Her habit of demanding help/information and then shrieking at them and storming away 30 seconds after they start trying may have something to do with that.

Yes, definitely, but in between cases, you think that they would at least be talking about it, seeing if there was some kind of potion or such to help while they leave Juliet alone.

these are the worst bunch of monster fighters on TV

I would have argued with you about that because it took me way too long to understand that no one on Vampire Diaries who cared about fighting monsters (and by that I mean dangerous to innocents, as opposed to inhuman) was endorsed by the script, so there was no point judging their ability as such. Letting that go, that it wasn't Buffy or SPN, was such a freaking relief--I'm awful at stopping watching shows.

However, Teen Wolf helped a lot. It was almost precisely what I was asking Vampire Diaries to be, and what it had never promised to achieve. Amicable parting.

I watched an episode of Grimm at random a few weeks ago--the one with the made up monster with the unpronounceable German name? Kidding. The one with the toad-eating lawyer that almost got the wolfy guy off for killing his mousy wife. I do have to wonder if random SPN is that boggling and unengaging, but I don't judge the series on the basis of my lack of comprehension.

these are the worst bunch of monster fighters on TV.

The only thing they're worse at is being cops.

Her habit of demanding help/information and then shrieking at them and storming away 30 seconds after they start trying may have something to do with that.

Although when she really should have been shrieking at them, when the house fills with weird stuff right after they do a strange ritual with her, does she call them?

Remember back when Giles proposed scanning magic books and Willow said, "Doesn't winter seem more like archiving season?" Why don't any of these people who depend on handwritten, unindexed books and journals ever get around to archiving season?

My fingers are crossed for Sam re: archiving season, especially since the might have a helper elf in the offing.

I've never seen The Vampire Diaries or Supernatural.

The text of TVD has no particular moral compass, which was a big issue for me, since I kept forcing do-gooding onto it, and it is about relationships with people who are witches and vampires and werewolves, and they only fight people who present a short term threat to their relationships.

Once you get grounded in Buffy's morality and even Angel's greyness...well, once I was grounded in that, I surprised myself with how hard it was to let go. Supernatural has much more greyness, but it also acknowledges greyness and hypocrisy. TVD plain old doesn't care.

I have gotten into a few arguments with people who cite TVD as being strong in the ramifications department, but I disagree quite vehemently--there's no moral requirement from the show's mythos nor an enforcement structure that punishes people that go astray.

Anyone can die, it's true, but that's also remarkably repercussion-free, IMO. And I'll go script to script with anyone who says the same of SPN.

When I think of any of the above mentioned shows, though, there definitely is charisma--some sort of strong character/persona evoked in just about any episode to have a reaction to even if canon means nothing to you. Grimm had very little of that, and the mythos came across as confusing, not enticing.

But every show has that sort of episode. So I don't know what I was looking at.

Oh, hey! Brady on Orphan Black. And he's called Chad, which is even more Brady than Brady.

Aw, man, why don't my favourite favourite shows have more plastic hot pants??? I have a plastic hot pant-shaped hole in my life.

GodDAMN, Orphan Black was good tonight. For a show this serious and tense, they do farce really really well.

"Horse! You have failed in your mission!"

Orphan Black continues to be wonderful. I agree about the farce. And never do I think of those characters as the same woman. Never mix them up even for a second. It's really marvelous.

Did Tom Tom pay off in any further way? That seemed to be a lot of work for a pretty obscured punchline.

Uh, Doctor Who, for context's sake.

Oh, ha, I thought it was a Thomas Guide reference.