cahn

The Road Home (Babylon 5)

2023-08-25T19:39:51Z

Animated movie of Babylon 5 with many of the old actors who are still alive. I think my verdict is: I am glad we have this movie; I don't think it's a good place to start watching B5; I liked it a lot; a few parts dragged and a few parts I really loved.

-I liked most of the new voice actors who were brought in to replace those who aren't still alive. G'Kar's was particularly great, and I really liked Sinclair's too. Delenn's was the exception -- I felt like she was never able to quite pull it off.

-I felt like a lot of the humans didn't look very much like their live-version selves, specifically because their faces were drawn as elongated from what they actually were in real life. I felt like this was most pronounced for Lochley, who has what I would call a reasonably square-shaped face that became quite elongated in animation, and I would never have recognized her had it not been that I had the subtitles on. I also didn't really recognize Sheridan, which annoyed me, but there's a specific reason there: Bruce Boxleitner reminds me of someone I knew who died not long before I started watching B5, and I suppose it would have been hard to make a drawing that wasn't considerably more detailed that reminded me of this person.

-Something I was surprised about is that the movie doesn't make any move towards dealing with any of the complexities that were left behind by the series. (LENNIER, AHEM.) It clearly did not want to get into that; it just wanted to be its own thing, and possibly spawn more stories. Which is great! I wanted some more complexity, but I can see how at this point, the former made more sense.

( The rest of my thoughts are spoilers. )

-Also!! This movie is eligible for Yuletide, isn't it?? Yeah! ALL THE ALT UNIVERSE FIC, I WANT IT

comments

Rant: a sequel

2022-11-02T04:08:25Z

So I have a lot of THOUGHTS AND ALSO FEELINGS about Babylon 5's 5th season (Byron?? Bester! Garibaldi! The Day of the Dead!! Lochley!! Number One!! LONDO. G'KAR. THE REGENT.) but I have just watched "Objects at Rest" and I thought I'd give an update to my previous 5x02 post about Lennier! Because also: LENNIER!

So, to recap for those who haven't just (re)watched S5: since 5x02,

Spoilers up to "Objects at Rest"! Content note for Many Capital Letters!

a) Delenn, unbeknownst to Sheridan, secretly meets with Lennier in a bar. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. To send him on a secret mission. That Sheridan also doesn't know about. And asks if Lennier can stay for longer to hang out. And gives him all these girlish yearning looks. And when Sheridan finds out, Delenn is all "But you're the one in the wrong for not sending him in the first place!" gah. All together: OH DELENN NO!
b) Delenn and Lennier end up in a ship together, everyone else around them dies, and they think they're about to die too and Lennier confesses his love. They end up not dying afterwards, and Delenn very nicely makes it clear She Does Not Feel That Way About Him, which is GREAT but which she should have done A SEASON AGO because quite frankly at this point I thought she DID feel that way about him and I expect so did Lennier, and this is so much tougher on him than it would have been if she had done this ages ago.
c) Lennier comes to escort Delenn and Sheridan to Minbar, which comes with him getting to sit through a lot of Delenn and Sheridan being touchy-feely with each other -- I mean, not any more so than your average just-married human couple, they're not bad by human standards, but I imagine by not-very-touchy Minbari standards it's basically the equivalent of them constantly necking in public. All culminating in:
d) after an unfortunate coolant accident, Lennier needs to open a door to save Sheridan. And... he doesn't. (And Sheridan saves himself.)

AS WE ALL KNEW I WOULD SAY, all my sympathy is with Lennier, obviously he shouldn't have done that, but, like, I am still totally on his side because that poor kid, he's been set up for this for the LAST TWO YEARS. I mean, I wish his stress fracture point had been somewhere else that wasn't quite so awful (like, couldn't you just punch him in the face or something? Sheridan could easily have understood and forgiven that, and no, I realize Doylistically that wouldn't have worked), but that there WAS a stress fracture point is just not surprising to me at all. Delenn overloaded him with way too much, emotionally speaking, and wouldn't stop even when he tried his best to get away, and the fuse blew. (To mix my metaphors, I guess...)

