I'll talk about a book again one day soon

I eventually found out what happened in the last ten minutes of The West Wing by ploughing through a 15 page recap at Television without Pity. Major anticlimax really. [Alan Alda gave the briefcase back to Jimmy Smits who claimed he wasn't maintaining a second family but was making payments to support his niece because his brother was a deadbeat and it wasn't a scandal at all and his wife knew all about it. To which I say "yeah right, why didn't Josh make a big deal about this last season when he was insisting on knowing all the background stuff?" Lousy continuity and lazy scriptwriting.]

Speaking of lousy continuity, I've almost finished Thackeray's Adventures of Philip. Our impoverished and disinherited hero is scrabbling away as a jobbing journalist and an insubordinate sub-editor. I kept wondering why he wasn't trying to get briefs because he'd been admitted to the bar three hundred pages earlier (although this was when he was rich and he'd had no intention of practising). I think old WM remembered this at the same time because lo and behold Philip's problems with his boss are solved by him getting first one brief, then another and so on.

I know these serialised novels are the Home and Aways or The Bills of their time but, even so, it wouldn't have killed him to do some rewriting before publishing the whole thing.