"The Prius is silent if you keep it under 5 miles per hour."
Happy, happy birthday, laurashapiro! I hope you have a fun and pain-free weekend, and that it's just the prelude to a wonderful year!
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It was lovely to see everyone's More Joy Day posts pop up on my flist yesterday. This year, my contribution was more material; a donation to my local food bank, a list of things I plan to do throughout the year for some of the people in my life. Maybe I'll get it together enough to do something online for the next one; last year's Emerson Cod picspam was fun to put together. Maybe at some point work won't be sucking up so much of my brain and my energy, too. We can all dream.
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The Office 5.11 - "Duel"
I think there was only one place in this episode where I actually laughed--and that was, sadly, when Andy crushed Dwight against the hedge in slo-mo--but despite its wrenching parts, it was really satisfying, because it was all about righting some universal balances.
For all of his absurdity, Michael has had a really heartbreaking year, between Jan's pregnancy and losing Holly. How great was it that he missed the drama between Dwight and Andy, and as an added bonus, had to report to corporate HQ to be praised and treated seriously? David Wallace's helpless fatality was excellent. Whatever Michael's doing, it's working. (And really, what he is doing is being Michael Scott, and how can anybody explain what that is, much less Michael Scott himself?) As a side note, I really like David Wallace's fundamental decency, because Michael likes to set himself up against various oversized (in his mind) nemeses, but his relationship with David Wallace, and therefore with corporate Dunder-Mifflin, is much more complicated because it's not antagonistic.
And then there was the look of dawning horror on Jim's face when he realized he couldn't duck out of the duel because if he called in sick, Dwight would be in charge. He was stuck. Nobody else was going to go around and collect those weapons. As in so many things, Jim doesn't embrace the responsibility, exactly, but he faces it when it's thrust upon him.
But most of all, Angela refused to choose between the two men she's been playing off against each other; she left the decision in their hands, and they both decided to dump her. It's been clear for some time--but was especially, appallingly clear in this episode--that Angela's passively-aggressively manipulating the situation so that she doesn't have to make any decisions and gets all of the benefits, and that she's not overly concerned with the feelings of either Dwight or Andy. (And as a side effect, in this episode we were treated to the spectacle of two of the most self-righteous people in the office holding themselves up against the weight of others' judgment, which was decidedly odd.) She let the whole office sit on the awful secret for 17 days; they had every right to be angry with her. There were so many wonderful and absurd and horrifying aspects to the duel, from Dwight's real potential to cause harm to the way it played into Andy's competitive streak to his delightfully stilted, formal note, and the trick behind it, the silent but deadly approach of the Prius (HEE!). But at the bottom of it all, both men realized how much they were losing from the situation, and how much they had in common; both got out of it with their dignity intact. It was especially important for me that Andy walked away with his head held high; and I would like, after this episode, to see Angela start redeeming herself again, because her behavior here was really appalling.
That was a note-perfect conclusion to a really heartbreaking situation.
* * * * *
I didn't get my Farscape comic until rather late. It turns out that when the bank shuts your credit card down after you report that someone has used it to rack up thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges in the last half of December, any number of automatic payments you've set up and then forgotten about go boom. (The same thing happened with my bank card last year. I do not approve of this becoming an annual tradition!) Fortunately, the good folks at TFAW notified me right away and shipped my order the instant I gave them a credit card that actually works.
Farscape Comic #1
I've never been much of a comic book person. I'm a prose person. There's something about the combination of page-flipping and lack of actual narration in comic books that I've always found weird. The corollary to that is that I am totally ignorant of comic book conventions and have, basically, zero context as I read the Farscape series. And yes, I am aware that it means I'm missing out on some good storytelling, so I have some hope that these comics might help me get over that hump.
That said, the characters mostly looked like I would expect. (I find the uniformity of body type in comics a little weird too, but even I know that's a convention; also, Aeryn's eyes aren't brown.) The pacing was snappy, and I felt like the panels did a good job of balancing the twin storylines of John and Aeryn adjusting to their new, post-PK/Scarran war life of parenting and Rygel's return to Hyneria.
There were also some really nice character touches: John's fatalistic humor, Aeryn's deadpan snark. I liked that Aeryn doesn't really know how to handle a baby, and no magical natural instinct has kicked in to guide her, but her determination and John's natural ease are their own kind of learning process. And I was terribly unsurprised that Rygel's return to Hyneria ended up being an ambush engineered by Bishan, but I was equally unsurprised that Rygel accepted Mmyna's loyalty as his just due, and embraced the dream of an easy triumph, and walked right into it.
I'm curious to see if Chiana's grief over D'Argo will be a continuing thread, because I can see her turning to sex in the short term, but only to hold off some kind of terrible explosion of feeling.
