"Does a man with a future always turn left?"
I used the long weekend to partially de-hovel my house and get caught up on a long list of RL chores and tasks. My back is sore today, but it's a deep muscle soreness, not an injury soreness, and I'm feeling much better about my life now that I've mopped the hardwood floors and done some other things that have been niggling at me on a barely conscious level for a couple of months now and adding to a sort of low-level white noise of unhappiness about the state of my life.
Yesterday I had lunch with Mrs. D. and the baby and the puppydog; we planned to go to Town's End, but when we got there it was most definitely closed, so we ended up at 21st Amendment instead. The weather was bright and crisp and relatively warm, even down by the water, and the puppydog was frisky and happy to be walking and smelling and peeing on the streets near South Park; like most dogs, he has a keen sense of geography and makes emotional associations with places, and he knows the area as the place where he and D. and I and the other employees of the email listserve company that shall go unnamed used to hang out during lunch or go out after work, always with the puppydog in tow. The baby, who is newer to the area, is absorbing the things around her and reacting now, and has started smiling, and is generally becoming a little person of her own. What a strange process. Stranger still, she looks exactly like D., and it's bizarre to see my friend's features, true to every detail except the eyes (which take after Mrs. D.), staring up from the face of an infant in a little pink onesie.
* * * * *
BSG 3.15 - "A Day in the Life"
I have nothing profound, and very little positive, to say about this episode. Not that it made me particularly angry, but I think it's a bad sign that I wasn't able to summon the effort to care about much that happened in it at all. asta77 was spoiled, but didn't have SciFi in her hotel, so I gave her the running commentary, which went something like this:
"Cally's whining."
"Cally doesn't want to be a working mom, despite the fact that they're horribly shorthanded and running for their lives from homicidal robots."
"Lee's angry with Adama for emotionally checking out of his family."
"Cally and Tyrol are trapped in an airlock and running out of air."
[ 15 minutes later ]
"Still whining."
"Still angry."
"Still running out of air."
[ 30 minutes later ]
"Still whining."
"Still angry."
"Still running out of air."
[ End of show ]
"OMG, I think Cally is actually whining silently from inside a decompression chamber!"
And I generally don't have issues with Cally at all, but JESUS. I don't know what the show was trying to do there with the heavy-handed tie-in between Adama and Tyrol and their work/life balance, but it shouldn't try to do it unless it actually makes sense for the characters and the situation. I think Cally would have a legitimate complaint if she and Tyrol were routinely being sent into death-defying situations together, because their risks should be separated to leave at least one parent to care for their son. But that was a pretty routine repair until they discovered the leak, and in general, a lot of people are having to do a lot of things they might not normally be doing under these circumstances--and some of them are raising a family at the same time, and doing the best they can, and she's not as special as she'd like to be in that regard. Sharon and Helo are probably not thrilled with day care either, and Sharon's a Raptor pilot who's out accompanying combat flights.
I actually think the revelation that Lee's mother was an emotionally unstable alcoholic makes some sense for his character--it explains some of his hyper-responsibility, the strength of his resentment over Adama's abandonment of the family--it's hard enough when the father checks out, worse when the father checks out and leaves the kids to fend for themselves with a deeply troubled parent, even worse when the father doesn't even notice he's done so--and the fact that certain aspects of Kara's personality that might give others pause don't even make him blink. But I'm not sure what it says about Adama is what the writers really mean to do; the show should be extremely careful of the use of the figure from the past haunting the present device given the Six/Baltar dynamic, and having Adama think about his failed marriage one day a year kind of makes him look like a self-pitying blowhard. And I still don't get how that has much to do with Tyrol; Adama had a choice when he made the fleet a priority over his family, but Tyrol is living with his family in the fleet, they're as much a part of it as he is, and they're operating under some dire and unusual circumstances. It strikes me that in imposing the arficial Tyrol/Adama family ambivalence duality, the writers missed a key opportunity to tell a story that would actually have been interesting--how Tyrol ended up with Cally, why she ended up with him, after he beat her so badly, and whether it was really a relationship that should have gone this far; how their son was conceived, if it wasn't something Tyrol really expected or planned for, if he's been playing the outward role of family man but finding it hard to actually be one. I guess the Big Idea strikes again.
