Two to Go

Well there's only two more episodes left of Law & Order: Criminal Intent for this season and then it's bye-bye Chris Noth and 99% of the production/writing staff.

Next week is Chris Noth's final episode and you can definitely see the build up of Logan becoming disenchanted with his job, but I'm honestly not sure if I'll be able to buy him just walking away. After 20 some years as a cop, what could he have not seen yet that would push him to walk away? Though I think it's either that (cause Logan doesn't seem like the kind to go gently into retirement) or that they kill him off. Now, I realize I'm in the minority, but I honestly would be okay if he went out with a nice, poignant (not soapy though) death scene. Maybe, I have just gotten used to watching characters I love die because of being so in love with Joss Whedon's series -- I mean jeez there was hardly anyone left at the end of "Angel," which is actually a pretty poignant message because all the human characters were either dead or hanging on by a thread and the characters with a bit of demon in them were the only ones left standing.

But I digress...

Either way the last two episodes of CI are going to be nail-biters. The season finale the following week, I think, has even higher expectations. For one it's Leight's and his writing team's parting gift to us. Plus I'm assuming there will be more Goren angst and the delightfully evil Nicole Wallace may be making an appearance. I think a wonderful gift Leight could leave us with would be to wrap up the Nicole storyline. I hope they can pull a story together that had the same grace as "Endgame" and not leave us with an unsettling and slightly disjointed episode like "Untethered" that really just had too much personal information crammed into one episode. Plus I think many of us fans are already a little unsettled about only one current writer returning for season eight.

I have to admit I am a little nervous about where the new showrunners will take the series, particularly the G/E episodes. Really, their new showrunner will have a much more difficult time I would think, since he has the veteran characters. Wheeler is still new enough and Goldblum's character will be completely fresh that their showrunner will be starting more from scratch than the G/E one (sorry their specific names escape me at the moment -- and for any who don't know Leight is being replace by two people: one for the G/E episodes and another for the W/unnamed Goldblum character).

There's alot of speculation on the CI forums about CI losing some of the depth that it has always had and turn into a straight procedural. I can see why people would worry about this, but being on USA, I think, would deter them from falling back on that, since USA is not about procedural dramas -- it's about characters.

The switching of writers doesn't bother me as much as the switching of the showrunner, though I really am going to miss Charlie Rubin and the other writers too. Most of the other shows I watch the creator and the showrunner are one in the same and usually write and/or direct a handful of episodes each season. But every episode passes through their hands at some point and time. Dick Wolf is credited as the creator of the series, but seems to be more a business man than a creative force behind his series. Granted he has a lot of talented writers and executive producers under him, but I wonder for character continuity if this will be a good thing or a bad thing.

I'm definitely willing to give season eight a chance and hope that I will be pleasantly surprised...and if not Joss Whedon has a new series coming out, so I'll just have to make due with that.