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As the fall season comes to a close, AIO fans can look back on these fifteen episodes and consider how they stacked up with our expectations. Before the Fall Season, I made a wish list of things that I would liked to have happened in the fall season. Here's how the wishes went:
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One of
my biggest wishes was that the series would become more unified, instead
of the stories happeneing seperately of each other. In some ways this
did happen. There seemed to be a bit more character development and
continuity of character traits than last season, but for the most part this
wish was not met. There were very few things that continued
from one story to the next. We had the excellent episode Blind
Girl's Bluff where Aubrey and Lisa decided that they couldn't be friends
for a while, but a few episodes later, they seemed to be best buds.
In The Treasure Room, Aubrey said that Jared gave her a lock-picking
kit, but she didn't know him in Blind Girl's Bluff. Despite
the fact that the writers are going over scripts "line by line",
there still isn't very much continuation of story elements. Very
few episodes led into other episodes and there were absolutely no
arcs of any kind. Each episodes seemed to occur in its own seperate
world. I'm not saying that there weren't good episodes (because there
were!), but they were not nearly as connected and unified as AIO has been
in the past. Worse yet was that not only were few of the the continuing storylines brought up in episodes, they were never even mentioned. I understand that perhaps the writers wanted to put Eugene and Katrina on hold for a while, but does that mean that we never even hear about them? That Eugene should act as though he's not engaged? And what about Jason? The super-spy is nowhere to be found. The mission work that he wanted to do? Forget it. Jack and Joanne? Again, missing in action. What about Eugene's job at the college? Nope. Haven't heard a thing about that. As far as I'm concerned, he has to get that job. On a Christian radio series, you simply can't have an angel say something and then not have it take place. Thankfully Bernard Walton checked in at the end of the year to tell us that he was still alive and well. |
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I ranted
and raved on my last wish list about how AIO team should still do serious
episodes, so you can see that column for a full opinion. I'll just
say that while there were a couple episodes that featured adults prominently,
there weren't really that many episodes that were even a little "serious".
While I love wild and funny episodes, I don't think you can carry a series
like AIO on those episodes alone. We occasionally need a dose of
reality with the fun. We did have episodes like Blind Girl's Bluff
and You Win Some, You Lose Some, but I guess I still think we need
some episodes that look at the lives of the Odyssey adults, like we used
to have on AIO. I continue to insist that children in the target age
range do understand stories about adults if they're told in the
right way. And while I'm not as violently opposed to split episodes as I used to be, I think they still prove that the show should not be entirely splits. They work well for telling a very (and I do mean very) short story, but they don't work for anything but making a quick point. I would like AIO to use them occasionally, when they have a few stories that simply won't make it to the required 24 minutes. But I don't like the idea that next season will be mostly split episodes. You simply can't pull the weight of this series with only tiny stories. |
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I also
wished that Eugene and Katrina would get married, but since Katrina has
largely disappeared, this also seems unlikely. They need
to deal with this storyline now. As many fans are, I'm getting
a bit tired of the dating storyline, so I think they need to be married.
In any case, they either need to be married or end the relationship for
the last time. |
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I also
hoped that Dr. Regis Blackgaard would not come back, but...well...you know
the drill there. |
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I had also hoped that the Mulligan family would not disappear into that void where it seems so many AIO characters go. Thankfully, this is one of my wishes that did come true. Lisa and Nick are still around. |