I stopped watching ER every week without fail when Dr. Greene died. Whenever I did tune in some unbearable horror was being indured by some character. When Without A Trace showed up it was easy for me to give up ER forever.
Now Jack’s wife just dumped him like he was a bag of crap.
This might be a good thing, though. Now Jack can really have no life besides the FBI and we can all get back to finding those kidnapped, drug taking, double-dealing 12 year olds.
I watch, most of the time.
I give them props, it was a twist I honestly never saw coming. I mean, okay, I knew Jack wouldn’t go, but I my guesses, in descending order of probability were:
Jack decides he can’t bear to give up his job, tries to talk wife into a commuter marriage. In 1a) she agrees to try in 1b) she calls for a divorce.
Wife goes all ‘stand by your man’ and agrees to drop the promotion so he can keep the job he loves.
Wife reveals that the promotion fell through somehow, maybe she was even fired, and it becomes necessary for Jack to stay in the better job he has now.
What they actually did…whooo! Good twist.
And, really, how much of his life outside of word did we see? Not enough that the loss of it will cripple things.
When ER gets boring I also migrate over to Without a Trace (Hereinafter: WAT).
WAT has a really great cast.
And so far, it hasn’t become hokey-farfetched (like The Profiler was a cool show, with a cool team, but arch-crminals were too much.) I like Marianne Jean-Baptiste - she’s incredilby mellow, but with something else just under the surface. I always expect her to turn into some kind of superhero. She tips her head down and looks at people as if studying them.
Eric Close always reminds me of the kid he played on the soap opera Santa Barbara. I don’t know why. He is just forever crystallized in my mind as “Sawyer.”
Jack’s marital problems have been going on since I started watching the show. It was usually pretty subtle - him finishing off a telephone conversation while looking a bit “terse”. I didn’t think they’d have their main guy leave the show, so I wasn’t expecting his marital situation to end well. It’s like the ER world and the Jossverse - lead characters can NOT live happily ever after while the show is running. The lead dude must be conflicted. Therefore he can NOT be happily married with a great wife who understands the nature of his work.
Nope.
I too have pretty much given up on ER and WAT (I usually hate acronyms but it works better this way due to my poor typing) makes it easy. It usually good, not too cliche (other than the good guys winning) and Poppy Montgomery is at the top of my list list now, even with a name like “Poppy” 
<swoon>.
I didn’t see how they could get rid of Jack, but it all seemed set, geez, right up until the last 30 seconds of the season. The best show that I’ve seen, IMO, was the one a few weeks ago where the middle school age boy was missing and then the picture of him tied up in the horse stall showed up, and then they found him trying to hang himself behind the girl’s house. Wow, very tense and emotional, moreso since I’ve had kids of my own.
Poppy got me watching, everything else about the show got me coming back.
LaPaglia is so good - compare his performance as Daphne’s brother on the Frasier finale with his performance here.
I’m not generally fond of acronyms either because they often take to long to type out. But longer-word titles are pesky to type out again and again. I DID consider “W/out Trace” but that seemed even ickier than WAT.
Besdies, now we can refer to the good guys as the “WAT Team”.
“The robbers have hostages! Bring in the S.W.A.T. Team! Wait, wait, wait! One of the robbers has gone missing… Bring in the W.A.T. Team!” (Cue music.)
That’s just what I was going to say! He is laugh-out-loud hysterical in that role, and contrasted with the role of Jack - wow. Just wow.
I still watch ER, but I’ve been taping it and watching both CSI and WAT as they air. Every episode is great.
Another big *WAT * fan here. I don’t watch all that much TV, so I’m glad they put this on after *CSI * or I probably never would have seen it.
After Jack said he would transfer with his wife a few weeks back, I had to do some checking. I found that LaPaglia was still contracted for two more seasons, so it was very unlikely he was going anywhere. I had considered the “never mind, I want a divorce” twist, but I was leaning towards his wife being killed somehow. However, I’m glad they went the route they did. Your spouse wanting a divorce is something that many more of us can relate to than having a spouse killed. Plus, the “murdered wife” plotline has already been played out in too many other series.
Plus, it looks like Martin is finally gonna get his shot with Sam. The “I know…” she said at the end of this epidode got a whole lot of “Woo woo!”'s around our house. 
I really like the fact that, at any given point on any given episode, you really have no idea if it’s going to be a happy ending or not. I can’t stand crime drama where the bad guy is caught, the victim has closure, and everyone is oh so happy and smiley every single episode. Damnit, I want your show to piss me off now and then too! 
Exactly! This show just has a much wider range of possibilities for what is going on: kidnap? runaway? accident? And any of the possibilities can have good, bad or mixed endings…and sometimes there isn’t an ending.
It brings to mind a bit what it was like reading Dean Koontz back when he was first starting to get popular. You just didn’t know exactly what genre you might be in. There would be strange happenings to kick things off, but the explanation could fall into horror or hard SF, the source of evil anything from a single insane person through mutants and arcane beings and all the way up to POed Elder God types. I loved it. Too bad he’s lost that uncertainty factor.
Yeah … sometimes the missing person isn’t dead or a runaway or a hostage or anything like that; sometimes the missing person just had something he needed to do and didn’t particularly feel like mentioning it to anyone.
Wow. Just…wow. That is one dead-on analogy. I’ve read just about everything Koontz has written, and you’ve nailed part of the appeal – you know there would be Something Bad happening, but the root cause could’ve been absolutely anything.
Like WOT, the majority had a happy ending, but there were just enough ones with an unpleasant or ambiguous ending to really spice things up.
I like that, too. I saw Anthony LaPaglia on some talk show back in the fall right before this show started (two years ago) and he said that it wasn’t always going to end on a ‘happily ever after’ note. Sure enough, the third or fourth episode in, the missing person was found dead.
I really like Without a Trace, although I have trouble remembering the title of the show, so to me it’s The Missing Show.
However, that being said, I also find it difficult to stay awake through the whole show. More often than not, I nod off in my Laz-Y-Boy (or however you spell it) before we learn whether the missing person is found.
I did stay awake through the entire final episode and I loved the twists at the end. Martin and Sam make a cute couple, although their being together will no doubt prove problematical in the upcoming season. And she still has feelings for Jack. Now Jack will be free. Sad but free. So will Sam throw Martin over for Jack? And will Jack have to bump the black lady out of the #1 job? When does the new season start?