I've been rewatching Fringe

Sleeping is not my friend lately, so I've been rewatching Fringe, an episode or so a night, and here's some stuff that has surprised me:

• This story is packed. Like, from the very beginning, there's hints and echoes and set-ups for things that don't happen for a while. Watching it the first time, I knew that there was more going on than I realized, but watching it now, knowing what goes on later, it's amazing how much of it is right there at the very beginning.
• I forgot how gross some of these cases are. Like, seriously gross. But also, totally in-tune with taking over from the X-Files, on the same channel and the same time slot.*
• Peter still gives me life. He's so snarky, so hard-shelled, but even in that first episode, there's these moments of softness, of delicateness, of something other than angry yelling--he helps Olivia, he holds her when she comes out of the tank all messed up, he defends her against whatever crazy his dad brings on--and better yet, she doesn't argue against being defended, but she also doesn't depend on it or even really seem to notice it. She's trying to get him on her side, and it's established early on that they're going through this crazy together, but after the vague sexism of the first episode, there's really no comment on how she's a pretty, basically young lady; she's an agent first, and a good one, and that's great.
• Their ship is among the greats on TV, I think. It still rings, even knowing that everything is fine in the end and everything they go through only makes things stronger.
• Lenseflares! If you didn't know this was JJ Abrams, you can tell from that alone.
• Walter is everything. He's weird, he's rude, he's full of crazy moodswings, he's crazy, and he's actually crazy--I knew, of course, that he was phenomenal, but I'd forgotten the details, the carefulness of how he played the part, and it's still brilliant.
• This show, if it was being made now, would be a perfect one to sell to Netflix, because it really benefits from being able to mainline it, to have the option of watching the episodes close together, all in a row. On TV, it got...gappy. If you miss a week, nothing makes sense. If you don't come back from the bathroom on time, you miss stuff. Commercials and week-long spaces between episodes water down the pacing, which is tight and involved, even early on. Frankly, I'm amazed that they lasted so long on TV, and I'm so grateful that they did!
• I feel like we're missing a show that actively tackles all the weird science and conspiracy theories and makes them all work together, right now.

NOTES:

*Well, at least part of X-Files' timeslot. They were on Friday in the Death Slot, but they were also on Sunday; I can't remember which came first.

What about Rockne?

 Everyone knows JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon, and they're both amazing and you can generally trust most TV from either of them, but for me, going back even before Buffy (my first Joss), there was Rockne, making the shows I want to watch. Someone other than me must've been hooked my Alien Nation and brought through the 90s by SeaQuest, but no one seems to talk about this dude as much as the Js--so I want to just put this little heads-up post here, talking about his work, to weigh the scale a little on the other side.*

If you know about SciFi, you almost definitely know about Farscape, and that's probably his best show to date (though I haven't seen as much of Defiance and Revolution as I want, so maybe they're catching up and I'm just not aware yet), but all his work has certain similarities that make them his:

• Lots of strong characters with their own motivations and goals, that don't always match up with anyone else's
• Weirdness handled well--alien civilizations, conspiracies, not-normal-earth realities
• Long, interconnected chains of smaller stories that tell bigger stories
• A certain unexpectedness--it's hard to guess what his shows will do next, and that's kind of great when you watch a lot of tv
• The juxtaposition of normal and super-bonkers--Human astronaut lost in space, end of the world survivors with new roles, a cop and his alien partner, etc
• Big storytelling--not just a few people's stories, but the whole world's stories
• Hopefulness, usually, even if it's hidden
• The idea that humans are pretty adaptable, even if we're also sort of ignorant and need to be taught things
• Politics and religion as main issues, though generally they're alien or post-apocalyptic, so it doesn't really get preachy
• Cross-cultural understanding as the answer
• Neat tech

Basically, if you're a fan of the normal and everyday colliding with the weird, and with those weird collisions telling stories that couldn't be told without them, you should be watching his shows and picking them apart and talking about them. And that'll give him the space and the faith from the networks to write the way he wants to write and give us more on the scale and quality of Farscape!

And speaking of, I hope the movie for that is so fantastic that the world clamors for more Farscape in some form or another, and gives the man a chance to bring us something else as ambitious without interference from the network! Because that's my wish for all my favorite writers and creators--freedom from network interference.

What do you think of when you think of Rockne S O'Bannon?



NOTES:
*as if fandom was a scale, rather than a big ball of wibbly wobbly fandomy stuff.