* * * * *
New BSG tonight! Woo!
Three-day weekend! Double woo!
* * * * *
It was lovely to see everyone's More Joy Day posts pop up on my flist yesterday. This year, my contribution was more material; a donation to my local food bank, a list of things I plan to do throughout the year for some of the people in my life. Maybe I'll get it together enough to do something online for the next one; last year's Emerson Cod picspam was fun to put together. Maybe at some point work won't be sucking up so much of my brain and my energy, too. We can all dream.
* * * * *
The Office 5.11 - "Duel"
I think there was only one place in this episode where I actually laughed--and that was, sadly, when Andy crushed Dwight against the hedge in slo-mo--but despite its wrenching parts, it was really satisfying, because it was all about righting some universal balances.
For all of his absurdity, Michael has had a really heartbreaking year, between Jan's pregnancy and losing Holly. How great was it that he missed the drama between Dwight and Andy, and as an added bonus, had to report to corporate HQ to be praised and treated seriously? David Wallace's helpless fatality was excellent. Whatever Michael's doing, it's working. (And really, what he is doing is being Michael Scott, and how can anybody explain what that is, much less Michael Scott himself?) As a side note, I really like David Wallace's fundamental decency, because Michael likes to set himself up against various oversized (in his mind) nemeses, but his relationship with David Wallace, and therefore with corporate Dunder-Mifflin, is much more complicated because it's not antagonistic.
And then there was the look of dawning horror on Jim's face when he realized he couldn't duck out of the duel because if he called in sick, Dwight would be in charge. He was stuck. Nobody else was going to go around and collect those weapons. As in so many things, Jim doesn't embrace the responsibility, exactly, but he faces it when it's thrust upon him.
But most of all, Angela refused to choose between the two men she's been playing off against each other; she left the decision in their hands, and they both decided to dump her. It's been clear for some time--but was especially, appallingly clear in this episode--that Angela's passively-aggressively manipulating the situation so that she doesn't have to make any decisions and gets all of the benefits, and that she's not overly concerned with the feelings of either Dwight or Andy. (And as a side effect, in this episode we were treated to the spectacle of two of the most self-righteous people in the office holding themselves up against the weight of others' judgment, which was decidedly odd.) She let the whole office sit on the awful secret for 17 days; they had every right to be angry with her. There were so many wonderful and absurd and horrifying aspects to the duel, from Dwight's real potential to cause harm to the way it played into Andy's competitive streak to his delightfully stilted, formal note, and the trick behind it, the silent but deadly approach of the Prius (HEE!). But at the bottom of it all, both men realized how much they were losing from the situation, and how much they had in common; both got out of it with their dignity intact. It was especially important for me that Andy walked away with his head held high; and I would like, after this episode, to see Angela start redeeming herself again, because her behavior here was really appalling.
That was a note-perfect conclusion to a really heartbreaking situation.
* * * * *
I didn't get my Farscape comic until rather late. It turns out that when the bank shuts your credit card down after you report that someone has used it to rack up thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges in the last half of December, any number of automatic payments you've set up and then forgotten about go boom. (The same thing happened with my bank card last year. I do not approve of this becoming an annual tradition!) Fortunately, the good folks at TFAW notified me right away and shipped my order the instant I gave them a credit card that actually works.
Farscape Comic #1
I've never been much of a comic book person. I'm a prose person. There's something about the combination of page-flipping and lack of actual narration in comic books that I've always found weird. The corollary to that is that I am totally ignorant of comic book conventions and have, basically, zero context as I read the Farscape series. And yes, I am aware that it means I'm missing out on some good storytelling, so I have some hope that these comics might help me get over that hump.
That said, the characters mostly looked like I would expect. (I find the uniformity of body type in comics a little weird too, but even I know that's a convention; also, Aeryn's eyes aren't brown.) The pacing was snappy, and I felt like the panels did a good job of balancing the twin storylines of John and Aeryn adjusting to their new, post-PK/Scarran war life of parenting and Rygel's return to Hyneria.
There were also some really nice character touches: John's fatalistic humor, Aeryn's deadpan snark. I liked that Aeryn doesn't really know how to handle a baby, and no magical natural instinct has kicked in to guide her, but her determination and John's natural ease are their own kind of learning process. And I was terribly unsurprised that Rygel's return to Hyneria ended up being an ambush engineered by Bishan, but I was equally unsurprised that Rygel accepted Mmyna's loyalty as his just due, and embraced the dream of an easy triumph, and walked right into it.
I'm curious to see if Chiana's grief over D'Argo will be a continuing thread, because I can see her turning to sex in the short term, but only to hold off some kind of terrible explosion of feeling.
* * * * *
New BSG tonight! Woo!
Three-day weekend! Double woo!