The spoiler is one of those most irritating and annoying things.
It's always the same scene - you're halfway through something you're loving and then someone who has either already seen it or just Googled what happens imparts to you a huge development you had not forseen.
One of the more recent visualisations came in The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon told Leonard various spoilers from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which he was reading for the first time at the time. This duly leads to Leonard moving out to live with Penny, who imparts another similarly big spoiler.
Some people argued "why Harry Potter?" but using a more recent spoiler would have undoubtedly pissed some people off. Not that it worked as a number of people apparently wrote to the US network CBS complaining they were spoiled the end of the book/film. This was accentuated by a spoiler of The Walking Dead, which was also added at the end of a then-recent episode.
Film buffs seem to accept spoilers as a part of life but how hard is it to avoid them?
It's a strange psychological bent at the best of times. The desire to know for some - i.e. me - means that when you are aware there's something big on the horizon of media you are enjoying, you want to jump to the end.
This is something that can be felt at the moment. The highly anticipated finale of US television drama Breaking Bad was aired last Sunday, with a climactic finale. For those on time.
Personally, I had first heard of Breaking Bad when the first season was reviewed in music magazine Q in late 2009/early 2010, but found the premise amusing and confusing. A few weeks ago, I bought season one on a limb and loved it. I'm now at the start of season four and one thing that does impress is that, each time it appears to exhaust a certain plot point, it creates newer, bolder horizons.
But with the access to sites discussing and disseminating what happened, it is easier than ever to stumble across spoilers and ruin the big finale for yourself.
In a way, its also easy to find out what happens in the immediate future. Part of this is down to hearsay - people have said the current season four is the season's biggest season.
This is, in one respect, an evolution of the spoilering process. In the old days, if you wanted to spoil things, you would either ask someone who had seen it what had gone done or stumbled across a stranger. The scene in the Simpsons where Homer loudly shouts "I can't believe Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's dad" in front of a queue waiting to see The Empire Strikes Back for the first time is probably similar to what happened to a fair amount of people in cinemas up and down the land until the invention of the internet.
Nowadays, with one click, you can find a website with synopsis, analysis and comment on every last detail of every episode. This has already yielded spoilers for seasons of Breaking Bad as I progressed through the various seasons of the show, although so far this clicking finger hasn't strayed onto the big finale. Yet.
Not for want of trying. The eagerness to discover information extends to a temptation to go foraging for information, which would be a stupid move because it would undermine viewing time and the point in wanting to view episodes.
There's always a desire amongst people to gain knowledge of information and wanting to know as much as you can about any given subject.
This however has to be controlled because sometimes, it can be a good idea to keep things in suspense for some things. In the case of films and TV programmes, that would be a good thing because it helps the feeling you are legitimately watching something new rather than re-treading a road everyone else has long explored.
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