I hope this show starts making sense by the end of the season. I'm starting to feel like I'm in Season 3 of Alias territory here, clinging desperately to the belief that there's somehow a unifying theory behind the trainwreck, not seeing it happen, and getting bitter in the process. I hope they pull it out by the end of the season, but at this point, it's looking like there will be a huge conflict over the legal code under which Baltar is tried, and--WHAT?!? One of the fabulous things about the show through Season 2.5 was the struggle to reconstitute civilian institutions within the fleet, and I just find it mind-boggling that nobody has had even some rudimentary thoughts on how to deal with competing legal codes. Surely a Picon was caught stealing on a Geminon ship, or a couple of mixed heritage had an acrimonious split-up, or something. (And that's setting aside the question of how a colonial government that was able to maintain a unified military service with members from all colonies never dealt with issues of competing legal systems; if there was a President of the Colonies, there had to be enough of a federal framework to maintain unified institutions--they had a unified colonial Education Ministry, for crying out loud, and education is one of the most localized government functions ever. This development strains credulity, to say the least.)
asta77 was at Mega Con this weekend and has posted a report on the Jamie Bamber and Mary McDonnell portions of the con.
* * * * *
I rarely post about Heroes, though I am enjoying it a lot, but something about last night's episode struck me rather forcefully. The show has been setting up an interesting relationship between Mohinder, the seeker, wanting to bring the heroes into the light and join them with each other, and Sylar, who wants to bring their abilities together in himself. But the true sides of the coin are Sylar and Peter--Peter is the anti-Sylar, or Sylar is the anti-Peter, both able to absorb abilities, but Peter does so through osmosis, unwilling, leaving the other untouched, while Sylar can only do so by killing and stealing. But both are, right now, struggling to control new abilities, and Peter started out from an altruistic idealistic place, wanting to help others, and is becoming embittered by degrees, and possibly will cause terrible destruction, while Sylar, starting from a deeply cynical and psychopathic place, is being exposed to Mohinder's idealism, though it's difficult to say whether it will have any effect, or whether Mohinder will be the one to change.
* * * * *
1.14 - "An Eye for an Eye"
This episode was a really good case of how borderline demented Fraser's quest for the truth can get. It wasn't so much that he wanted to save the thief as that he wanted to save the vigilante's soul, stop him before he could do something irreperable to himself. Sometimes the greatest harm you can do isn't to another person, it's to yourself, and in ways you don't anticipate until it's too late. Ray's take is much more cynical--he's not a huge fan of vigilante justice, but he doesn't have that crusading need to stop people from hurting themselves, and when he tells Fraser that doing things like destroying the evidence on the bat to make a point is the reason he's no longer welcome at home, it's a harsh truth, because Ray, like most other people, don't share that part of Fraser's reality. Fraser's plans tend to be more than a little suicidal, counting as they do on people to relent and adhere to higher principles in the end, in Fraser's ability to make them see what he sees. But then, that's Fraser's magical superpower, and it works on Ray as much as anyone else.
Poor Diefenbaker! I certainly don't blame him for being down on Fraser's little altruistic projects after the taffy pull incident, but the terrible hat and "Corky" is asking too much. And Ray's random neuroses--he's terrified of old people--are pretty funny. But the best is when Fraser takes the liberty of writing up a reprimand for himself and Welsh tells him, stoned-face, to put it in the file with the others.
Also, Fraser has an Inuit story for every occasion, doesn't he?
1.15 - "The Man Who Knew Too Little"
I just love this episode to pieces. I love that Ray gets to go to Miami because, unlike Huey and Louie, he did not cause a riot in the squard room that morning, but that Ray doesn't go to Miami because the idea of Fraser driving his beloved Riv is so much worse than giving them a ride and getting sucked into the dysfunctional adventure that ensues. The Canadian culture clash jokes should not be funny but are--the conversion of kilometers to miles, the polite brutishness of the Canadian mafia. There's an excellent parallel between the con's compulsive lying and Fraser's compulsive truth-telling and the way they both cause so many problems, and Ray hits on that with a precision. And Ray, snarky and frustrated and ultimately heartbroken over the loss of his beloved car, is excellent throughout.
It's a rollicking road trip with wolf, with Ray providing the bitingly sarcastic running commentary, and best of all is the way Fraser's credulity ends up making even the compulsive liar snap, and the way that credulity was based on a certainty that there was a core of emotional truth to the stories that were the most important, the story about witnessing the shooting and the story about the father and the pancake house.
