December 10, 2011 | Awake & Dreaming

I can’t believe that the series is almost over and I haven’t done a single blog post about it. Today will see the final episode, the series finale and only 49th episode of Being Erica a CBC produced Canadian drama-comedy series with a little element of time travel. The protagonist of the show, Erica Strange (Erin Karplunk) is this sweet & lovely Jewish woman of 32 who is single & well educated but has not been able to hold a steady job. Constantly under-achieving, she ends up getting desperate and seeks out help from a mysterious therapist Dr. Tom (Michael Riley), who has one condition to helping her – she must make a list of regrets that she has had throughout her life, regrets which she feels has led her to having an unfulfilled life. Unknown to her, Dr. Tom belongs to a small, secret group of therapists who are able to send their patients back in time to whichever point of life they want to go to. These therapists are able to fold time & space and help patients by facing the regrets face on. They can’t change too much of the past but they can learn a lot from them and so small changes which helps the patients to move on.

Erica is able to interact with people & places and get to redo her regret, and everyone from that time see her as the Erica of that point in time. For example, when she goes back to her school days, everyone sees her as a high school teen. Additional players in the series are Erica’s best friend Ethan, Judith & Jenny. Throughout the 4 seasons, Erica has relationships with Ryan, Ethan, Kai Booker & Adam who she ends up with at the end. Erica takes a job in a publishing company and although her relationship with her boss Julianne is initially antagonistic, they become close later and Erica is promoted to junior editor. However both Julianne and Erica get fired when Brent, another employee, double crosses them and this leads to the two of them starting a new publishing company called 50/50 Press.

Erica’s biggest regret is the death of her brother Leo, who died in a barn fire at their family cottage when he went in to smoke weed and the place caught fire. She goes back in time to stop that from happening and initially succeeds to the fury of Dr. Tom. He tells her that you cannot stop a death because it has consequences and she had to agree to undo it when he shows her the consequences of an altered timeline. Erica sessions also include her in going back to her see about her parents decision to divorce, her sister’s wrong choice for a husband and their consequent divorce. She also goes to see situations with her family, her friends, work and stuff. Most important is for her to learn from each situation and understand why people do certain things and make her closer with the people she loves.

Erica’s love life is often the point of discussion and is complicated by a fellow patient, Kai, who falls for her. Kai is from the future, working on a regret and is smitten by Erica, who is the love of his life. We also get to see Dr. Tom’s life – a failed engagement, a failed marriage, a daughter who he lost to drugs and the street, a suicide attempt which led him to his own therapy before he became a therapist himself. Towards the end, he rekindles his relationship with the woman he was engaged to earlier in his life and pushed away due to his work. He finally decides to start his life afresh with her, as all his patients have neared the end of their therapy including Erica, and the condition is that he is to sever all ties with his patients, including Erica. This is the sad ending in an otherwise happy turn of events in the finale that is to air tomorrow.

I will miss this show, which some have called Sex & The City meets Back To The Future. It’s a cool, sexy and fun show.

Well I’m messy although yes I do clean up once in a while and are by no means a complete slop. It’s not like you will find animals raised in my room or mold & stuff growing around. It’s more like my room is messy, I have books and stuff lying on my bed and until I put dirty clothes for washing, they tend to lie in a pile on my floor. And dusty; some of my stuff tends to get very dusty unless I use it frequently. Nothing like that girl who Ross dates for a bit who is extremely messy, played by Rebecca Romijn.

So now back to our topic – is it tougher living with someone who is messy or someone who is noisy? Too bad I can’t have a mix of them where they aren’t too messy and not too loud either. But think about it someone who is too noisy might not be too bad unless they are some kind of religious nut who reads from some book totally ignoring the privacy of others. I lived in this lodge, Kallai Everrest Lodge, in Calicut for 1 month and one of my floormates woke up everyone around 5 am every single day by his loud chanting from the gita. The rest of us hated the sonofabitch and one morning I had to restrain myself from going to his room, grabbing the fucker by the collar, taking that book and shoving it up his arsehole!

So noisy is worse? What about messy? What is there’s shit stains on the wall and urine sprayed outside the bathroom cause he/she just could’t hold it in. I remember going to a room where the guys had a sheet with vomit on it folded and tucked under the bed! Gross and they had lots of cigarette ashes all over the floor. I became sick not long after I go there.

I really can’t say. Can’t I get someone who is cleaner and less noisier than me?