Of course I'm speaking from the perspective of knowing, from it coming up vaguely through selenak's discussion posts, that Lennier was going to do "something," even if I didn't know what, and I wonder if I would have been a lot more WTF if it had come out of the blue like it did for the original watchers. I think it would have shocked me a lot more, but I think I still would have eventually come down on the side of "natural end to what was happening with him." And then again I think it couldn't have quite come out of the blue, because of Morden's prophecy too.

Also, it strikes me as a very Minbari failure mode -- you can just see Lennier thinking, I don't have to do anything, I just don't have to press that button... and that's the same sort of reasoning, or whatever, as the Warrior Caste used when they were like "so we'll just uh drive out the Religious Caste into the freezing cold, that's not actually killing killing them." Or that Delenn uses all the time when she's like "well I'll just not tell John about [insert thing of the week here], it's not like that's doing anything wrong really..."

It broke my heart, and I think it's totally IC, that Lennier (because he really is a good kid who had just one second where he broke) changed his mind and realized he couldn't actually leave Sheridan like that, and he went back for him. Only then it was too late, and now Sheridan doesn't know that Lennier came back to save him, not to finish the job. (Them locking eyes at that point, the scared and hurt look Sheridan gives him, OUCH.) But I'm really glad he did that too. (And my headcanon is that it will give Lennier some comfort, later.)

And then there's Delenn's speech to Sheridan about how you can in one misguided, emotional minute mess up the work of years, and how she really wants him to forgive Lennier, and DELENN YEP WE SEE YOU PROJECTING LIKE AN IMAX THERE.
And all that was great and then she caps it off with "I can't imagine how he's feelign right now," and WELL ACTUALLY I THINK YOU CAN. Or, maybe, you can't, because you never got caught and Lennier absolutely did, and really that's the difference between the two of you, isn't it?

This scene also made me think, afterwards, that Delenn isn't a very good mentor for yet another reason -- we know what a good helpful conversation between SOMEONE WHO'S BEEN THERE BEFORE looks like, we just saw Lochley help Garibaldi with that -- but Delenn, who could have been like, "look, I know what it feels like, I've been there, you KNOW I've been there, except what I did was far worse, you just have to work through it and do what you can," just reverts to her usual "I neeeeeed you Lennier!" which thankfully Lennier does not fall for. (Of course, Lennier might rightfully point out, as above, that she never got caught... but he won't do that, because he will never criticize anything Delenn does, which is a huge part of the problem.) But of course that leaves him nothing to do but self-banish himself, which, ALSO not exactly a great solution, but what else is he gonna do now?

Also, a minor point, but when she's all "so I had Lennier's room searched and read his diary" my first thought was, okay, I realize that Lennier just did a Bad Thing and Delenn is within her rights to find out what happened, but man, that's got to be basically Lennier's second-worst nightmare, the woman whom he's got a super crush on reading his Very Sekret Diary all about how he loooooves her and thinks Sheridan is super not worthy of her.

...I must confess my second thought was, so, Delenn is all "I knew he had feelings for me, but when I read his diary, I was like, whoa!" and, okay, I bet that canonically this is actually just one of those half-truths to Sheridan, but it's more entertaining to think about what could have been IN this diary! is this diary Lennier's Lennier/Delenn RPF?? (and omg HOW embarrassing would THAT be) Is it a lot of "John Sheridan is a poopy-head!"?? I kind of want Lennier's diary in Diary of a Wimpy Kid style...

Lennier just.... really really needs a hug, is what I'm saying. (A PLATONIC HUG NOT FROM DELENN.) (And also this is why everyone should go read my giftfic where he does get a very-much-needed platonic hug not from Delenn!)

I still want the break-it-differently AU where the stress fracture point is that Sheridan is bumbling along saying something he doesn't realize is crass about the Human-Minbari war, and Lennier just up and snaps at him that Delenn started it. I can see why canon couldn't do that, because it would just destroy Sheridan/Delenn, and it would probably destroy Delenn/Lennier much harder than this did, but...

Next up is Sleeping in Light <3

comments

In which I rant about Delenn

2022-09-09T00:29:42Z

So, I just finished S4 of B5 and started S5, and there are lots of exciting and interesting and moving things going on, but, well, this particular rant is because it's just sort of happened that I have somehow got really intensely involved in Delenn's relationships (mostly in the sense of yelling OH DELENN NO (1) at her (and at ase and selenak when available)) and, uh, late S4 and early S5 happened and then my yelling started getting a lot more "...she just said WHAT??"