1.16 - "The Wild Bunch"
Ray and his car trauma are unreasonably entertaining. The motorpool heap is just a TRAGEDY, but obviously less of a tragedy than Diefenbaker and Maggie, the canine Romeo and Juliet. This is an episode where two of Fraser's deep and abiding faiths--that people and wolves always do things for a reason, and that truth and the law are just and fair, and that through the sum total of these things, the world is ordered and make sense--come into irrevocable conflict, and it's a terrible choice he makes. The way he loses his faith in Diefenbaker first because he can't explain his actions, and prepares to shoot him down because it's his duty and responsibility and probably because it's a twisted sort of kindness to have the execution be performed by a friend rather than a stranger, in Fraser's mind, is hard to watch. But in the long run, it's perhaps just as corrosive to Fraser's soul that all of the truth and trial in the world wouldn't have uncovered what Diefenbaker did by supposedly going wild and Willie did by defying the judgment and breaking Diefenbaker out, that the law let him down.
Plus--puppies! AWWWWWWWW.
1.17 - "The Blue Line"
This seems like another important step in Fraser's disillusionment, because Smithbauer, this childhood friend with whom he'd shared so many dreams, had gone on to live those dreams, and there are hints--the rookie card collection, Diefenbaker's alleged fannishness (at this point, I'm taking half of what Diefenbaker does as an outward manifestation of Fraser's innermost thoughts and desires)--that Fraser had lived vicariously throug him. So the adult Smithbauer, who has lost touch with what made playing magical in the first place and started seeing the hockey and every relationship he has with people as a transaction, as something someone wants from him, is something that visibly brings Fraser up short. It's telling that Smithbauer only starts warming to Fraser once he realizes that he doesn't want anything from him, only to realize too late that what Fraser wants from him is maybe more demanding than anything his fans and the sport and the gamblers have ever asked. There's a leveling between them as there can only be between people who go so far back that they know each other no matter how much time has passed--Fraser gives Smithbauer back some of his faith in himself, and some of his joy in the game; Smithbauer unintentionally gives Fraser another rattling of his previously unshakeable faith in people.
And Ray, of course, can't help himself, has to get involved with the case and the person who is such a part of Fraser's past. There's a very neat contrast of Ray's and Fraser's methodologies as Ray tries to get forensics experts involved to try to identify the stalker while Fraser brings in a more informal set of experts: the deaf woman who can read lips, the video store clerk who identifies the seat the man is sitting in, the neighbors and friends from his everyday life. And I love that Ray didn't want to tell Fraser that Smithbauer had taken the money, didn't want to be the one to inflict that pain, that he understood what it meant.
... aaaaand that's as far as I got this weekend with the writeups. Y'all were right, though--"Victoria's Secret" killed me dead.
Yesterday I had lunch with Mrs. D. and the baby and the puppydog; we planned to go to Town's End, but when we got there it was most definitely closed, so we ended up at 21st Amendment instead. The weather was bright and crisp and relatively warm, even down by the water, and the puppydog was frisky and happy to be walking and smelling and peeing on the streets near South Park; like most dogs, he has a keen sense of geography and makes emotional associations with places, and he knows the area as the place where he and D. and I and the other employees of the email listserve company that shall go unnamed used to hang out during lunch or go out after work, always with the puppydog in tow. The baby, who is newer to the area, is absorbing the things around her and reacting now, and has started smiling, and is generally becoming a little person of her own. What a strange process. Stranger still, she looks exactly like D., and it's bizarre to see my friend's features, true to every detail except the eyes (which take after Mrs. D.), staring up from the face of an infant in a little pink onesie.
* * * * *
BSG 3.15 - "A Day in the Life"
I have nothing profound, and very little positive, to say about this episode. Not that it made me particularly angry, but I think it's a bad sign that I wasn't able to summon the effort to care about much that happened in it at all. asta77 was spoiled, but didn't have SciFi in her hotel, so I gave her the running commentary, which went something like this:
"Cally's whining."
"Cally doesn't want to be a working mom, despite the fact that they're horribly shorthanded and running for their lives from homicidal robots."
"Lee's angry with Adama for emotionally checking out of his family."
"Cally and Tyrol are trapped in an airlock and running out of air."
[ 15 minutes later ]
"Still whining."
"Still angry."
"Still running out of air."
[ 30 minutes later ]
"Still whining."
"Still angry."
"Still running out of air."
[ End of show ]
"OMG, I think Cally is actually whining silently from inside a decompression chamber!"
