“Failure is not an option…If you feel the need to vomit up there, just swallow it.” - Kitty Farmer, Donnie Darko

By Lisa Fary

No matter how well versed you are in the Buffy lexicon, how many times you’ve seen the Blade movies, or how many hours you’ve spent debating Gary Oldman’s dopey red armor in Dracula, none of it prepares you for this:

What do you do when a vampire offers you soup?

I’m sure the proper Middleresponse is to stake the soup-offering vampire with the purest Carpathian wood, but as a soup lover (because inside, I’m really a toothless 80 year old with a cranky digestive system) I feel the situation merits further investigation.

What kind of soup is it? Is it gazpacho?  I’d totally accept gazpacho from a vampire.
If it’s any kind of cream of something, then the offering vampire would have to get a face full of soup in addition to a Carpathian stake.  “Cream of” soups are gross.

But, gazpacho. That combines two of my favorite things: soup and salsa.

Now I’m hungry.

And off topic.

This week, the Middleman and Wendy face off against puppets. Gazpacho-less, vampire puppets bent on bringing an eternal night of vampiric damnation as a hostess gift to the world.  The puppets are Vladdie and Lizzie, wooden copies of Vlad the Impaler and his girlfriend and if they get married on the hands of two people in love, they come back to life and the world gets that whole eternal damnation thing.

Lucky us.

The idea of a vampire puppet is freaking funny to me.  So is the Middleman having a revealing, yet sinister, discussion with Vladdie’s previous, criminally insane ventriloquist via hand puppet.  And Lacey having steamy sex dreams about the Middleman and ice cream.

With “The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation”, The Middleman was back on this week.  That leads me to the following conclusion: Tyler brings the show down.  Last week was all about Wendy learning about Tyler (and countering Kevin Sorbo’s zombiefied performance - poor Herc) and it just didn’t fly.

OMG, I can’t believe I’m about to type this (I also can’t believe I just typed “OMG” - I should have my English teaching credentials revoked), but here it is:

As much as I love my newest addition to the TV Boyfriend Petting Zoo and Chest Hair Rehabilitation Ranch, maybe Tyler should be visible as little as possible.

Sorry, Tyler. It’s for the good of the show.  Now go frolic.

The less mature part of me, the part that typed “OMG”, finally generated my Middlenickname and Middlecostume on the ABC Family website after tonight’s show.  After determining that my secret weapon for fighting evil is my super smart brain, that I keep my crime fighting senses sharp by drinking lots of smoothies, and that my crime fighting style is calm and laid back, my Middlenickname came back as. . .

That’s right. The Noodle.  That will strike fear into the hearts of soup lovers everywhere.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.