( Spoilers, I guess, for Delenn's relationships through 5x02. )

comments

Babylon 5, halfway through S3

2022-06-08T05:13:58Z

So I am halfway through B5 now! S3 is interesting because there are some things about it that I don't really like that much (the entire Franklin addiction arc, ugh) and things that --

-- well, I just watched World Without End last week... and I thought those of you who have watched B5 but who aren't following selenak's rewatch would be entertained by my OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED WITH MANY CAPITAL LETTERS flailing about :P

( DO NOT CLICK IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED World Without End, IS FULL OF MASSIVE SPOILERS )

comments

WoT ep 8, finally

2022-02-03T06:34:43Z

We finally watched this after many many delays (and then I was super behind on posting, so...). Some great stuff, some... weird stuff.

( Cut. )

comments

WoT ep 6

2021-12-14T06:30:42Z

Last WoT post for a while, probably (I know there are two more episodes, but probably not going to watch them until after Christmas). I observed to D that I thought it was funny that I, who have forgotten almost everything about the books, have about as much idea as to what's coming next as he does, as someone who remembers in great detail what happens in the books.

( Episode 6 )

comments

WoT ep 5

2021-12-08T06:26:15Z

I actually do things besides watch WoT? But I am sort of enjoying this idea of actually being more-or-less caught up on a current fandom, which is never the case, and may not be the case for a couple of weeks after this week anyway because of moving from music-planning season into music-rehearsal/performance season, wheeeeee. (Also, tangentially, after failing hard at attending virtual Worldcon last year because I was busy with RMSE, I was amused to see that Worldcon has managed to be at what I expect will be exactly the busiest week/weekend of the year for me both with Yuletide and Christmas -- I may or may not actually get to see any of the Hugos, whereas last year I was able to block off what in a normal non-GRRM-infested year would have been more than enough time to see the entire thing, sigh. I will be quite shocked if I manage to attend any panels.)

( Ep 5 )

comments

Wheel of Time eps 1-4

2021-12-03T17:21:37Z

So I really do not have the time for this, and yet somehow I seem to be watching Wheel of Time? This is of course J's fault, and then amplified by D being interested in watching it too once he saw I was trying it out, which is hilarious because although we've watched a number of movies, etc. together, we've actually never ever watched a TV show together (because we both watch TV rarely enough, and are willing to commit swathes of time to watch TV rarely enough, that it's doubly rare there's something that we're both interested in at the same time). But it's fun to watch something with him, especially as he was a bigger fan of the books than I was, and/or has a better memory, so he actually remembers stuff and can explain it to me (whereas I remember people's names and random things about the worldbuilding but almost zero about the plot, and anyway noped out somewhere around book 7 or so when everyone was going nowhere fast).

tl;dr: I was generally entertained by Eps 1-3 but Ep 4 was where I actually got invested!

I didn't think to write anything up about Ep 1 (I suppose I wasn't convinced I'd keep watching) but here are some thoughts on Eps 2-4. Obviously spoilers; also spoilers for the books, I guess.

( Ep 2: )

( Ep 3: )

( Ep 4: )

comments

cahn @ 2021-03-04T08:55:00

2021-03-04T16:56:40Z

Argh, I have been swamped lately but just to say

-we finished She-Ra S5 (and thus the entire thing) a couple of weeks ago and both E and I loooooved it, although I feel like the ending was kind of compressed and not very big on the explaining bit of worldbuilding

-still really liking crocheting though the amount of yarn we have (and the number of things in my ravelry queue, yeah, I have one of those now) is growing at an alarming rate, and also it's a good thing pulling out crochet stitches is fun because I've been doing a lot of that (lately more because I don't like the way something has been going rather than because my stitches are actively wrong or badly done, which I guess is progress?)

-I realized just this week that Easter is in a month; fortunately for me my ward does not make a big deal of Easter but I should make sure Something happens and probably make my kids make a video or something, which means I need to have a Plan by the end of this weekend, blargh (there are certainly advantages to having a music coordinator who can do music, but I have often thought they might be better served by having a music coordinator who... can plan in advance and doesn't hate coordinating, lol)

comments

She-Ra Seasons 2 and 3

2021-02-04T06:19:24Z

Okay... I am really loving this show. All the characters are getting deeper and more interesting, which I LOVE.

