Save Our Seeker.

I'm going to miss Legend of the Seeker. I'm going to miss it for its flight of fancy, its storytelling, and the missed opportunity to have more Xena alums on (I'm looking at you, ROC).

When I watched the behind-the-scenes feature on Sci-Fi, as hosted by Lucy Lawless (I love you, Three!!!), I wasn't really impressed. Because it looked like a wannabe-Xena, without the fun. And Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert seem to be hit-or-miss with shows. And the male lead looked a little without in that feature (but a hot Australian!). The female lead had pretty eyes, and the old guy just looked like a (very) poor man's idea of a wizard.

The first episode wasn't best, but it was enough to get me thinking, hmm: I think I can watch this (in context, I wasn't hot on BSG the first time I saw the miniseries, either). There were a lot of annoying episodes in the first season, but thank God for the Mord-Sith and their evil, evil ways, because I stuck around for the second season.

Sidebar: Some of the first few episodes would get so tedious that I actually contemplated just reading the books. Then I realized that a) it would ruin my viewing pleasure to compare the book to the show, b) the books don't have Craig Horner and Bridget Regan, and c) the books were frakking expensive to complete the whole series.

The recycling of Xena locations struck me as funny (because they got recycled on Xena often enough in the show alone), and those costumes were awesome. And the ways they got Craig Horner shirtless was a much better exercise than those let's-get-Milo-to-take-off-his-shirt hilarity during Heroes' 2nd season.

It took patience (a lot of it), but I really grew to love this show. It's a really good example of fantasy television, and when it stopped taking itself so seriously (read: season two), it got really good. But by the same token, it didn't go into tongue-firmly-in-cheek camp/comedy that Xena happily went into.

Sure, the show could use less Zedd wizard-effects (except Wizard's Fire), and the way they keep trusting Shota when she's never done anything good for them is almost pointless, but I heart the addition of Cara into the core cast. Finally they weren't all goody-goody greater-good do-gooders. And the writing got so much better. And the past few episodes just serve as a dose of depression that sometimes, really good shows just don't have time to grow.

So thank you, internet and torrents, because without you I would have given up on this show midway through the first season (yes, ever Richard Cypher's abs couldn't get me invested in Seeker).

But, oh, those fights. Even Xena's got nothing on the fight sequences that Seeker has (because, well, you always kind of knew Xena was going to win). And sword-fight melees are always just a little bit plenty of awesome.

And, hey: any show that has a (Mord-)Sith in it automatically gets some cool points. And the Charisma Carpenter stunt-casting took away nothing.