TGIF: Extra Thankful Edition
Television:
Babylon 5 3.05 - "Voices of Authority"
How much did I want to punch Julie Musante? Thiiiiiiiis much. And, obviously, that was intentional: she was grating and interfering in the most smarmily pleasant way possible, taking advantage of other people's unwillingness to be directly rude and her position as political officer in order to compel their attention and their outward agreement. In a lot of ways, she was a caricature of the authoritarian functionary, giving Zack Allen a taste of the consequences of noncooperation, needling Sheridan to consider political angles in his decisions, to accept the "advice" of the Ministry of Peace; she was the long arm of the Clark government, armed with a complete repertoire of Nazi/Stalinist talking points and catchphrases. But her attempted seduction of Sheridan, as icky as it was on several different levels, served as a powerful signal of the Clark administration's vision of ideology as something that must intrude into and inform every part of life, including personal relationships, including sex.
I liked that Ivanova had to take Sheridan's place on Epsilon 3; it was convenient to the plot, but it also gave her a concrete role in the anti-Clark conspiracy. Garibaldi's the head of security; Sheridan's the captain; Stephen's the doctor, the point of contact for humanitarian aid smugglers and the underground telepathic railroad; Delenn's the diplomat with alien resources; Ivanova's usefulness to the cause has been pretty nebulous up to now. It's also a more affirming and positive experience of her telepathic power, and that's something she's had precious little of. Although I'm a little dubious about the admissability of a psychic recording as actual evidence, I guess I can buy that it doesn't need to come to court proceedings, because the footage of Clark plotting with Morden (!) was explosive enough in the court of public opinion to compel the Senate to open investigations, and the thing about regimes like Clark's is that they tend to step on a lot of people on the way up, and to be rather full of squirming, crawling things once the rock is turned over. On the other hand, Clark clearly has powerful backers on Earth, in the Psi Corps and other places, as well as from the Shadows, and it will be interesting to see what he does once he's cornered.
And finally, I like that the remaining First Ones are fractured, and not naturally altruistic and enlightened, and in some cases don't even particularly like each other. It makes Delenn's task to enlist their help difficult, but it's much more interesting than if they were a set of benevolent higher beings, and helps explain why the Shadows were able to regroup in the first place.
Bablyon 5 3.06 - "Dust to Dust"
I loved all of the different elements of this episode; it was delightful.
First: Vir! I was so happy to see him again, and to see him thriving on Minbari, and sticking up for Londo--insisting there's more to him than others see--even after Londo played hardball with the Drazi, and cemented his participation in the Centauri Empire's grasping moves to take advantage of their recent victories over the Narn. He's still not completely gone; he can sneer at Vir's report on the Minbari, and at his political naivete, but in the end, he wants for Vir something more than what he had: to not be a joke.
Second: OH G'KAR. We finally learn why the Narn have no telepaths; and G'Kar gambles that the Dust will work anyway, and become the weapon he needs, and makes a beeline straight for Londo while he's high, so that he can try to figure out what exactly happened. He learns it all: Londo's bargain with Morden, his use of the Shadows. It wasn't just generic Centauri aggression that started the ball rolling; it was Londo, specifically, on his own. Now he knows Londo's secret; and he has seen Londo's vision of his future, and of their possible future because they are locked in this struggle together. But more than that, he has seen the latest signpost on his own personal road: the one that's leading him away from these rash and violent acts and toward something that lifts him above the cycle of violence, something that leads him away from the future Londo has seen. Of course, Kosh was there to lend a helping hand; they really need to put a bell on that guy. In the end, both Londo and G'Kar seem a little scooped-out, reduced to something more fundamental, and even though Londo was the victim of the attack and G'Kar the attacker, they still seemed to be moving in tandem.
Third: Bester! Ivanova's still the least trustful and the most optimistic; she won't take any chances when it comes to the Psi Corps, and I'm not convinced she's entirely wrong. But Sheridan keeps her from shooting him out of the sky, and neuters him as best he can. It works, as far as making sure that Bester can't use his telepathic powers on the station goes, but the completely wonderful thing about this episode is that Bester is more than just a telepath; he's also sneaky and smart and ruthless, and Sheridan can't kill those abilities with a drug. Bester didn't need to read the drug dealer in the interrogation scene telepathically because, as he pointed out to Garibaldi, he can read him as a human being, and use the power of his uniform even when he can't use the power of his mind. And he did it all while killing them with sardonic kindness. Walter Koenig's performance was sublime. (True, random story: I rode an elevator with Walter Koenig at Dragon*Con this year. He's not very tall.) And in the end, we learned something else about Psi Corps: that they created the Dust to try to make more telepaths, and the genie got out of the bottle. (It's interesting that G'Kar regarded the Dust as a potential weapon to be used on enemies, while Bester and the Psi Corps are anxious to keep its use isolated to the human population; maybe the two are related.)