-E is REALLY into this show now, to the extent that she is finishing her music practice quickly so she can watch more of it. Although as far as I can tell she's actually on the side of more diligent than average for her age, practice has always been kind of a flash point for us and the fact that she's trying to get it done early is... well, evidence of how much she loves this show. And now we're synced up and watch it together so it's like mom-daughter bonding time, which is AMAZING.

-I'm really loving her and A watching it too (A does not watch very much of it, and I don't think he could follow the plot in any case, but occasionally he'll drop in). A was like "the girls are heroes?" and "the villain is a girl?" and I was like YES. YES THEY ARE. (We don't watch very much TV, but he does hear about things from his friends at school and can recite character lists and plots of shows he Has Never Watched.) And when Scorpia is all "Hey, we should hang out sometime!" to Catra, I can talk to E about how that means Scorpia wants to be friends! (Yes, this is the level I'm dealing with here. Yes, I've mentioned to her some of the subcurrents in the Scorpia-Catra-Entrapta relationship, but I don't think she's there yet.)

-End of Season 3 plot, WHOA. I... was... not expecting that and it was GREAT.

-So I ended S1 liking Entrapta a lot but I wasn't crazy about her, but now... I'm crazy about her!( Spoilers! SCIENCE and Entrapta! Crackship-but-not-really! )

-In S2 there's this episode where they're basically doing RPF of themselves and in Bow's self-RPF he gives everyone their 80's costumes (also omg he gives himself a mustache which I had super completely forgotten was 80's canon, to the extent that I told ase that it wasn't, but it actually totally is) and AHAHAHAHAHA I just about died laughing

comments

She-Ra S1

2021-01-26T06:23:13Z

...so... I recently seem to have got over my problem with watching anything, and while this is not exactly making me into a TV/movies/opera powerhouse, at least I am watching more than the -- was it zero? Oh, no, I watched Hamilton, that was it, and that took me a month -- the almost-zero of last year after April or so. Right now it is She-Ra (2018 reboot) which I'm really liking! I've now watched S1.

This is because of ase, partially as recompense for how -- months ago -- she was all "Hey, I'm watching She-Ra and I really like it!" and then I subjected her to a really long rant about how MUCH I loved She-Ra as a child (though I didn't watch many of the cartoons, as we had music lessons on Saturday mornings) and how my mom at my insistence got me some really really large percentage of the action figures (I give my mom a hard time sometimes. But sometimes she was like, you know what, I'm going to give my child something cool and it's going to be awesome -- and it was awesome!) and they were So Great, much better than Barbie or My Little Pony, because each one had a little gimmick (She-Ra herself had the double costume, Angela had wings that would flap, Glimmer had a glow-in-the-dark wand...). Just like the He-Man toys! also the fact that each one had a little shiny different-colored rhinestone as part of her costume and so this was one of the ways I could get shinies in my life through TOYS clearly had nothing to do with it, also see here Crystal Swift Wind, which I pestered my mom for a Lot even though I already had Original Swift Wind Um. She-Ra was a big part of my child life, that's all I'm saying.

So anyway, once my weird video-antipathy started clearing up, I started watching it, and hilariously I pinged ase after watching the pilot to be like "hey, what a cool origin story they came up with!" and it turned out that apparently it's the same origin story as in the original which I have been unspoiled for for... thirty-five years?? This is what happens when I don't watch enough cartoons :P Anyway, it's still a cool origin story and props to Larry DiTillio and J. Michael Straczynski for it :D It's really well done! Just everything is well done, the character interactions are great, the stories have a good blend of character work and tension and humor, it's got a whole bunch of Tropes I like. It's a kids' show, there are topics about Not Abandoning Friends and Working Together and Stuff but they never get too overpowering.

The one thing where I was shaking my fist a little was -- you will laugh -- Castapella: I remember nothing about Castapella in the original cartoon, but I (of course) had the action figure, and she has a cool shiny rotating disk on her back! I loved that rotating disk! WHY DOESN'T CASTAPELLA HAVE A SHINY DISC ON HER BACK. Maybe it will come in a later season. (Probably they just realized it looks totally dumb. Non-80's me concedes that it does look totally dumb. I don't care!!)

