Visionary Thinking

I'm the kind of cat who doesn't let things I like die easy deaths. I can't seem to go three posts without finding some way to mention Radio Free Roscoe, stuck with The O.C. during Season Three (which - thank fuck - paid off in Season Four) and I'm INFURIATED that The Class is pretty much all but canceled. But, during the rest of my time on this mortal coil, it's likely no TV show will ever inspire in me the same passions as Dark Angel.

I was all over DA from the second I heard "James Cameron, post-apocalyptic future and mutants." Well, that or seeing my first picture of Jessica Alba. 16-year-olds are impressionable, man. If you have your best friends when you're 12, I'm declaring 16 as the age you're most likely to develop a celebrity crush you're just never, EVER letting go of. Watching Jessica Alba does that pretty much anytime, but when you have a completely badass character (Max Guevara) who has moments of tender vulnerability (Triptophan seizures, family ties to the other X-5s) ... gosh. I signed up on that bandwagon for life.

So, despite missing most of Season Two at the time it came out - because the geniuses at FOX decided to put a show with a core audience between 18-34 on Friday nights - I was crushed by its cancellation at the end of the year. I'm not gonna lie, it ended in a good place (much like RFR), but only having two seasons was the weakness.

I responded by keeping tabs on all the DA alums, paying extra attention to every random movie or episode of a procedural J.C. McKenzie (he's that guy) or John Savage appeared in, and getting into Numb3rs not because the concept intrigued me or the women were so fine, but because I had to see three episodes before I accepted "Herbal Thought" (Alimi Ballard) could speak without a Jamaican accent.

So upon getting up to Oneonta last summer and finding myself with a dumb amount of time to kill, I came across a little CBS show called NCIS, featuring Michael Weatherly a/k/a Logan Cale, the "Eyes Only" informant, a/k/a my hero for nailing Jessica Alba (once engaged). His NCIS character, Anthony DiNozzo, is a play on the same base - brilliant, principled, bit of a ladykiller, but without the dour super-serious introspection of Eyes Only. DiNozzo's actually quite caustic, and they throw him some great material to work with, like from the Sept. 5 episode:

"I got a better chance of hooking up with Jessica Alba than these guys do of infiltrating SeaLift."

Cracked me up, that one.

So as the course of the second season developed, DiNozzo began to get shady on the rest of the crew, secretive on the cell, offering the runaround on his whereabouts. See, the player had been slayed by a lad:

Scottie Thompson

(From ScottieThompson.com)

This green-eyed Southern belle is a classically trained ballet dancer who spent many years with the Richmond Ballet before getting that Harvard education. So to recap, Thompson's smarter than you, can dance, can act, is sexy as hell and makes mad cash. That would be oh, say, 5-FOR-5 in the "Categories That Matter" checklist. And if being Michael Weatherly's love interest on a TV series is a valid predictor of success (see: Alba, Jessica and The World Takeover), Thompson is about to explode bigger than Peter Petrelli. Holla atcha Heroes.

(From IMDB)