Unhappy Endings

There's an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where the ship starts melting randomly. Also, the equipment, and the crew. All of these are important parts of the mission of Voyager: to get back home. So, naturally, they do everything possible to solve this. They eventually figure out WHY they're melting. They are not the real Voyager, they are a copy made years ago when Voyager landed on a "Demon" class planet, and leaving their home for such a long time has caused them to lose structural integrity. The original planet is too far away, so they scan the surrounding area for something that can match, all the while melting away. So this carries on for like an hour. until they eventually realize they are going to melt before they get there. Captain Janeway records the ships log into a relay beacon for posterity, before she, like the rest of the crew and ship, melt away. The relay beacon also melts away.

What the fuck, man?

My mom commented after watching that episode that it was completely contrary to the spirit of the original series. On Captain Kirk's Enterprise, the good guys always won, the bad guys always lost, and justice was served in nice simple one hour chunks (with room for commercials). The Voyager ep, on the other hand (Course: Oblivion if you're interested). is nothing like that at all. Good people do good things and end up obliterated anyway, and no record of their existence is left at all.

I guess I bring this up because I just watched an episode of House where they diagnose a woman with an auto-immune disease, and decide to irradiate her immune system to cure her. Then, once her immune system is gone, they realize "Oops, it was an infection after all," and with her immune system shot, the patient has nothing left to do but die. They reach this decision a little more than half way through the episode, and the rest is just Foreman (the one who recommended radiation) sitting next to the girl, watching her die. It's all very touching. It literally moved me to tears. But I kept hanging on, hoping against hope that House would find out that the disease that didn't look like an infection at the start really WASN'T an infection... But nothing happened. The girl died, and Foreman's only absolution came from his Alzheimer's suffering Mom, who didn't even recognize him.

Bad things happen to good people. I know this. Good people make mistakes, and hurt or kill people. I'm not going to deny that this kind of thing happens in real life. But when I'm watching television, I want to watch something that doesn't resemble real life that much. I want escapism. I want a hero to swoop in when everything looks its worst and make it better again. Not all of it, necessarily, but... well, more than just "Oh, House kept Wilson's ex's dog because he was guilty."

I'm just a sucker for an unhappy ending, I guess.

;_;