Day: June 27, 2010

Our muttons

Friday’s page from my Forgotten English calendar was “our muttons” meaning…well:

The farming community has given us another useful expression in our muttons. When we speak of something being our muttons, we mean that we like it especially well.

This according to Sydney Baker’s 1941 New Zealand Slang: A Dictionary of Colloquialisms, and if you can’t trust that, what can you trust?

I had a pretty our muttons-y sort of weekend, all things considered; a pretty late night of it yesterday meant I didn’t get a chance to post about it until now, but overall I liked the weekend quite a lot.

I got a haircut, went to the library, and saw my second Broadway show of the week. Not too shabby, eh?

Back on Mother’s Day, we bought my mom tickets to see Mary Chapin Carpenter, since she’s long been a fan but never seen the singer in concert. The show was this weekend in Manhattan, and so to coincide with that (and last week’s Father’s Day), my sister and her husband drove to New York from Maryland. They brought their dog Chloe with them, which was an interesting experience, I think mostly for Chloe and for our much older — and much less interested in rambunctiousness — dog Tucker. We left the dogs at home (Chloe in her crate, Tucker in his pen) and drove into the city for a very nice dinner out. Then we split up, my father and mother off to see Carpenter at the New York School of Ethical Culture, and the other three of us to see American Idiot on Broadway.

I was a little worried about not liking the show. I like some Green Day songs well enough, and even have a few from the album on which the Broadway show is based in my iTunes catalog, but I’m not exactly what you’d call a huge fan. But the show was quite entertaining. It’s very loud and very bright, and if you blink you could miss the story, but the cast is undeniably talented and there’s a kind of pulse-pounding poetry to the whole thing. It’s a little like being inside a music video, with all the good and the bad that that suggests. It’s a breakneck ninety minutes, and it’s not without its faults, but it was hard not to be impressed by the end.

Since our show was over around 9:30, the three of us caught a train home instead of meeting back uptown with my parents. It’s maybe good that we didn’t stay in Manhattan, like we originally thought we might, since when we got home we discovered that Chloe had soiled her crate, her bedding, and herself while we were gone. Wet food and too much water earlier in the day had apparently not agreed with her. Catherine and Brian spent the next hour or so giving Chloe a bath on the front lawn — thank goodness it’s summer — and cleaning up the mess, while I tried to offer whatever help I could and look after Tucker. It was well after midnight before everyone was settled down — Chloe bathed, Tucker calmed, and my parents home.

Today was relatively calm and uneventful by comparison. I watched this week’s season finale of Doctor Who and thoroughly enjoyed it. As Betty says:

I’m not sure how much sense the finale actually made, but, oh, what wonderful, wonderful nonsense it was.

And I went for a short walk, despite the pretty oppressive heat. I worked on some fake horoscopes for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue — it’s a continuing feature, and the issue comes out next month — and on the Sunday crossword puzzle, which I have yet to finish.

Now I think I’m just going to watch a little TV and retire for the evening. Hopefully there will be more our muttons in the week to come.

One more frelling time

I’ve been re-watching Farscape a lot recently, not just a favorite episode here and there, like I’ve sometimes done in the past, but actually revisiting the series in its entirety from the beginning. This is something I’ve actually never done before, and there are several episodes that I’ve only ever watched a single time. But I’ve been really pleased — almost surprised at how pleased, even — to discover just how well the show holds up on a second viewing. In fact, knowing where the show is headed ahead of time, and how the characters and their relationships will develop, has actually increased my admiration for it. Now that I know its destination, I can even better appreciate the steps that it took along its journey.

Because Farscape is all about the journey, and all about character development along the way. The thing that I’ve most loved about revisiting the show is realizing not just that the characters change and evolve, but just how believable and hard-won those changes and evolutions are. They happen gradually and organically, so that you can look at any one character’s arc over the series and not feel like the writers have cheated. The show famously prided itself on having no reset button, so that there would be no undoing of mistakes or avoiding the consequences of a particular choice; but there’s also no fast-forward button, nothing to zip us past conflict and make characters suddenly friends, or enemies, or lovers without it feeling like that’s what would actually happen. The characters make very different choices by the end of the show than they do at the beginning, but these almost never feel like choices the characters wouldn’t make at that given point.

Some heavy spoilers follow, just so you know.

I’ve just recently finished re-watching the first season, and I think this is nowhere more clear in that season than in “Jeremiah Crichton,” about midway through. In one of their commentary tracks, the writers and cast jokingly refer to the episode as “When Bad Things Happen to Good Shows,” but I think that really does it a disservice and undermines what is, in retrospect, one of my favorite episodes from the first season. Yes, the costuming is unfortunate, and some of the acting from the guest cast is…well, questionable. It is not a perfect hour of television. And yet it does so many things right and underlines just how organic the character development on the show is, that I can easily forgive these faults.

It was only three episodes earlier, in “Till the Blood Runs Clear,” that Crichton told D’Argo that the two of them would never be friends. Now that I’ve seen the series in its entirety, I know that this isn’t true — there’s a friendship forming even by the end of the first season, and by the end of the show Crichton will name his first-born after D’Argo — but it was perfectly believable and in keeping with the characters at the time. Here, in “Jeremiah Crichton,” D’Argo realizes he hasn’t really held up his end of the bargain, that all of them have pushed Crichton away. Whereas, not that long ago, he would have gladly left Crichton on the planet where he’s been stranded, D’Argo returns to make amends and to help the man who, if nothing else, has proven himself a worthy ally. The episode is a real turning point in their relationship, and a deepening of D’Argo’s character overall.

Add in the beautiful Australian location shots — and some nice character work for both Aeryn and Rygel — and I think the episode gets unfairly maligned.

I’m really looking forward to re-watching the rest of the series. Including season four, which I don’t remember being the series’ finest hours. It’s been great to discover that Farscape really holds up, that it isn’t just nostalgia feeding my love for it. I may have more observations about particular episodes or arcs as I go along, but until then, I really do recommend giving the first season a shot if you’ve never seen it. The series rewards some initial patience, and its characters (even the ones that are puppets) are some of the richest and best developed in televised science fiction.