ABC's "Once Upon a Time" - time to let it go?

For the past six years, ABC's "Once Upon a Time" has largely been my favorite network TV show. If I really had to choose, I think I would rank it ahead of "Hawaii 5-0," "Survivor," and "Scandal." As for "24," it's only had two short seasons ("Legacy" this year and "Live Another Day" in 2014), so it would be hard to count it as a full competitor.

At one time, "OUaT" was one of ABC's stronger shows, regularly winning its timeslot, but it's tumbled badly in the last couple of years. Last night's episode finished last in its time slot, something that's happened a lot this year. As a result, "OUaT" has been a bubble show all year - not doing so poorly as to be an obvious cancellation, but not doing well enough to be an obvious renewal either.

Still, the prediction sites that I check have consistently put "OUaT" in the "likely renewal" category. It's a veteran show, so there may be a desire to give it a final season to tie up all the loose ends. Plus, Disney owns ABC, and it's able to use "OUaT" to promote all kinds of Disney characters (such as part 1 of Season 4, which brought Frozen into Storybrooke).

Today's news is that star Jennifer Morrison declined an invitation to return as a regular if there is a season 7. On top of that is the news that if there is a Season 7, it will be something of a reboot with only part of the cast. The last time I remember something like this happening was the last season of "The Practice," in which half of the cast was fired, and James Spader and Rhona Mitra were brought in. I guess you might call that a success, since it led to the spin-off series "Boston Legal," but it certainly didn't do much for "The Practice."

"OUaT" is an ensemble show, but Morrison's character (Emma Swan) has been the central one. The series started with Swan in the real world, being brought into Storybrooke by the 10 year old boy who turns out to be the son whom she gave up for adoption, and the whole first season arc revolved around her gradually coming to believe that there is magic, that her parents are Snow White and Prince Charming, and that her son Henry's stepmother is the Evil Queen. I can certainly see the show without her, but I'm reluctantly coming to the view that if the Season 6 finale really is going to finish the main storyline, it's probably best to end the show. For example, I miss "Justified" and believe it could have gone on for another season or two, but better that it ended a season too early than one too late. (I watched "The X-Files" to the end of its original run, but man, those last two or three seasons were not good....)

Random thoughts about fall 2015 TV shows

Most of my current TV shows are entering hiatus, having aired their winter finales. I've got questions about them. [SPOILERS AHEAD for "Grimm," "Supergirl," "Marvel's Agents of SHIELD," and "Once Upon a Time."]

- On "Grimm," there is a mayoral candidate who's been on the City Council for the past 8 years, and claims his district is #1 in terms of job growth. Considering that "Grimm" is not just set in Portland but also filmed here, you would think the writers would've been able to figure out that Portland elects its city councilmembers at-large, not by district.

- I get that Supergirl is largely invulnerable because of her Kryptonian background and something about the sun's yellow radiation, but her costume is made from Terran materials. When she steps in front of an out-of-control train and uses herself to slow it down, how do her boots not get eroded to nothing by friction?

- One of the results of watching as much TV as I do is that I start recognizing potential twists because, at a meta-level, it's what would be surprising. In "Agents of SHIELD," the Hydra sleeper Grant Ward takes nerd Fitz and some Hydra redshirts to the alien planet via the black monolith portal, in an effort to grab the alien god or something. Fitz's unrequited love Simmons spent several years on the alien planet, surviving only because of the presence of stranded human astronaut Will, with whom she fell in love. Fitz finds the astronaut's underground home, tries to escape from Ward, but ends up getting himself and Will captured. Hmm, I thought, I wonder if that's really the astronaut ... or if he's the alien god? Sure enough, "Will" turned out to be just a shell, with the real human having been killed covering Simmons' previous escape. And when Fitz "killed" the body with a flaregun, we later saw a silvery substance slither out of the charred remains - all of which reminded me of the black oil from "The X-Files" and the body-stealing alien from the underrated sci-fi horror flick The Hidden.

- In the resolution to "Once Upon a Time's" "Dark Swan" arc, Emma gets freed of the darkness when Captain Hook sacrifices himself to stop the revived Dark Ones, by sucking them into the sword Excalibur, which he then begs Emma to use to kill him. She does, but only later does she learn that Rumplestiltskin charmed the sword to become a conduit, rather than a vacuum, so that all of the darkness flowed into him, reinvigorating him as an uber-Dark One. Emma forces him to help her open a portal to the Underworld so she can rescue Hook; he agrees to do so because she threatened to reveal his treachery to his love Belle. All fine and well, but in the next scene, it's not just Emma and Rumple at the river Styx. Snow White, Charming, Regina, Robin Hood, and Henry are all there! Now, first of all, why oh why would you bring Henry on a journey to the freaking underworld?!? But more importantly, how does Emma explain to the others that Rumple can open a portal to the underworld? Doesn't this mean the others also know that he's back to being the Dark One?