Why the ending of Lost still bothers me, even now

In one sentence: because it came out exactly as they said it wasn't.

In a longer series of sentences:

From the beginning of Lost, they kept encouraging fans to try to figure it out, to voice their ideas of how it worked and what it all meant. And from the beginning, people kept saying "it's purgatory" and they kept saying "it's totally not purgatory, it's totally science", and then we get to that last episode and guess what? It's purgatory. Of some sort. And then there's a church and a light and everyone is together except the black guys, and then they all go into the light and it's done.

No.

I will never be alright with that.

Not because it was just a shitty ending, but because a) it felt like a cop-out, like they knew they didn't have the endgame they kept saying they did, and didn't try to give us something better, b) because it was all a lie, and that spoils a lot of the previous enjoyment, c) because it smacked of network meddling messing up a good thing, and d) because, from a writerly perspective, it feels unfinished, and it really only needed a few more seconds of screentime to fix that, and they didn't do it, for whatever reason.

D is the one that most pisses me off. Okay, they can't control network meddling, or writers' strikes or any of that behind the scenes thing. Maybe that messed up whatever they'd originally wanted to do at the end and then they just gave us what should have been a vindication of our cleverness but was done in such a way, after so much denial, that it felt like a lie. Whatever. But the fact that they didn't give us just, like, three more minutes to show what happened on the other side of the light, and prove that it was, all along, science and truth and not supernatural BS, is a permanent thorn in my side.

Ways it would have been better, and which would not have pissed me off:
They go into the light and...

• Get a second chance to make life on the Island work, since now they know, intimately and painfully, exactly how all the mistakes turn out.
• Find themselves watching their past selves, because now they're the whispers that were never explained, and all along, they were trying to warn themselves.
• Wake up on the plane, which doesn't hit the Island, and they get to live the lives they should have lived, but they still know each other and now get to apply the lessons they learned in the closed-alternate-reality of the Island.

Hell, even going into the light and finding out that they're the ones who started the Dharma Initiative at all, at the very beginning of all this, would have been okay--basically, anything that would have brought it back around to something that matters to the show, the characters, and the massive and complicated history of the series, and took it's drift into supernatural and away from science fiction, and put it into a sciency context again, would have been okay.

But we didn't get that.

And I'm still pissed.

We get so many of out shows cut off before the end that I think there isn't a precedent for how weird / SF / F / H shows to actually accomplish an end. And that means when one actually does get an end, instead of just being cancelled, we want it to be good, to prove that things like this can stay good all the way through.

Lost didn't do that, and it felt like a betrayal.

Five 80s shows I would love to see a reboot of

1. Remington Steele
2. Simon and Simon
3. Jem
4. Jace and the Wheeled Warriors
5. Storyteller
6. 
   

Things we learned from XFiles

Recently, I discovered that the extraordinarily strange El Rey* channel way up in the numbers plays The X-Files in the afternoon several days a week, and so I've been soaking in the vintage fandom goodness. And I'm noticing some life lessons the show passes on...

1. Scars are always a sign of creepiness and creepiness always scars you in a way people can see with a casual glance at the back of your neck or behind your ear or on your upper arm

2. When faced with a reasonable explanation, it's probably actually the weird impossible one that's right. If its the simple one, its the simple one that sounds super-crazy.

3. Codependency involving all sorts of really weird obligations = true love. Like autopsies at all hours, or "I know this sounds crazy, but trust me", or late-night drama that you can't tell anyone about. Totally true love.

4. Barely-seen monsters are the scariest.

5. Humans are usually the cause of the worst unexplained phenomena, one way or another.

6. Stoners, children, crazy people, and circus freaks know much more about reality than anyone else ever. Also, they're much more likely to disappear, mutate, or die horribly than anyone else.

8. Everyone's parents have really weird secrets they aren't telling you. EVERYONE's.

9. The government is WAY more organized and in control than anyone ever once gave them credit for, because there's no other way to explain something so complex, and yet so little-known as this Conspiracy.

10. ALL forms of physical contact and / or all combinations of glances between partners are Meaningful. Everything has so much subtext that it totally drowns all actual text. 

What life lessons have you gotten from The X-Files? Share in the comments!

NOTES:

* Old cop shows during the day, X-Files alternating with Dark Angel in the afternoons, and Chopsaki and various 'sploitation films and grind house at night? What?