And I generally don't have issues with Cally at all, but JESUS. I don't know what the show was trying to do there with the heavy-handed tie-in between Adama and Tyrol and their work/life balance, but it shouldn't try to do it unless it actually makes sense for the characters and the situation. I think Cally would have a legitimate complaint if she and Tyrol were routinely being sent into death-defying situations together, because their risks should be separated to leave at least one parent to care for their son. But that was a pretty routine repair until they discovered the leak, and in general, a lot of people are having to do a lot of things they might not normally be doing under these circumstances--and some of them are raising a family at the same time, and doing the best they can, and she's not as special as she'd like to be in that regard. Sharon and Helo are probably not thrilled with day care either, and Sharon's a Raptor pilot who's out accompanying combat flights.
I actually think the revelation that Lee's mother was an emotionally unstable alcoholic makes some sense for his character--it explains some of his hyper-responsibility, the strength of his resentment over Adama's abandonment of the family--it's hard enough when the father checks out, worse when the father checks out and leaves the kids to fend for themselves with a deeply troubled parent, even worse when the father doesn't even notice he's done so--and the fact that certain aspects of Kara's personality that might give others pause don't even make him blink. But I'm not sure what it says about Adama is what the writers really mean to do; the show should be extremely careful of the use of the figure from the past haunting the present device given the Six/Baltar dynamic, and having Adama think about his failed marriage one day a year kind of makes him look like a self-pitying blowhard. And I still don't get how that has much to do with Tyrol; Adama had a choice when he made the fleet a priority over his family, but Tyrol is living with his family in the fleet, they're as much a part of it as he is, and they're operating under some dire and unusual circumstances. It strikes me that in imposing the arficial Tyrol/Adama family ambivalence duality, the writers missed a key opportunity to tell a story that would actually have been interesting--how Tyrol ended up with Cally, why she ended up with him, after he beat her so badly, and whether it was really a relationship that should have gone this far; how their son was conceived, if it wasn't something Tyrol really expected or planned for, if he's been playing the outward role of family man but finding it hard to actually be one. I guess the Big Idea strikes again.
I hope this show starts making sense by the end of the season. I'm starting to feel like I'm in Season 3 of Alias territory here, clinging desperately to the belief that there's somehow a unifying theory behind the trainwreck, not seeing it happen, and getting bitter in the process. I hope they pull it out by the end of the season, but at this point, it's looking like there will be a huge conflict over the legal code under which Baltar is tried, and--WHAT?!? One of the fabulous things about the show through Season 2.5 was the struggle to reconstitute civilian institutions within the fleet, and I just find it mind-boggling that nobody has had even some rudimentary thoughts on how to deal with competing legal codes. Surely a Picon was caught stealing on a Geminon ship, or a couple of mixed heritage had an acrimonious split-up, or something. (And that's setting aside the question of how a colonial government that was able to maintain a unified military service with members from all colonies never dealt with issues of competing legal systems; if there was a President of the Colonies, there had to be enough of a federal framework to maintain unified institutions--they had a unified colonial Education Ministry, for crying out loud, and education is one of the most localized government functions ever. This development strains credulity, to say the least.)
asta77 was at Mega Con this weekend and has posted a report on the Jamie Bamber and Mary McDonnell portions of the con.
* * * * *
I rarely post about Heroes, though I am enjoying it a lot, but something about last night's episode struck me rather forcefully. The show has been setting up an interesting relationship between Mohinder, the seeker, wanting to bring the heroes into the light and join them with each other, and Sylar, who wants to bring their abilities together in himself. But the true sides of the coin are Sylar and Peter--Peter is the anti-Sylar, or Sylar is the anti-Peter, both able to absorb abilities, but Peter does so through osmosis, unwilling, leaving the other untouched, while Sylar can only do so by killing and stealing. But both are, right now, struggling to control new abilities, and Peter started out from an altruistic idealistic place, wanting to help others, and is becoming embittered by degrees, and possibly will cause terrible destruction, while Sylar, starting from a deeply cynical and psychopathic place, is being exposed to Mohinder's idealism, though it's difficult to say whether it will have any effect, or whether Mohinder will be the one to change.
* * * * *
1.14 - "An Eye for an Eye"
This episode was a really good case of how borderline demented Fraser's quest for the truth can get. It wasn't so much that he wanted to save the thief as that he wanted to save the vigilante's soul, stop him before he could do something irreperable to himself. Sometimes the greatest harm you can do isn't to another person, it's to yourself, and in ways you don't anticipate until it's too late. Ray's take is much more cynical--he's not a huge fan of vigilante justice, but he doesn't have that crusading need to stop people from hurting themselves, and when he tells Fraser that doing things like destroying the evidence on the bat to make a point is the reason he's no longer welcome at home, it's a harsh truth, because Ray, like most other people, don't share that part of Fraser's reality. Fraser's plans tend to be more than a little suicidal, counting as they do on people to relent and adhere to higher principles in the end, in Fraser's ability to make them see what he sees. But then, that's Fraser's magical superpower, and it works on Ray as much as anyone else.