* * * * *
Books:
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman: I normally like to link to the edition of the book I actually read, but my nice trade paperbacks with the tastefully abstract covers don't appear to be available on Amazon. Hm! Anyway, I absolutely adored the first two books but found myself disappointed with the third. I liked the concrete, detailed differentiation between the parallel universes and the steampunk aesthetics of Lyra's world; the focus of each book on an important physical tool; the way the daemons reflected and reinforced their people while being independent personalities; and the fighting, talking polar bears. And I especially liked Lyra. She's mostly well-intentioned but with a realistic self-serving streak, a desire to do the right thing but not always the wisdom or experience to know what that is, and an impulsiveness that rings true to childhood and adolescence; she's a survivor, and rough around the edges, pragmatic but not entirely hardened. Will's kinder instincts and more cautious, hunted nature are a nice foil, and his treatment of his mentally ill motehr is a great piece of characterization, an aspect that carries through to the way he handles everything he encounters after that.
In general, Pullman draws vivid, complicated characters with independent but intersecting agendas: Lee Scoresby, the witches, the Gyptians, the bears, Mary, and particularly Mrs. Coulter, who is an excellent villain, frighteningly capable and ruthless. Then he sets them to work in a plot with multiple threads that all connect up in unexpected ways, and that is rooted in visceral danger: the terror of being separated from one's daemon, the difficulties of being a relatively powerless child trying to thwart very powerful and connected adults, and the ways that choosing sacrifice are harbingers of adulthood. And I think that's why The Amber Spyglass felt so flat and off. Lord Boreal never comes across as a real person--which works in the beginning, when Lyra regards him from afar with both wonder and fear, but doesn't work when we need to know him better--and his war is huge and abstract and ultimately unreal; Mrs. Coulter's turn toward self-sacrifice doesn't feel earned; the Church, which is never painted in a particularly flattering light, at least starts out as an organization with recognizable goals--the perpetuation of its own power through the promulgation of a narrow and self-serving view of faith--but becomes progressively more of a caricature of motiveless evil, with Father Gomez, the holy assassin, as its ultimate representative. (Father Gomez's embrace of the destructive bird-creatures and their attacks on the wheel people was not a subtle piece of imagery, but there was a point on Wil's travels through Siberia where he had an encounter with a village priest who was coded as creepy and borderline pedophilic for no discernable reason, and in moments like that, it felt like Pullman's agenda poked through the fabric of the story and left holes.) The Authority is too big, too powerful, to be an actual character, and villains with no comprehensible personality or drive are ultimately pretty boring. And Lyra and Will, whose motivations have been so beautifully drawn and organic up to that point, suddenly become puppets who move in the direction the plot compels; that was probably the most disapointing aspect of The Amber Spyglass for me.
Ha'penny by Jo Walton: I really liked Farthing and am glad that Jo Walton is continuing to write in that alternate universe; I also think her choice to tell a different but related story was a good one. I enjoyed Hapenny too, but not quite as much, for two reasons: I stumbled a lot with Viola Lark, the narrator, and there was no mystery to solve this time. One of the things I adored about Farthing was the way it aped the conventions of an Agatha Christie-style country house mystery so cleverly; Hapenny is a much more straightforward story, the unfolding of a plot to assassinate Hitler and the fascist Prime Minsiter of Britain, and the suspense is rooted in the potential for success or failure of the plot--or, more accurately, how badly the plot will fail, and how many of the characters will come through the disaster. (I didn't for a moment think it would succeed, and perhaps that was part of the problem: stories like this never have a happy ending.)
