ZEP: Still perturbed that Max got fired and Leif didn't. Mo's number was fun, as was the love scene between Zoey and Max. Nice to have a couple of light moments in such a heavy episode.

The last half hour took me back 20 years to when The Ex's mother died, and all of the freakyness that happened then.

Now that the finale for ZEP is out there I plan to watch eps 11 and 12 back to back...but I still haven't found it in me to watch them, knowing where it's going. That's a tough sell for me right now! I need my entertainment to be lighter and/or in the realm of scifi/fantasy, not the already difficult reality!

Yeah, the show with the fantastical premise gets extra real with the emotions.

It is still sitting in my queue waiting. Each day I look and ask myself if I am up for it, and put it off again. Maybe this weekend.

I watched the first episode the other night and enjoyed it, but I don't know if I'm up for heavy emotions with that effective a delivery system at the moment. "True Colors" always gets me no matter who's singing it, and when you add in the circumstances...

You know you don't have to spoilerfont things that have aired, right?

Jesus, that was brutal. Way too much like my father's actual death.

I'm still working through why it upset me so much more than "The Body."

Just watched it. That duet between Mitch and David did me in completely (the actor who plays David has a lovely voice, even though he does not get to showcase it much). And the True Colors reprise! Oh man.

I still struggling with thoughts about ZEP.

My grandfather had congestive heart failure. He had been sent home from the hospital the previous month and was under hospice care. When he had his final seizure, I phoned for the hospice nurse and started CPR, knowing it was pretty useless. He died underneath my hands.

Almost two years later, "The Body" aired. As I watched, it seemed like I was mentally marking off a long series of checkboxes: "Yep, that's familiar. Yep, did that. Yep, I remember that. Yep, that's what that was like." The background silence was quite effective. When the episode was over, I came away greatly impressed. It had been engaging without being painful, a difficult story well told and deeply affecting, yet it hadn't made me feel bad. On re-watch nineteen year later, I'm still impressed.

In contrast, the season finale of Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist a few nights ago was very painful to watch. I am struggling to understand why. Joyce's death was unexpected even though it had been well foreshadowed. My grandfather's death wasn't unexpected. Mitch's death was completely expected. So why did the episode hurt so much?

Perhaps it was the use of music and song and dance, even though all the numbers were very well done and fit the story-telling so well?

Perhaps it's because of the recent changes to my own sense of mortality. Maybe it's merely because I am nineteen years older now than when "The Body" aired. That's why I just re-watched it. Yet I still react differently to the two shows.

Perhaps it is because Mitch is a middle-aged white male, and I am also now a middle-aged white male? Yet I never felt like I identified with Mitch. I never felt like I identified with Joyce (or Buffy, or Zoey) either.

Yet somehow BtVS left me with awe, and ZEP left me with tears. I'm not good at tears.

I definitely think the music is a big part of it -- it was designed to draw out emotion!