* Over at The House Next Door, the very good TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston debate which show by The Three Davids–Chase’s The Sopranos, Milch’s Deadwood, and Simon’s The Wire–is the best TV drama of all time in a podcast. One day, when I finish going through The Wire and then roll through Deadwood, I plan on listening to this with great interest, but until then I’m steering clear. In the meantime I will say 1) They missed a David; 2) So far (I’m a couple episodes into Season Four), as good as The Wire may be, between it and The Sopranos it’s not even close.

* A terrible week for the cast and the fans of Road House just gets worse: First Jeff Healey dies, and now we learn that Patrick Swayze has (terminal?) pancreatic cancer.

* Apparently Joss Whedon is going to have Buffy the Vampire Slayer have a lesbian fling in her current comic book. Feminism! (This gratuitous bit of browncoat-baiting is brought to you by Jason Adams.)

* The Blot artist Tom Neely keeps doing great work; the sad and upsetting comic strip he posted today knocked me to the floor.

* Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle unearths one of the most unnerving stories I’ve heard in a long while, one I’m surprised I hadn’t heard before: the Dyatlov Pass Accident. In 1959, nine Russian cross-country skiers made camp in the Ural Mountains to wait out a storm. The next morning they were all dead–apparently having literally torn their way out of their tents and ran into the -30 degree Celsius night in their underwear, two of them with massive internal trauma to the chest but no external injuries, one with a crushed head, one with a missing tongue, all bearing traces of radiation and all with their hair turned gray literally overnight. More weird details at the link. Given my reading of late, this rolled right down my alley.

UPDATE: A friend did some googling and discovered that virtually all references to this story stem from the past few weeks (there’s some sketchy stuff from 2006 on Wikipedia (where the article is up for deletion) and a Russian-language message board thread purporting to be from 2004 but that’s it), so take it all with a tub of salt.

* Finally, via Bruce Baugh I came across this alternate ending to Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend.

As they say at the link, it’s not perfect–the new coda feels like it needs a separate transitional scene to make sense given the tenor of the revised climax that forms the bulk of the alternate take–but it’s vastly superior to the out-of-nowhere Signs riff imposed on the film in the theaters. It ties directly into emotional themes present throughout the film, it makes more sense out of the viro-vampires’ behavior, and it comes a lot closer to the most provocative aspects of the book’s conclusion in terms of how the vampires think of themselves. There’s even a nice little visual callback to the Central Park Zoo lions that ties it all together.

It’s funny: As I’ve thought about the big apocalyptic monster movie trifecta of the past few months–The Mist, I Am Legend, Cloverfied–I came to terms with the fact that even though the character work in the middle movie is head and shoulders above the by-the-numbers material of the other two movies, I was still more likely to end up owning the other two flicks on DVD because their monsters were better. But if I Am Legend had this ending in the theater, I’d have walked away from it with more or less no reservations, and it’d have been a whole different ballgame.

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