Is That All There Is?

I made it through Monday's season finale perfect storm:

24.  Good, but fairly anticlimactic.  My predictions were all wrong.  Audrey lived and even seemed to have recovered from nearly bleeding out a mere few hours ago.  No misogyny recrudescence, either.  (Well, the First Conjugal Visit subplot was borderline.)  It even looked like Karen Hayes Homeland Security (I only just noticed how she always introduced herself that way.) was about to get some from the ranking silver fox, Bill Buchanan (James Morrison). 

Alias.  This was a mess.  It didn't need to be two hours and, other than the impressive body count (I was wrong again, by the way.  I got Jack, but missed Irina -- duh -- and Special Agent Balthazar Getty.  Sloane's fate -- immortal, trapped under a papier mache rock -- was too absurd to predict.), not much happened.  We still don't know what the Hell all that Rambaldi crap was about and we didn't get any other big revelations.  I was hoping we were going to find out that Sark was Sydney's long-lost half-brother -- and also, yeah, really into her.  David Anders and Amy Acker were completely wasted, yet again.  I hope casting people watched some of this season.  They should both be working, a lot more. 

Everwood.  Again, I'm crap at predictions and I'm a sucker for a well-crafted promo.  I knew someone was going to die in last night's very special episode and I totally fell for the clip of Bright Abbott (Chris Pratt) falling out of the window.   This may have been because I love him so much.  Bright is another example of a character who started as a caricature but gradually became rounded as a result of good writers working with an appealing actor.  In retrospect, it's crazy to think that the producers would kill off Bright, even if they expected the show to be cancelled.  It makes all the sense in the world to murder Irv (John Beasley).  Irv was the Mary Alice of Everwood's first two seasons.  (OK, Mary Alice herself was sort of the Mary Alice of season 1, as Brenda Strong made frequent appearances as the late Julia Brown.)  Ending the series with the death of the narrator gives the four seasons some shape they would otherwise be missing.  Furthermore, although Irv initially had strong connections to most of the central characters, by the beginning of this season he and his wife Edna (Debra Mooney) had become isolated in a fairly uninteresting arc.  (Actually, looking over last night's and recent episodes, it seems like almost all the characters are stranded in their own stories and don't interact in the organic ways in which they did as recently as the beginning of this season.  This is a common problem with long-running television serials and one from which recovery is fairly rare.  Maybe it really is time . . . )  Irv's death not only gives Mooney some solid scenery on which to chew but frees Edna to comment on the other plot threads.  My prediction -- for what it's worth, see above -- is that Edna will provide the impetus for Andy and Nina (Stephanie Niznik) to finally get together.