Poor Diefenbaker! I certainly don't blame him for being down on Fraser's little altruistic projects after the taffy pull incident, but the terrible hat and "Corky" is asking too much. And Ray's random neuroses--he's terrified of old people--are pretty funny. But the best is when Fraser takes the liberty of writing up a reprimand for himself and Welsh tells him, stoned-face, to put it in the file with the others.
Also, Fraser has an Inuit story for every occasion, doesn't he?
1.15 - "The Man Who Knew Too Little"
I just love this episode to pieces. I love that Ray gets to go to Miami because, unlike Huey and Louie, he did not cause a riot in the squard room that morning, but that Ray doesn't go to Miami because the idea of Fraser driving his beloved Riv is so much worse than giving them a ride and getting sucked into the dysfunctional adventure that ensues. The Canadian culture clash jokes should not be funny but are--the conversion of kilometers to miles, the polite brutishness of the Canadian mafia. There's an excellent parallel between the con's compulsive lying and Fraser's compulsive truth-telling and the way they both cause so many problems, and Ray hits on that with a precision. And Ray, snarky and frustrated and ultimately heartbroken over the loss of his beloved car, is excellent throughout.
It's a rollicking road trip with wolf, with Ray providing the bitingly sarcastic running commentary, and best of all is the way Fraser's credulity ends up making even the compulsive liar snap, and the way that credulity was based on a certainty that there was a core of emotional truth to the stories that were the most important, the story about witnessing the shooting and the story about the father and the pancake house.
1.16 - "The Wild Bunch"
Ray and his car trauma are unreasonably entertaining. The motorpool heap is just a TRAGEDY, but obviously less of a tragedy than Diefenbaker and Maggie, the canine Romeo and Juliet. This is an episode where two of Fraser's deep and abiding faiths--that people and wolves always do things for a reason, and that truth and the law are just and fair, and that through the sum total of these things, the world is ordered and make sense--come into irrevocable conflict, and it's a terrible choice he makes. The way he loses his faith in Diefenbaker first because he can't explain his actions, and prepares to shoot him down because it's his duty and responsibility and probably because it's a twisted sort of kindness to have the execution be performed by a friend rather than a stranger, in Fraser's mind, is hard to watch. But in the long run, it's perhaps just as corrosive to Fraser's soul that all of the truth and trial in the world wouldn't have uncovered what Diefenbaker did by supposedly going wild and Willie did by defying the judgment and breaking Diefenbaker out, that the law let him down.
Plus--puppies! AWWWWWWWW.
1.17 - "The Blue Line"
This seems like another important step in Fraser's disillusionment, because Smithbauer, this childhood friend with whom he'd shared so many dreams, had gone on to live those dreams, and there are hints--the rookie card collection, Diefenbaker's alleged fannishness (at this point, I'm taking half of what Diefenbaker does as an outward manifestation of Fraser's innermost thoughts and desires)--that Fraser had lived vicariously throug him. So the adult Smithbauer, who has lost touch with what made playing magical in the first place and started seeing the hockey and every relationship he has with people as a transaction, as something someone wants from him, is something that visibly brings Fraser up short. It's telling that Smithbauer only starts warming to Fraser once he realizes that he doesn't want anything from him, only to realize too late that what Fraser wants from him is maybe more demanding than anything his fans and the sport and the gamblers have ever asked. There's a leveling between them as there can only be between people who go so far back that they know each other no matter how much time has passed--Fraser gives Smithbauer back some of his faith in himself, and some of his joy in the game; Smithbauer unintentionally gives Fraser another rattling of his previously unshakeable faith in people.
And Ray, of course, can't help himself, has to get involved with the case and the person who is such a part of Fraser's past. There's a very neat contrast of Ray's and Fraser's methodologies as Ray tries to get forensics experts involved to try to identify the stalker while Fraser brings in a more informal set of experts: the deaf woman who can read lips, the video store clerk who identifies the seat the man is sitting in, the neighbors and friends from his everyday life. And I love that Ray didn't want to tell Fraser that Smithbauer had taken the money, didn't want to be the one to inflict that pain, that he understood what it meant.
... aaaaand that's as far as I got this weekend with the writeups. Y'all were right, though--"Victoria's Secret" killed me dead.