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Chiming the time when you came to my room
So my vacation ended and it feels appallingly apt that immediately on returning to the Boston area I had to see a doctor I hadn't planned (and have to call another doctor tomorrow) and other than watching the latest episode of Chernobyl (2019) my day was otherwise devoted to my paying job. There were some fireworks over the Mystic, their highest explosions just barely visible through our skyline of roofs and trees. Happy Memorial Day.
And then I wrote more than a thousand words of fiction. For the first time in five months. On a project I desperately want to finish because once it is out of my head I will have more room for other things, I hope. Also I enjoy it.
Not a joke: I need more vacations.
And then I wrote more than a thousand words of fiction. For the first time in five months. On a project I desperately want to finish because once it is out of my head I will have more room for other things, I hope. Also I enjoy it.
Not a joke: I need more vacations.
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How's Chernobyl?
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Thank you!
How's Chernobyl?
I am three episodes in and really enjoying it: after the initial chaos of the disaster, it becomes a story about people trying to make the best decisions they can while caught between physics and bureaucracy; it is full of hot equations and it is never without compassion. I came into it with less detailed knowledge of the Chernobyl disaster than I did something like the K-19 nuclear accident, I think because I was alive at the time and a small child and did not assimilate the information the same way, but everything I can evaluate seems well-handled and while at least one of the protagonists is a composite, I thought one of the others was invented and she turned out to be famous. It is terrifyingly good about the numinous, supernatural aspects of radiation, the way it can kill you and you can walk around for five years (or five days) first, its invisible persistence, the way it can be transferred like a curse. It is also doing, from my perspective, a brilliant job of being an almost constantly technical narrative that never buckles under its own infodumps, primarily because it doesn't really have them (it has exchanges of information, but so do real human conversations). I sort of tripped and fell into Jared Harris last year and he's excellent as the deputy director of the USSR's leading atomic research institute who gets fast-tracked to Chernobyl to make a problem go away that best-case strictly speaking won't go away for hundreds of years; he has a conscience and not enough political acumen and he's both appalled by the human cost of Chernobyl and his share in it and transfixed by the science of it, both the problem-solving to save as many lives as possible and the locked-room mystery of what makes an RBMK reactor explode. Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, and Jessie Buckley seem to have emerged as the other protagonists, with consistent support from a wide range of character actors. If it holds up, I'll write about the series when I'm done. I have to wait for each episode to air because there is no way I am paying my Roku for HBO. The Criteron Channel and TCM cost money; that's it.
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I have to wait for each episode to air because there is no way I am paying my Roku for HBO
There is no doubt the separate channels -- Hulu, HBO, Disney+, CBS streaming, on and on -- are trying to lure people in with quality content, and everyone I know just can't afford then period. I think pirating is going to skyrocket out of financial self-defense.
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She's great! She's the other scientist in the main cast: the composite character derived from multiple men and women who worked on the Chernobyl disaster response, but she feels like a sharp and detailed individual, even more in the pure research line than Harris, which does not mean that she's indifferent to the human effect; she is in fact the only one of them there by choice, having fast-tracked herself to Pripyat the minute she realized there was a problem with the reactor and her numbers said something the official ones didn't. Her Khomyuk is not the woman in the position of providing the emotions for men. Harris' Legasov and Skarsgård's Shcherbina bond complementarily—the research director and the apparatchik—but Khomyuk and Legasov bond over the shared and difficult understanding that Chernobyl, like the short and thorny history of twentieth-century nuclear physics before it, is not a problem they can walk away from, because it's been presented to them, "because that is who you are."–"A lunatic, then," Khomyuk sighs. Legasov says kindly and not without the irony of self-inclusion, "A scientist."
There is no doubt the separate channels -- Hulu, HBO, Disney+, CBS streaming, on and on -- are trying to lure people in with quality content, and everyone I know just can't afford then period.
I do not think it's a good plan. The Roku is beginning to feel indistinguishable from TV, but TV with way too many pay channels. I can't imagine that was the goal.
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And it's still a bad idea!
I really enjoyed original flavor Netflix, when it was full of new movies and old movies and its algorithms didn't hound you to death.
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You cannot dismantle the master's star system with the master's contracts.
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Hah! Yes. That.
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The Roku is beginning to feel indistinguishable from TV, but TV with way too many pay channels. I can't imagine that was the goal.
Cynically, I wonder....it's like the unbundling of cable services. "Now you no longer have to pay for what you don't want to see!" But you need to pay for every single little thing you do, and while Disney+ is "only" $7 a month those add up really quickly. (I am also kind of nastily amused at the corporate push to make customers pay at the granular level, while corporate banks shame people on twitter for buying stuff like coffee drinks and food.)
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It's just really good TV so far. It could always fail to stick the landing, but right now I don't even know what the landing is going to look like. It's a short series with an unpredictable timeline: the first episode was the first few hours after the explosion. The intervals have widened since, but we're still only a few weeks out. It feels organic; it focuses on whatever it needs to, whether that's a conversation at night or cellular degradation over a week.
(I am also kind of nastily amused at the corporate push to make customers pay at the granular level, while corporate banks shame people on twitter for buying stuff like coffee drinks and food.)
Why waste money on food when you could be purchasing their exclusive streaming service?!
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I particularly love the way Legasov and Shcherbina have bonded. You're all set for the apparatchik to be an obstructionist asshole who thinks he understands enough, but all it takes is one look at the real scope of the situation and he sells his property on the banks of that river in Egypt.
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Cats are harder on me than dogs, but, yes.
(I didn't watch the fourth episode until tonight, due to having to work my face off this week.)
I particularly love the way Legasov and Shcherbina have bonded.
"Valery, what's that? A smile?"
You're all set for the apparatchik to be an obstructionist asshole who thinks he understands enough, but all it takes is one look at the real scope of the situation and he sells his property on the banks of that river in Egypt.
Yes. I loved that. Precisely because it isn't what's expected, especially of bureaucrats in a science-oriented narrative, but it's how people sometimes surprise you.
Talk to me about Gentleman Jack?
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I find it an interesting show in part because it's willing to let Anne not be sympathetic all the time. She's a really interesting woman, but she's also manipulative, brusque, and howlingly inconsiderate of her sister. It's a type of narrative freedom female characters still don't receive very often.
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Nice! I enjoy that as a feature of storytelling even when I want to throw things at the characters in question.
I knew about Anne Lister (I may in fact have learned about her from O'Hooley & Tidow's "Gentleman Jack"), and I knew of the existence of the series, but you are the first person I can ask personally for an opinion, so I appreciate it.
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I suspect you'll also like the actress who plays Lister; she has the kind of face you tend to find interesting.
I knew about Anne Lister
I'm not surprised.
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Legit.