point. Instead, I found a bit of information in this post that I didn’t know, and I can’t figure out why I didn’t know it:

But since that time, something remarkable has happened: medical researchers, denied the easy path of extracting stem cells by killing a human embryo, have responded with typical American ingenuity. They have brilliantly solved the problem: we now know how to extract embryonic stem cells without killing the embryo. This is a remarkable breakthrough… and it changes everything.

(Bold emphasis mine, italics belong to Dafydd)

I’ve been involved in a couple of debates recently about the ethics of using embryonic stem cells for research purposes. I’ve had people come back at me with the argument that embryos aren’t humans and therefore it’s okay to kill them to save actual “human lives“. I’ve heard the counter-argument that embryonic stem cell research is done on embryos that would be destroyed otherwise. I’ve heard the argument that it’s the mother’s decision.

None of those convinced me, for various reasons, and I’m shocked that not one of the people I’ve been arguing against, who in general struck me as well informed about the science involved, brought up the simple fact that it’s now possible to harvest stem cells from an embryo without killing the embryo. That seems very important to me, and I’m shocked that I’m only just hearing it.