All the characters are just super great. I can't tell you how cool it is to be watching something where there are so many women of all different kinds that they're just... themselves. I love them all, and how all of them are so different (and better in ensemble than apart, which is awesome), but I do have a favorite: by the time we were done with the Mermista-centric episode (1x5) I was the biggest fan of Mermista (and of course my love for her just continued to grow). (I didn't have the Mermista action figure, and looking at pictures on google I am nearly 100% sure that this was... because... her action figure didn't have a rhinestone on it, so I didn't particularly want it. Lol, my child self was so predictable. I guess much like my adult self.) She is such a snarky unimpressed delight :D Also I have a pretty large fondness for Scorpia and am really pleased whenever her low-attention-span cuddly self (but she did attend Force Captain training!) is on screen :D
( One spoiler for S1. )

It's like frothy really good candy for me -- really fun and delicious and if I watch too much of it at once I can get a little tired of it? but if I pace myself a bit it's super awesome.

The absolute best thing about it, though, is that E LIKES IT. You guys, this is the FIRST audiovisual media she has ever, in her life, asked for more of!! I mean, it's got: a) swords b) robots c) magic d) lots of fights with swords and robots and magic, so it was basically made for her. But I am soooooo excited about this mostly because I really want her to watch more TV to get more of a sense as to how social interactions and conversations and things like that work, and also to be honest because it's really cool to for the first time share a fandom with her :D (In principle she likes some books that I do, but in practice she doesn't want to talk about them, whereas she is more interested in talking about She-Ra.)

(Though we were talking about Entrapta at dinner last night and D, who has not watched any of it, objected to the names: "With a name like Entrapta she has to be evil!" Which, uh, she is not at that episode yet, so he may have spoiled it for E, who has not yet learned tropes like that. And anyway at that point I told him about Castaspella's name and he had to agree that Entrapta wasn't the worst name :) )

And when Adora raises the sword and says for the first time, "For the honor of Grayskull!" I just. I JUST.

comments

Nirvana in Fire - finished!

2019-10-20T04:11:35Z

I finished Nirvana in Fire!!!! It was really, really good. Thank you to everyone who told me how awesome it was and how I should definitely for sure see it because it had everything I liked, because you were right :P

Totally random thoughts: ( Mild implicit spoilers? no explicit or show-destroying ones )

comments

Nirvana in Fire

2019-08-18T04:26:45Z

I am having SO MANY FEELINGS about Nirvana in Fire right now. I just finished episode 27, so I'm exactly halfway through. (Don't spoil me! :) ) I took a while to ramp up but now I'm at the point where I'm sneaking ten minutes here and there whenever I can watch because it's sooooo good.

Basically, this is a complicated drama with a ton of characters and a ton of subplots all of which I think turn out to be related at the end?? The big drama is the fight for who is going to rule after the Emperor; at the beginning there is the Crown Prince but also Prince Yu, who is competent and powerful, and both are vying for the ascendancy. They both find out that the man who wins the fight for the throne will need to have Mei Changsu (henceforth MCS) on his side. MCS is the head of a powerful martial arts sect (despite not being very strong or martial-arts-oriented himself) and is a master strategist.

...so that's the beginning.

As usual, I shall now ramble on in a way that will probably make no sense if you haven't watched it:)

( Mild spoilers, nothing terrible I think )

comments

The Good Place, S2 finale

2018-02-09T21:43:47Z

I was discussing the The Good Place S2 season finale with wendelah1, and finally I figured maybe I should just post about it.

The interesting thing about the season finale is that I loved it, I really really did, but I didn't enjoy quite a large section of it.

