Watching TV online is both awesome and terrible.

I know I said in an earlier post that being able to watch TV online is awesome. And I stand by that. Mostly. When you're stuck in bed, like I was after surgery, it's great. I was able to keep up with my prime time favorites and  avoid going insane from boredom.

So not long ago I had the genius idea that if I could keep up with current shows online, maybe I could go back and revisit some shows that I missed. Like, for example...

I'm not even a little bit ashamed to admit that this was one of my favorite shows of the late '90s. It had action. It had drama. It had super-sexy counter-terrorist agents with their awesome high-tech gadgets. It was a great show. My only problem was that I didn't come into it until the third season.

So finally, after all these years, I decided to go back and watch it from the beginning. And the mixed emotions began almost immediately. Mostly, I think, because I was forced to confront just how much the world has changed since 1997. The awesome high-tech gadgets of 14 years ago are now so laughably outdated that it's almost painful to watch. The kicker for me was when, in one of the first episodes, the tech whiz explained to Nikita what a chat room was.

It isn't the show's fault. I'm pretty sure I didn't know what a chat room was back then either. If I had seen the episode when it first aired, the explanation would have seemed perfectly natural. But watching it this many years later I couldn't help but laugh. Just like I laughed every time they had to search for a land line in order to call somebody. It just seemed so weird.

The simple truth is that we can never really go back to our previous perspective once we've moved on. Everything we see and do changes us. This is not to say that we can't still enjoy things that we used to enjoy, or remember what our life was like before. But we'll never be able to see things from our past exactly the same way again.

Is that a bad thing? Of course not. I'm all about growth, and moving forward. Of course that's the way life should work. But, sadly for me, it does make it just a little bit more difficult to completely enjoy an awesome action-adventure from the '90s.