Episode Report Card Deborah: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT "The Lamps Are Different, But The Light Is The Same"
By Deborah | Season 2 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.23.2004
Props to JennB, QASteph, Rob-Bob, and Jason, who all responded over the summer to my request for someone to compile a list or spreadsheet of all the first season Gods. Thanks, guys! Now I just have to work at keeping it up over Season Two…
And the season starts with…an aneurysm. Mine, not Joan's. We have two TV sets: a bigger one in the living room (first floor), with the comfortable couch and everything, but where the relatively new VCR hasn't worked since we got digital cable in January; and a small TV/VCR combo in my office (second floor), which I use for recapping. I tape shows in the office since that's the only VCR that works. Unfortunately, because of some stupid broadcasting boojum I don't understand, any given channel is broadcasting one network at one moment, and at the next hour it's some other network. Channel 9 is sometimes CTV, which shows Joan of Arcadia, but then suddenly at the turn of the hour it's not, and CTV's over on Channel 5 or something. But not always. It makes it very difficult to ensure you're taping or watching the right channel. Anyway, after four months away from recapping, during which time I watched maybe five hours of television altogether, I forgot about this idiocy, so when the show started Friday night, or more to the point, didn't start, but some dumbass sitcom featuring people I'm sure I've seen on the Fug Blog came on, I bolted up the stairs like a squirrel on PCP to try to stop the tape in my office while Professor Frink worked the remote control and yelled channel instructions up the stairs. I was freaking not just because the beginning of my tape would be screwed up but because I was missing the show, after all these months of waiting. While I cursed like a Marine and struggled with the tape, Frink was telling me what was going on show-wise. The tape straightened out, I flew back downstairs only to find that the channel broadcasting the show had picked this moment to start having transmission problems: picture blanking out every few seconds, static and lines and I don't know what. Not happening on any other channel. I really thought my head was going to explode. Luckily, during the first commercial we found another station way up the dial showing the episode without all the interference. All this is to explain why I don't have the first ninety seconds of the show, and why I have a crappy version of the opening, and why I missed seeing Christopher Marquette's and Becky Wahlstrom's names in the list of regular cast members on first viewing.