Lucy Kahn, the narrator of Farthing, was intensely likable: someone who both loved and struggled with her family, someone who had been forced into cynicism by the ugliness around her without losing all of her faith in the goodness of (some) people. Viola is too self-involved to be likable, but that's not necessarily a problem. She's an actor; her self-involvement fits; and the way she talks about acting and the subtleties of the production of Hamlet she's working on are some of the best parts of the book. She's also both the member of an aristocratic, connected family and an outsider, someone who consciously and definitively separated herself from that family, and that makes her an excellent POV character because she has an intimate knowledge of a lot of the characters in the political plot without being a concrete part of their world. But she's not, by nature, political herself, and the biggest weakness of the novel, in my opinion, is the use of an incredibly contrived relationship with the Irish man whose name I have, unfortunately, forgotten to bring about her participation in the plot. I didn't buy her initial fearful compliance and her later dinner party conversion to the cause; I didn't like her for it, and I couldn't reconcile it with the rest of her characterization, because she certainly wasn't heroic or daring, but she was resourceful and good at lying when she needed to be. The other jarring element for me was Jack, Carmichael's lover. Carmichael is a wonderful character, and a perfect illustration of the way authoritarian power structures bring both private and public pressures on people to get them to do the day-to-day work of oppression; the way he stopped the bomb, because that's his job and he's damn good at it, and only realized afterwards what he'd done to perpetuate the evils of the regime, was utterly heartbreaking. He's in that position because he's gay, because his superiors know if and hold his relationship with Jack as a lever with which to compel his cooperation, to get the investigative results they want. His story is the most immediate and personal example of the struggles a number of characters go through in the universe of these novels: careful calculations about where to cooperate and where to resist, to protect loved ones and livelihoods, and the regime's reliance on everyone to cooperate just enough to make it all work. It's unfortunate, then, that the reason for Carmichael's moral compromise comes across as so whiny that I spent most of their scenes wishing Carmichael would kick him to the curb already and then tell his superiors to stuff it.
* * * * *
Other:
Happy Friday, everybody!
Babylon 5 3.05 - "Voices of Authority"
How much did I want to punch Julie Musante? Thiiiiiiiis much. And, obviously, that was intentional: she was grating and interfering in the most smarmily pleasant way possible, taking advantage of other people's unwillingness to be directly rude and her position as political officer in order to compel their attention and their outward agreement. In a lot of ways, she was a caricature of the authoritarian functionary, giving Zack Allen a taste of the consequences of noncooperation, needling Sheridan to consider political angles in his decisions, to accept the "advice" of the Ministry of Peace; she was the long arm of the Clark government, armed with a complete repertoire of Nazi/Stalinist talking points and catchphrases. But her attempted seduction of Sheridan, as icky as it was on several different levels, served as a powerful signal of the Clark administration's vision of ideology as something that must intrude into and inform every part of life, including personal relationships, including sex.
I liked that Ivanova had to take Sheridan's place on Epsilon 3; it was convenient to the plot, but it also gave her a concrete role in the anti-Clark conspiracy. Garibaldi's the head of security; Sheridan's the captain; Stephen's the doctor, the point of contact for humanitarian aid smugglers and the underground telepathic railroad; Delenn's the diplomat with alien resources; Ivanova's usefulness to the cause has been pretty nebulous up to now. It's also a more affirming and positive experience of her telepathic power, and that's something she's had precious little of. Although I'm a little dubious about the admissability of a psychic recording as actual evidence, I guess I can buy that it doesn't need to come to court proceedings, because the footage of Clark plotting with Morden (!) was explosive enough in the court of public opinion to compel the Senate to open investigations, and the thing about regimes like Clark's is that they tend to step on a lot of people on the way up, and to be rather full of squirming, crawling things once the rock is turned over. On the other hand, Clark clearly has powerful backers on Earth, in the Psi Corps and other places, as well as from the Shadows, and it will be interesting to see what he does once he's cornered.
And finally, I like that the remaining First Ones are fractured, and not naturally altruistic and enlightened, and in some cases don't even particularly like each other. It makes Delenn's task to enlist their help difficult, but it's much more interesting than if they were a set of benevolent higher beings, and helps explain why the Shadows were able to regroup in the first place.
Bablyon 5 3.06 - "Dust to Dust"
I loved all of the different elements of this episode; it was delightful.