( Spoilers, lots and lots of spoilers. And also maybe some capital letters and lots of FEELINGS. )

(Also can I say how INCREDIBLY COOL I think it is that this show is about philosophy and moral constructs and moral desert and it actually WORKS and it's REALLY GOOD??)

comments

Two random unrelated things

2015-08-03T04:28:13Z

1. So, for the first time in my life, I was faced in the 2015 Hugos with choices that follow the voting paradox. I never, in my heart, really believed in nontransitive voting preferences before; of course one likes peach pie better than blueberry, and blueberry better than apple (the example Martin Gardner gave where I first learned about this paradox), because fresh peach pie is obviously The Best Pie and better than any other pie. It would be silly to like apple pie better than peach pie. (In my opinion. D ranks them differently. But he was very sweet and made me a peach pie for my birthday. <3 And I'm not saying apple pie isn't wonderful too :) )

But: I liked No Award better than Three-Body Problem for the Hugo, 3BP better than Ancillary Sword for the Hugo, AS better than The Goblin Emperor for the Hugo... and TGE better than No Award. (Note that this does not correlate with how well I liked the book or how well I thought it was written; TGE wins easily on both those counts.) So, I dunno. I ended up voting them all under No Award, because I am a crotchety grumpy sort of person who feels The Hugos Are Not What They Used To Be And Darn Kids Get Offa My Lawn, but it was a very close thing. Probably if I'd had another day I would have switched them all above No Award, and if I'd had two more days back under.

2. I had Lots of Opinions about Fringe S5, and then sprocket noted that it was Walter fanfic, and then I got All My Opinions out about it here. (It's honestly a little uneven, because I was writing it while watching the episodes, only later going back to try to make it into a coherent whole. And... that's as good a metaphor for Fringe as any other, I think.)

comments

Fringe, Season 5 (first half-ish)

2015-05-05T13:24:58Z

Okay, um, I am up to 5x08 ("The Human Kind", mostly just started) and my principal feeling is one of bafflement. ( Spoilers for S4 and S5 )

comments

Fringe, Season 4

2015-03-05T05:21:24Z

Okay... so... I have finished Season 4 and I have MANY FEELINGS about it.

My principal thought is that it reminds me of writing a fic -- only it reminds me of that part of writing the fic where I'm really excited about all these ideas I'm having, because they're really awesome ideas, and they're starting to gel but they are still a little all over the place, and the characters! Right then, the characters are basically vehicles to tell the story-- they get moved hither and yon as the plot demands. Usually my beta dings all of these things (I... think maybe everyone who's ever betaed for me has dinged me on this to a certain extent, though they may have phrased it differently? but in particular hiiii sprocket, you're awesome), and they get at least slightly better.

So, yeah. I felt like a lot of Season 4 didn't get betaed. And yet it had so many great things going on! ( In which I say lots of random things about Season 4, including Denethor, the failed attempt at Padawan, the alternate Extended Seasons in my brain, and Nimoy. )

comments

Fringe, Season 3, Ep 8 "Entrada"

2015-01-22T17:09:30Z

So ase has somehow convinced me to watch Fringe, not least by referencing the ep list here, which, yeah, the "high points" version of Season 1 of any canon is usually the right tack to take with me. (It does mean that occasionally I get stymied by a character point that might have been a little more obvious if I'd stuck around for all the episodes, but if I'd stuck around I would never have gotten this far, so.)

Anyway. It took me a really, really long time to watch episode 1 of Season 3 (almost a month, I think?), and the next episodes took a while as well, but lately I've been going through a lot. (And yes, getting a lot of chores around the house done :) )

So capslocking flailing last night to ase wasn't good enough and I must share. I'm still reeling from watching the last half of 3.7 (thanks for the kiddie torture, show!) and 3.8 last night. ( Major spoilers through 3.8. This is one show where it pays not to be spoiled. Also, it is not likely to make any sense if you haven't watched this far... )

comments

January meme: Jan 16

2014-01-16T20:25:50Z

luzula asked about first fictional crushes, "assuming you've had any." (I'm going to assume "fictional" refers not only to books.)

Ahahahaha. In fact I make a new fictional crush every year or so. My first fictional crushes, I think, were Sherlock Holmes, Spock, and MacGyver. (As a kid, I tended to crush less on literary characters, because I'd more identify with them -- Will Stanton, Ged, Peter Pevensie -- than actually crush on them.) Uh, yeah: when I was a kid, I was guaranteed to fall for any character with analytical problem-solving skills, ideally with an unemotional exterior hiding a deep capacity for friendship, if not love. Nowadays I tend to go for either quiet unselfconscious competency and integrity -- Simon Illyan, Costis -- or lots of shades of moral grey (Cary Agos, Nicholas Rush, Garak). Not sure what this dichotomy says about me. (I do note that the moral-grey characters tend to be from TV and movies, whereas in books I'm almost always drawn to the competent ones. It's hard to do moral-grey in books in a way that makes me fall for the character. I do crush on TV/movie competent characters as well, though!)

