office – Houghton STAR

Featuring The City Harmonic, Houghton College, will host its first Accepted Students Weekend, allowing prospective students to experience Houghton before many of them make their final decision.

The weekend, beginning on Thursday, March 19 and will conclude Saturday, March 21. Friday, March 20 at 8 p.m. in the Wesley Chapel, Houghton will welcome multi-award winning rock and worship group, The City Harmonic, with special guest and recent Houghton graduate, Taylor Wilding ‘14. The performance will take place as a stop on their nationwide tour. Friday, March 20 at 8 p.m. in the Wesley Chapel.

The Admission Office has put together a weekend “geared toward providing accepted students an opportunity to visit campus, meet other potential classmates, and interact with faculty and staff,” said senior admission counselor, Zina Teague. Accepted students will arrive on Thursday evening and will stay through the weekend, leaving Saturday morning.

Each accepted student will have the chance to stay overnight with current Houghton students, view a movie in the Kerr-Pegula Athletic Complex, and attend The City Harmonic concert. Following the concert there will be an after party in the Center for the Arts building and all current and prospective students are welcome. Teague said of the accepted students, “Overall, we want them to have a chance to experience what it’s like to be a Houghton College student.”

Houghton offers many Visit Days or Opportunity Days for prospective students to have a tour of the campus, attend classes, and meet other current and prospective students. However, this Accepted Students Weekend offers high school and transfer students the opportunity to spend a weekend on Houghton’s campus, while attending events to make their stay more memorable.

Accepted Students Weekend is unique to other Visit or Opportunity Days because it offers accepted and current students the chance to attend The City Harmonic concert. According to Housing Liaison and Resident Director of Lambein, Krista Maroni, the concert is helpful due to a lack of activities during overnight visits. Maroni said, “I’ve found that hosts often struggle to find creative activities to share with their visitors. The concert provides an easy way for current and prospective students to share an experience and connect. Ideally the concert and the after party can be a jumping point for future connections.”

Maroni also mentioned how the concert will leave accepted students with a “lasting memory of their visit”. In past years, Houghton has hosted bands such as Jars of Clay and Sanctus Real, so The City Harmonic will add to Houghton’s repertoire of award-winning performers. Having The City Harmonic perform during Accepted Students Weekend enables accepted students to engage in an energetic, exciting weekend that is different from the typical weekend here at Houghton. Maroni stated “Prospective students are vital to Houghton’s future and the culture we want to create; this concert is an expression of that value.”

After a two-year hiatus, Sherlock returned to television at the beginning of this year to the jubilant delight of thousands of fans around the world. For those unaware, Sherlock is a retelling of the classic stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in a contemporary setting. It provided the stage on which Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the titular character, burst into international acclaim, and it has not done poorly for the reputation of Martin Freeman in the role of deuteragonist John Watson, either. Written by Stephen Moffat (of Doctor Who) and Mark Gatiss, the show has thus far displayed a great ability to adapt Doyle’s original stories to a modern setting.

The third season had a tall order to meet. The dazzling success of the first two ended in the heights of mystery, as fans everywhere were left wondering how Sherlock had survived his apparent death while deceiving even Watson. We all loved that ending, and looked forward to learning the explanation, as well as witnessing Sherlock’s return to his beloved London.

Any writers would have been challenged to deliver on fans’ expectations, and unfortunately, Moffat and Gatiss didn’t quite manage it. Compared to the prior two seasons, the third one has thus far been a relatively unremarkable example of television. Catering to the curiosity of the fans, Gatiss spent the majority of the first episode, The Empty Hearse, focusing on Watson’s reaction to Sherlock’s return. As one of those curious fans, I was absolutely delighted by the emotion and concurrent humour involved with said reaction, but given the brevity of the episode, it was surely a mismanagement of time. It would have been business-as-usual in a show which featured seasons of normal length, but Sherlock only has three episodes per season, and I felt as though this writing decision cost them. Because the episode focused so much on Sherlock’s return, the drama of the actual case—in which Sherlock is to prevent a terrorist bombing of parliament à la Guy Fawkes—is hurried and unfinished. We never learned enough about the antagonist to actual fear that he might succeed, and by the end of the episode he still felt like an empty threat. Consequently, the resolution rang hollow as well.

The second episode,The Sign of Three, was slightly reminiscent of The Reichenbach Fall (the 2nd series finale) in its coverage of multiple cases which Sherlock hadn’t been able to solve. While it only seemed right that the writers should deliver handsomely on the wedding of John Watson, this episode again felt unfulfilling. The majority of it was retrospective, delivered in the form of history’s most awkward wedding speech, and it felt quite taxing by the time Sherlock wound to a close. Despite the fact that they tied all of the cases together at the ending and Sherlock was able to prevent a death during the reception itself, the entire episode still seemed as though Moffat and Gatiss had drawn inspiration from Michael Scott of The Office. While entertaining, it seemed out of place in Sherlock. Overall, the second episode was very disappointing. Most of the episode meandered without a clear antagonist to anchor it, and when he did show up it was without much hubbub or recognition. He was less engaging than a monster from Scooby-Doo, and the episode suffered for it. In most shows, I would call this a “filler” episode, making it a real shame that they wasted both the Wedding of John Watson and Sherlock’s first Best-Man speech on it.

Between the meandering and unfocused script of the second episode, and a first episode which, with its spectacled man and ominous music at the end, might well have been written to fulfill a checklist of “How to Introduce a Scary Villain,” the season has been much less enjoyable than the preceding two, and has felt much less engaging. That is not to say that it is a selection of terrible episodes, because it really still is far superior to most other contemporary television shows. Rather, in the third season, Gatiss and Moffat failed to meet the high bar which they themselves raised impossibly high in their first two seasons. They put in a very good effort, though, and so I recommend that everyone who has not yet seen the season put the popcorn on and watch it ASAP—so long as you don’t hold it to the same standards as you might the first two seasons.