First: Vir! I was so happy to see him again, and to see him thriving on Minbari, and sticking up for Londo--insisting there's more to him than others see--even after Londo played hardball with the Drazi, and cemented his participation in the Centauri Empire's grasping moves to take advantage of their recent victories over the Narn. He's still not completely gone; he can sneer at Vir's report on the Minbari, and at his political naivete, but in the end, he wants for Vir something more than what he had: to not be a joke.
Second: OH G'KAR. We finally learn why the Narn have no telepaths; and G'Kar gambles that the Dust will work anyway, and become the weapon he needs, and makes a beeline straight for Londo while he's high, so that he can try to figure out what exactly happened. He learns it all: Londo's bargain with Morden, his use of the Shadows. It wasn't just generic Centauri aggression that started the ball rolling; it was Londo, specifically, on his own. Now he knows Londo's secret; and he has seen Londo's vision of his future, and of their possible future because they are locked in this struggle together. But more than that, he has seen the latest signpost on his own personal road: the one that's leading him away from these rash and violent acts and toward something that lifts him above the cycle of violence, something that leads him away from the future Londo has seen. Of course, Kosh was there to lend a helping hand; they really need to put a bell on that guy. In the end, both Londo and G'Kar seem a little scooped-out, reduced to something more fundamental, and even though Londo was the victim of the attack and G'Kar the attacker, they still seemed to be moving in tandem.
Third: Bester! Ivanova's still the least trustful and the most optimistic; she won't take any chances when it comes to the Psi Corps, and I'm not convinced she's entirely wrong. But Sheridan keeps her from shooting him out of the sky, and neuters him as best he can. It works, as far as making sure that Bester can't use his telepathic powers on the station goes, but the completely wonderful thing about this episode is that Bester is more than just a telepath; he's also sneaky and smart and ruthless, and Sheridan can't kill those abilities with a drug. Bester didn't need to read the drug dealer in the interrogation scene telepathically because, as he pointed out to Garibaldi, he can read him as a human being, and use the power of his uniform even when he can't use the power of his mind. And he did it all while killing them with sardonic kindness. Walter Koenig's performance was sublime. (True, random story: I rode an elevator with Walter Koenig at Dragon*Con this year. He's not very tall.) And in the end, we learned something else about Psi Corps: that they created the Dust to try to make more telepaths, and the genie got out of the bottle. (It's interesting that G'Kar regarded the Dust as a potential weapon to be used on enemies, while Bester and the Psi Corps are anxious to keep its use isolated to the human population; maybe the two are related.)
* * * * *
Books:
His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman: I normally like to link to the edition of the book I actually read, but my nice trade paperbacks with the tastefully abstract covers don't appear to be available on Amazon. Hm! Anyway, I absolutely adored the first two books but found myself disappointed with the third. I liked the concrete, detailed differentiation between the parallel universes and the steampunk aesthetics of Lyra's world; the focus of each book on an important physical tool; the way the daemons reflected and reinforced their people while being independent personalities; and the fighting, talking polar bears. And I especially liked Lyra. She's mostly well-intentioned but with a realistic self-serving streak, a desire to do the right thing but not always the wisdom or experience to know what that is, and an impulsiveness that rings true to childhood and adolescence; she's a survivor, and rough around the edges, pragmatic but not entirely hardened. Will's kinder instincts and more cautious, hunted nature are a nice foil, and his treatment of his mentally ill motehr is a great piece of characterization, an aspect that carries through to the way he handles everything he encounters after that.
In general, Pullman draws vivid, complicated characters with independent but intersecting agendas: Lee Scoresby, the witches, the Gyptians, the bears, Mary, and particularly Mrs. Coulter, who is an excellent villain, frighteningly capable and ruthless. Then he sets them to work in a plot with multiple threads that all connect up in unexpected ways, and that is rooted in visceral danger: the terror of being separated from one's daemon, the difficulties of being a relatively powerless child trying to thwart very powerful and connected adults, and the ways that choosing sacrifice are harbingers of adulthood. And I think that's why The Amber Spyglass felt so flat and off. Lord Boreal never comes across as a real person--which works in the beginning, when Lyra regards him from afar with both wonder and fear, but doesn't work when we need to know him better--and his war is huge and abstract and ultimately unreal; Mrs. Coulter's turn toward self-sacrifice doesn't feel earned; the Church, which is never painted in a particularly flattering light, at least starts out as an organization with recognizable goals--the perpetuation of its own power through the promulgation of a narrow and self-serving view of faith--but becomes progressively more of a caricature of motiveless evil, with Father Gomez, the holy assassin, as its ultimate representative. (Father Gomez's embrace of the destructive bird-creatures and their attacks on the wheel people was not a subtle piece of imagery, but there was a point on Wil's travels through Siberia where he had an encounter with a village priest who was coded as creepy and borderline pedophilic for no discernable reason, and in moments like that, it felt like Pullman's agenda poked through the fabric of the story and left holes.) The Authority is too big, too powerful, to be an actual character, and villains with no comprehensible personality or drive are ultimately pretty boring. And Lyra and Will, whose motivations have been so beautifully drawn and organic up to that point, suddenly become puppets who move in the direction the plot compels; that was probably the most disapointing aspect of The Amber Spyglass for me.