MacGyver was clearly the biggest crush. (And Murdoc, the assassin who is obsessed with MacGyver. Yup, I had a crush on him too, although not the same kind -- I mean, MacGyver was the kind of guy you'd want to date, and Murdoc was, well, not.) I can't believe I am admitting this in public... somewhere between elementary and high school, I wrote -- years before I had ever heard the term "fanfiction" -- an angsty MacGyver epic that was many thousands of words long (twenty thousand? forty thousand? It was Many Double-Spaced Pages, that's all I'm saying). Yes, complete with self-insert who all the other characters thought was incredibly smart and attractive etc., although even at the time I drew the line at constructing the self-insert as a major love interest. However, there, uh, may have been a noble angsty self-sacrificing revealing death scene reminiscent of Eponine's. (I had read and watched Les Mis at that point, and it showed.) There was even a time-travel super-conspiracy involved, in which Murdoc turned out to be Tragically Misunderstood (or even better, Tragically Intentionally Misunderstood For the Good of Mankind). This was epic, I tell you.

(There may even be a copy of this great work extant somewhere in my parents' house, but no one except my sister -- who was the intended audience, at the time -- is ever going to be allowed to see it.)

comments

The Good Wife (Season 1, eps 15-22)

2012-10-05T14:06:56Z

( Apparently all you have to do is name someone 'Gold' and I fall desperately in love with the character. Also UNROMANTIC WILL/DIANE FOREVER SO MUCH LOVE! )

In conclusion: nonromantic OTP: Will/Diane! Romantic many-TP: Kalinda/Everyone!

comments

The Good Wife (TV)

2012-09-27T13:59:18Z

So sophia_gratia told me I HAD to watch this, and I have learned that when my friends are quite this insistent, they are right.

Caveat that I've only watched the first half of the first season, but I have not felt this strongly about a TV show since Veronica Mars. It is in some ways a totally different show, of course. VM is dark and noir (to the point that I would have stopped watching after the pilot if not for liuzhia (who told me I HAD to watch it, and who was right) telling me it wasn't that dark from then on) and the main characters are high-school students, and it's got a precision micrometer plotting arc I've never seen equalled anywhere else. TGW's main character is a middle-aged woman with high-school-age kids (which I LOVE) and has a much more detached, posh, political vibe (given that it's a drama of politics disguised as lawyer drama, this makes sense). They are the same, though, in their complicated and nuanced portrayal of people (both women and men, lots of interesting women) who are trying to do the right thing in an ethically gray and morally complicated world, in the rich chracterization, in the incredible (INCREDIBLE) character interactions. And in both main characters being women who can totally beat up (metaphorically, though, heck, I'd put odds on them in a dark alley as well) people giving them crap. TGW does not have the precision plotting of VM, but on the other hand, have I mentioned that TGW's main character is a middle-aged woman trying to navigate going back into the workforce, a woman who is juggling her husband's drama and her kids and her job and... AGH. And it's all about the character interactions playing in with politics and power and hierarchy and strategy and... yeah. It's, in a lot of ways, VM for grownups. Go watch it.

( Now for some episode recaps, with spoilers: eps 6-14 )

comments

SGA: season 1, eps 11-20

2012-09-16T05:30:05Z

So people gave me fic recs and they were awesome and this has really slowed down my SGA snarfing, but then D poked me to clean up the papers that have been accumulating for weeks while I've been doing, um, other stuff, and SGA is perfect to have in the background while doing that.

( These eps can be summed up as follows: I love Zelenka. I hate Beckett. )

comments

SGA: season 1, eps 3-10

2012-09-01T03:57:00Z

I'm watching the Stargates in reverse order! Soooomeday I shall get to SG-1.

General reaction: yeah, I see why one might be put off by the SGU propensity to Leave People Places. Definitely a far different vibe, here. I think every single episode, at least almost, has had some version of "We don't leave people behind!"

