Glee 1.09-1.11 and other TV stuff
I love Glee. I love Britney. Now my kids are in secondary, they’re organising for them to join in something called a ‘Nurture Group’ in the local mainstream school. I really hope they have a Britney there to cheat off them in maths. Also maybe learn that ballad isn’t sex-specific, it’s an entire species of duck.
And I wept all through the deaf choir number in this week’s episode. Repetition may have rendered Imagine the It’s a Wonderful Life of protest songs but this way was like hearing it for the first time all over again (I was eleven. So!)
Kind of kicking myself for not signing up for festivids after finishing the Black Narcissus vid in under a week actual viding. Still I was inspired to order the DVDs of one of the fandoms I would have nominated this year, The Boys from the Black Stuff . It ran in the early eighties just before the VHS era so although it made a big impact at the time I’ve only ever watched it once. Rewatching the first episode was strange. It was The Wire of its day, I suppose, but pacing and staging have changed a lot (also not American). Still very funny. Black comedy. And then the banister holding Snowy’s getaway rope breaks and his head hits the gutter and Christ, this isn’t really happening even though I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming.
This was billed as the mutant love child of Heroes out of Skins. Three episodes in I’m beginning to understand how watching Dollhouse feels for a lot of people. It’s visually arresting and they give good music but the characters are as about as appealing as the average Big Brother contestant. It’s hard to give a damn beside the sick thrill of waiting for the next trainwreck moment.
Worst culprit on the not believing they actually went there is the Alyssha storyline, the party girl whose ‘superpower’ is that any man who touches her in the show’s words “wants to have sex with her” but since want is regardless of whether she wants it, what they actually want is rape. It’s the sort of power that’s usually given to male characters in anything from the Lynx ads through the Troika’s cerebral dampener on BtVS to Owen’s alien sex phernome use in Torchwood. In those cases it gets disturbing to the extent that the roofie-rape comparison goes unacknowledged. With a female protagonist you’d think the rape question might be reversed but Misfits manages to elide over that side of things while being unusually explict about how the men Alysha’s power affects feel violated. Classy.
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