Ha'penny by Jo Walton: I really liked Farthing and am glad that Jo Walton is continuing to write in that alternate universe; I also think her choice to tell a different but related story was a good one. I enjoyed Hapenny too, but not quite as much, for two reasons: I stumbled a lot with Viola Lark, the narrator, and there was no mystery to solve this time. One of the things I adored about Farthing was the way it aped the conventions of an Agatha Christie-style country house mystery so cleverly; Hapenny is a much more straightforward story, the unfolding of a plot to assassinate Hitler and the fascist Prime Minsiter of Britain, and the suspense is rooted in the potential for success or failure of the plot--or, more accurately, how badly the plot will fail, and how many of the characters will come through the disaster. (I didn't for a moment think it would succeed, and perhaps that was part of the problem: stories like this never have a happy ending.)
Lucy Kahn, the narrator of Farthing, was intensely likable: someone who both loved and struggled with her family, someone who had been forced into cynicism by the ugliness around her without losing all of her faith in the goodness of (some) people. Viola is too self-involved to be likable, but that's not necessarily a problem. She's an actor; her self-involvement fits; and the way she talks about acting and the subtleties of the production of Hamlet she's working on are some of the best parts of the book. She's also both the member of an aristocratic, connected family and an outsider, someone who consciously and definitively separated herself from that family, and that makes her an excellent POV character because she has an intimate knowledge of a lot of the characters in the political plot without being a concrete part of their world. But she's not, by nature, political herself, and the biggest weakness of the novel, in my opinion, is the use of an incredibly contrived relationship with the Irish man whose name I have, unfortunately, forgotten to bring about her participation in the plot. I didn't buy her initial fearful compliance and her later dinner party conversion to the cause; I didn't like her for it, and I couldn't reconcile it with the rest of her characterization, because she certainly wasn't heroic or daring, but she was resourceful and good at lying when she needed to be. The other jarring element for me was Jack, Carmichael's lover. Carmichael is a wonderful character, and a perfect illustration of the way authoritarian power structures bring both private and public pressures on people to get them to do the day-to-day work of oppression; the way he stopped the bomb, because that's his job and he's damn good at it, and only realized afterwards what he'd done to perpetuate the evils of the regime, was utterly heartbreaking. He's in that position because he's gay, because his superiors know if and hold his relationship with Jack as a lever with which to compel his cooperation, to get the investigative results they want. His story is the most immediate and personal example of the struggles a number of characters go through in the universe of these novels: careful calculations about where to cooperate and where to resist, to protect loved ones and livelihoods, and the regime's reliance on everyone to cooperate just enough to make it all work. It's unfortunate, then, that the reason for Carmichael's moral compromise comes across as so whiny that I spent most of their scenes wishing Carmichael would kick him to the curb already and then tell his superiors to stuff it.
* * * * *
Other:
- Amanda Tapping's new project Sanctuary premieres in the US tonight at 9 and 11pm Eastern on SciFi.
- 50mm recommends TFAW for all of your Farscape comics needs. As I told her, I didn't even know when the first comic was coming out, so an idiot-proof subscription service is exactly what I need. (The subscription is already on issue #2, though; you have to order #1 separately if you do set up a subscription.)
- I only saw five minutes of the vice presidential debate last night--it was all I could stand, because, yes, I have issues--but this Sarah Palin Debate Flowchart captures what I saw with perfect accuracy.
- I'm pretty sure it's not going to start raining until after I get home, mostly because I remembered to bring my umbrella with me to work today.
Happy Friday, everybody!