tv

“You’re talking about dreams?”

So, what did I do today?

Well, first thing this morning, I was woken up by Tucker, our dog, who was barking downstairs. He’d apparently thrown up his breakfast, I’m assuming shortly before his plaintive barks woke me from my dreams. (My father had gone to the store not too long before that, and I don’t think that’s something he could have missed on his way out the kitchen door.) I took Tucker out into the yard — I was still barefoot and in my pajamas — and when we came back in I cleaned up the mess. He threw up again later, but I didn’t get the honor of clean-up that time thankfully. Tucker seems fine now, so I don’t think he’s actually sick or anything, but hopefully he’ll keep down tomorrow’s breakfast.

After that, I watched this week’s episode of Burn Notice — which I enjoyed, even if the show has been better in seasons past — and I worked on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. I didn’t finishthe puzzle, not quite yet, but I’m close. I did a little bit of writing — on my own, since my writing group wasn’t meeting this week — and I read a little bit. I also went to see Inception, continuing something of a Leonardo DiCaprio mind-bending movie weekend. I liked it, even if the movie is a little slow and too cold at times. But it’s very clever and engaging, and an expertly pieced together puzzle box. I liked it a lot.

Though Ken Jennings is right: this is kind of weird.

And that’s about it for my Sunday.

Thursday various

  • Following up on yesterday’s revelation that Michael Palin didn’t like A Fish Called Wanda when he first read the script, here’s a letter sent by a “comedy script editor” to the BBC, calling Fawlty Towers — incidentally named the all-time top British television program by the BFI in 2000 — “[a] collection of cliches and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.”
  • Following up on the Wonder Woman post on Monday, here’s two more dissenting views.
  • This I Write Like meme is getting torn apart all over the place, notably here [via] and here [via]

    I’d post my own results, but they change with every different piece of text I have “analyzed,” and none seem remotely accurate — a weird mix of ego-stroking and insult.

  • And that’s one way to ensure fewer comments… [via]
  • And finally, Zombies: The Kid Vector:

    Here’s somethin they don’t tell you, but you better listen good if you want to survive out there: It’s the kids you gotta watch out for. They stay in the shadows, in the dark. When you see ’em, they don’t run right at you like the big ones, they stay back, let you come in closer. You think you’re rescuin a kid, you get in close and BAM! The dead brat goes for your throat or face, workin for a quick kill.

Wednesday various

  • It’s as I always suspected: Twilight will kill you.
  • Heaven knows Kaleidotrope contributor Genevieve Valentine isn’t a fan:

    The good news is that if you are seeing a Twilight movie to mock it, you’ll feast every time.

  • The Fab Faux’s live cover of Abbey Road raises a really interesting question: what is the difference between a really great cover band and a classical orchestra? [via]
  • Meanwhile, Janis Ian covers herself (with a few tweaks) for this year’s Nebula Awards. [via]
  • And finally, also meanwhile, all those covers on Glee would probably get the school in a lot of trouble [via]:

    These worlds don’t match. Both Glee and the RIAA can’t be right. It’s hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can’t do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue’s Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.

Independence Day

Happy Fourth of July!

I spent mine working on the Sunday New York Times crossword, watching a little television (old-school Doctor Who and, later, an episode of Wire in the Blood), and joining my friend Maurice for our regular Sunday writing group. So basically just your normal Sunday, but I do like that I don’t have to be at work tomorrow.

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.