SciFi/Fantasy

Because I could never get into Star Trek

In the 90s I was a huge fan of The X-Files. My favorite episodes weren’t necessarily the ones about extraterrestrials as much as they were the ones about more mundane things like weird skin diseases and inbred people who weren’t my cousins.

I’ve had my share of favorite shows that my husband barely tolerated, but at the top of the list was another sci-fi drama from the 2005-2006 season called Surface (this one features Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl!).

I compared the lizard/sea creature from Surface to my childhood Stretch Monster thusly:

“Earlier this week I was watching an episode of the NBC series ‘Surface’ about an ocean-dwelling lizard species that’s poised to take over the world when the one redeeming part of the show — the scary, deadly baby lizard — had something terrible happen to it. I won’t give away what happened, just that it was terrible and the teenage boy it had befriended looked like someone had just stretched his best friend to death. Jon asked why I was crying and I hadn’t even thought about Stretch Monster Spencer until that question. It was like my little reptile buddy had been resurrected by this show and we had been reunited.”

I watched every episode of Surface and forced Jon through more than his share of highly improbable plot line. It didn’t help that one of the stars of the show reminded me of a teenage Jon. It’s just, I could totally see him harboring an alien species and not telling his parents.

In the new year, I’m going to give Fringe a shot. It looks like a cross between The X-Files and Surface, minus the adorable lizard.