UPDATE (12/15): Is Kara Danvers' (aka Supergirl) catty boss Cat Grant the smartest human ever in comic book TV history? I realize that Kara puts on glasses and ties her hair back in the ponytail to "disguise" herself, so it's a good thing she doesn't give in to vanity to get contact lenses. But Cat notices some interesting coincidences, corners Kara, and asks her to take her glasses off.... Wow, someone in a comic book show actually figured out a superhero's identity by, you know, observing things!

"The X-Files" revival

The news that Fox is bringing "The X-Files" back for a limited 6-episode run is a week or so old now, but here are my thoughts.

At one point, "The X-Files" was my favorite TV show on the air. (This was well before I had TiVo, but I did tend to record them on videotape so that I could skip commercials. The downside of videotaping, as opposed to DVRing, was that I had to wait for the episode to finish airing before I could rewind the tape to start watching.) I liked the alien-government conspiracy myth arc stories better than the monster-of-the-week ones, for the most part, and I was not a 'shipper.

However, the central problem with the long-time stability of the series was that it became impossible to sustain plausible Scullysque explanations for the phenomenon being depicted on-screen. About midway through the third season, it became clear that Mulder's view of the world was indeed correct and that Scully's continued refusal to accept the existence of extraterrestrial life was just pig-headed stubbornness.*

Funny episodes of "The X-Files"

It's hard to believe that Fox's "The X-Files" has been off the air for over a decade now. Of course, it's been even longer since it was good, despite the valiant efforts of Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish as the ostensible replacements for David Duchovny. It makes me wonder how well even early "X-Files" episodes hold up today.

Recently, I went for a long run on the treadmill and didn't feel like watching my current binge-fest ("The Wire"), and for some reason I was inspired to stream "The X-Files: Fight the Future." It was better than I remembered, although exhibiting much of the same flaws as the TV show: excellent on the mood and atmosphere, and better at setting up the conspiracy angle than at resolving it, and disastrously weak at the end.

Still, it was a positive enough (re)experience that when I had only 45 minutes for a treadmill session, and hence not enough time for a full episode of "The Wire," I opted for "The X-Files"' season 5 comic vampire episode "Bad Blood."

This is really a brilliant - and funny - episode, with the first and second third of the episode being told from Scully's and Mulder's points of view, respectively, and then an objective/omniscent view for the last third that follows the events of their earlier narration. The acting performances that each gives in the other's viewpoint are appropriately exaggerated versions of their character foibles (Scully comes across as a bit of a whiny and annoying skeptical; and Mulder comes across as manic and dismissive). The clues are all there to figure out the mystery, and in retrospect you can see how cleverly and meticulously writer Vince Gilligan (who would go on to create "Breaking Bad") was about getting all the details right.

It got me thinking about the other funny episodes of "The X-Files," which ran long enough and had enough creativity on the part of the writers to put together a number of intentionally comic efforts. Here are my rankings on the best:

Yikes, a reason to embrace the treadmill?

Yikes! A lot of runners don't like treadmills, referring to them as "dreadmills." They're kind of monotonous and they don't teach you to monitor your own pace.

But maybe there's a place for them after all. Outside running may be more scenic, and it may train your pacing better, but it's not without hazards: cars, air pollution, bad weather, and so on. Skin cancer, too.

At least skin cancer can be avoided by using lots of sunblock.

Not so fast, says a Runner's World article. Sunblock works, sort of, but it's not close to 100 percent protection against damaging UV rays.

Per the Nature article cited in RW:

Here we show that sunscreen (UVA superior, UVB sun protection factor (SPF) 50) delayed the onset of UVR-driven melanoma, but only provided partial protection.

Partial protection is better than nothing, of course, but it's still only partial.

Well, I ran my 11 miles this morning on the treadmill. Yeah, 11 miles was pretty monotonous. I was planning on 12+, maybe even 13 while watching "The X-Files" movie, but just as the movie started wearing down after about 90 minutes, so too did my mental fortitude.

NBC's 2014-15 new dramas

NBC has announced its new fall dramas (comedies too, but I don't watch those so have nothing to say):