( Cut for individual-episode, possibly somewhat-cryptic, reactions for season 1, Eps 3-10: )

Are there ever shows were women scientists get to do the rapid-fire science exchanges like McKay and Other Scientist Dude get to do in this episode? Like Amanda Perry in SGU never did that with Rush, did she? Not the way McKay and Eli did it pretty much immediately after they met. I guess Ginn did, a little (love Ginn), but we didn't see it on-screen all that much -- Eli would describe them working together like that, but what we actually saw IIRC was Ginn gushing about Eli's work, not a partnership. (Another point for that Perry-Ginn fic that needs to be written...) I want to see women scientists doing that fighting-disagreeing-convincing-each-other-working-together-finishing-each-other's-sentences collaboration Thing that I love so much about technical fields, that Eli and McKay got to do, that McKay and the scientist in this episode got to do, and it occurs to me I'm not sure I've ever seen it with a woman scientist. (I think Scully and Mulder might have been the closest I can think of, and Mulder, of course, wasn't a scientist.) Does Samantha Carter get to?

comments

SGU: eh, it got better, but WAIT QUANTUM

2012-07-26T13:57:11Z

So. The writing, especially first season but also some second season just frustrated me so much... they took what could have been some really interesting situations and characters and just wasted them and/or made them boring (Gloria? Could have been really interesting, and then they just dropped that storyline completely), and then jump back in and demand you care for a character or relationship that they've put no work into, just because they assert that it's been going on this whole time. This is not even to mention the camera work (shaking the camera is not gritty, it just makes me carsick, and same with ten montages in a row), the fail-y bits (um, what you are doing with the communication stones do you not realize that is ethically incredibly skeevy and might in fact be rape? ew ew ew, also whaaaat torture = awesome?) and so on. (I have been told that apparently there was a LOT of cut material; this may have contributed to my perceived problems.)

But occasionally, especially in Season 2 when they seem to have found their feet a little, there are some very good and creepy scenes ("Visitation," while having the most cheesy science ever, was actually quite interesting, as was the whole time-travel arc), good character writing (the women were totally wasted first season but this got a lot better second season), good character-interaction writing -- Rush, for example, is consistently The Most Terrible At Saying Comforting Things Ever starting from the pilot and continuing through the end of SGU's run, it's hilarious -- and the actors are pretty much uniformly awesome, and WAIT WAIT HOLY HECK DID RUSH JUST ASK HIS CLASS ABOUT SHOR'S ALGORITHM?? RUSH WAS A QUANTUM INFORMATION COMPUTER SCIENTIST?? AT BERKELEY??

...Now my backstory headcanon totally has Rush having ADVENTURES at Berkeley with Scott Aaronson as a grad student and possibly psychopathic killer robots.

And then, of course, not twenty minutes later Rush is talking some sort of incredibly nonsensical "proto-encryption" gobbeldy-gook, which rather dampened my enthusiasm, but still. STILL.

(Shor's algorithm is, as they almost-correctly say in the episode "Human," an algorithm to factor a large number N that can run on a quantum computer in polynomial time (in log N). This is important because public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely-used RSA depend on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible (which as far as we know today is the case for classical computers; I am not entirely sure the episode understood that this is not proven. However, kudos to them for bothering to read wikipedia, though I was amused to find that they essentially plagiarized the entry, except for the part they didn't quite get).

This algorithm is important not least because it basically inaugurated the quantum information / quantum computing discipline, in that it gave a practical-ish (and, perhaps more to the point, fundable) reason for quantum computers to exist; Shor's paper is quite possibly cited in half the papers written in quantum information/computing. Also, disclaimer: I am not a computer science person.)

(HEY they just mentioned fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation BE STILL MY HEART.)

...also, one ep into SG-1, I have to say, I prefer SGU (BSG-lite-with-scientists > 80's-camp) but hi MacGyver!

[ETA 7-27-12: Rereading this, it sounds way harsher on SGU than I intended. I really liked it (I would have liked it for Carlyle alone), I thought the second half of Season 2 was quite good, and by the time it ended I was really sorry to see it go; I think it could have been a really good series. And it was put together in such a way as to have about ten thousand hooks for fic, ouch!]

comments

TV

2012-06-01T13:23:08Z

( Smash, Once Upon a Time, Stargate:Universe )

comments