These Are a Few of My Favorite Things: I Spy...

So, I have a really busy weekend — tons of writing to do for classes/midterms next week. However, I had to take a moment for a post I've been wanting to do for a long time.

I'm very easily excitable and have a real knack for recognizing faces and voices of actors. Put the two together and you get random bursts of squealing from me whenever I spot an actor who shows up in several shows I love. It's been happening a lot recently: I rewatched an episode of Life and noticed the actor playing a homeless man is also Sheriff Dearborne on True Blood, and then I also remembered he was Oldmann, the truth-serum making Dharma-version-of-Sayid on Lost. And the woman who plays Jessica on True Blood, Deborah Ann Woll, was also on an episode of Life. Exciting stuff (if you're me)!

What tipped the scale in favor of writing this post was the appearance of three brand-spanking new SQUEEE moments on Thursday's episode of FlashForward*. First, Joseph Fiennes' character's AA sponsor talks to a bartender (who's just serving him soda) who turns out to be Cassidy, aka Sawyer's baby-mama, on Lost. Then Joseph Fiennes' wife on the show — played by Penny from Lost — is randomly having lunch with Zoe from Firefly**. Those were pretty neat moments for me, but the pièce de résistance was noticing that the German security officer was played by they guy who was Captain Englehorn in Peter Jackson's King Kong (though it's not a TV show connection, it still counts as excitement in my book).

* I really feel like FlashForward is just one big modge-podge of actors from other projects. I know actors have almost always been in other projects before, but this show is full of them. The FBI LA office director was the chief on Law & Order: CI, Joseph Fiennes is Shakespeare in Love (and should NOT be talking with an American accent), his wife is Penny*** from Lost, the other FBI agent is Harold from Harold and Kumar, the man Penny is going to have an affair with is Commodore Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.

** Though FlashForward revolves around an interesting concept and has some funny moments, I think my inability to remember characters' names and only refer to them by the actor's name or a different character they've played is a bad sign that I'm not invested in the show.

*** Seriously, she will always be Penny.