All those two had was EACH OTHER!

John's got a brief post in which he describes a TV show moment that makes him cry. Since I myself have been known to blubber like a baby at certain movies and TV shows, I figure, why not make a list of such moments? (It's not like this is a masculine blog or anything; I mean, geez, look at the picture at the top!)

:: Titanic. OK, I never found this movie to be the overwhelming emotional experience that many folks did, and Jack's frigid and wet demise never made me tear up at all, but that brief bit where the mother in steerage is telling her two kids their last bedtime story before the waters swirl around them, and then the moment just after that when the elderly first-class couple is on their bed for the last time, always gets me. (Yes, I still like Titanic. I've never seen so befuddling an example of something so universally beloved at one point becoming so universally loathed a bit later on.)

:: Field of Dreams. When the catcher removes his mask, and Ray Kinsella realizes just who he is and just why he's been doing all this weird stuff -- oh, crap, where's my Kleenex?

:: Back when ER didn't suck, it could usually be counted on to have one big tear-jerking scene per year. The "Love's Labor Lost" episode (Dr. Greene saves the baby but the mom dies) was one such episode; then there was the second season episode when one of the two ambulance-driver dudes died of the burns he suffered in a fire. I always found the episode where Dr. Greene died overdone -- it was like the producers were saying, "You will cry now. Cry, damn you! CRY!!!" -- but the episode before that one really got me. That was when, at the beginning of the episode, Dr. Carter is reading a letter to the ER staff from Dr. Greene, and then at the bottom, he gets to the note that Elizabeth had added to the end: "Mark died this morning." The rest of the episode tracks everyone's reaction to the news, and it ends with a flash-forward by about six months or so -- and the last letter of Dr. Greene is still pinned to the bulletin board.

:: OK, I gotta mention the Little House on the Prairie episode when Laura Ingalls gets jealous over the attention being paid to her baby brother, and prays for the baby to die, which he then does. And then Laura runs away from home and goes up on top of this really high mountain (an oddly high point, given that the Ingalls family is supposed to be living in the flatlands of Minnesota, but who cares), whereupon she meets an angel played by Ernest Borgnine. While Laura's learning all kinds of wisdom from the angelic Borgnine, Pa and Mr. Edwards are frantically searching for her. Yes, it's exactly as maudlin as it sounds, but that moment at the end when Pa finally arrives...and then Laura turns to introduce her new friend, but he isn't there...shit, I need more Kleenex.

:: The West Wing: when Aaron Sorkin was really on top of his shit, he could get me like nobody else. The opening minutes of the second-season premier, "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen", gets me every time, when Toby starts speaking to Josh and then realizes he's bleeding profusely from his gunshot wounds. "Two Cathedrals" is a tough one, too, as Jed Bartlet comes to grips with Mrs. Landingham's death and his big MS problem. But nothing got me quite as much as the scene in "25", Aaron Sorkin's last episode of the show, when Toby spoke to his newly-born twins.

:: I don't recall actually tearing up during the second half of Star Wars Episode III, but I definitely felt like I'd been punched in the gut as Anakin's betrayal of the Jedi starts to play out. The look on Plo Koon's face as he realizes that the clone troopers are now training their blasters on him is devastating.

:: The Shawshank Redemption: "I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams...I hope." Wow.

OK, that's about it. I could go on, though.