Stop it and you'll start me
The upshot of this afternoon's urgent care is that I don't have pneumonia even though my lungs sound like it and the topical antifungal to which I will be quadridiurnally subjecting my mouth for the next week tastes awful. I came home with the desire to prostrate myself on the couch and stare at a movie and the upstairs people partied so hard until after midnight that it was impossible. I have set the problem of figuring out how to sleep on the schedule of this medication for tomorrow.
Chances are good that my favorite character from the second season of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–) would always have been Oliver Chris' Sef Sermak because he's a disapproving heron of a career bureaucrat with a core of pure marshmallow fluff where his daughter is concerned, but it doesn't hurt that his relationship with his religion reminds me more of cultural Judaism than anything I can remember seeing on science fiction TV. By the time of his tenure as Director, the Foundation has moved into what its creator will recognize as its religious phase, wherein the red-robed mendicants of the Church of the Galactic Spirit use sleights of science to build their following throughout the Empire-abandoned worlds of the Outer Reach. It is not merely a shell game; in the hundred and thirty-eight years since the digital ghost of Hari Seldon emerged from the vacuum-black mystery of his Vault to reveal the true purpose of the Foundation, the children's flags that once marked the extent of its protective null field have been augmented by cairns of pilgrimage and handmade rag trees clinking with charms and bells in the cold dust-drifting winds of Terminus. Not just his priests when they preach, but ordinary citizens speak casually, seriously of the Prophet and his Plan. It isn't a faith that Sef shares. He believes in Hari Seldon as the founder of psychohistory, the architect of the slow sculpture by which the chaos of Empire's inevitable fall may be amended from thirty thousand years to a mere millennium and the intelligence which has presided over the Vault since the settlement of Terminus, but he doesn't believe—even after he's seen a man incinerated for zealous presumption, stood at his daughter's side within the tesseract of the Vault—in a god in the mainframe, or outside of it. He acknowledges the political usefulness of the Church and dismisses it spiritually as salvation for sale. And when his daughter may have died in the service of her vocation, those true-hearted trickster's red robes he wanted so desperately for her to choose anything but, he goes alone and shitfaced to the edge of the null field to have it out with the next best thing to God, from whom he is not expecting a response. Quite honestly, this quality of not needing to believe in God in order to yell at them would have sufficed for me, but as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio has been listening to me explain, it matters so much to me that Sef never becomes a believer. He is not in a conversion narrative. If anything, he has the opposite of a theophany: he met his daughter's god and it had no answers for him, even whether the sparrow that fell in its name was caught or not. It consoles her other father to think of her in the hands of the Prophet, but Sef can't offer a faith he doesn't feel. And none of it means he doesn't know the words to the prayer of the dying or a congregation's call-and-response or even how to play the ringer for a cleric working an impossible crowd; he chants guide me through the darkness like it means something to him because it does. It isn't his faith, but it is his culture. I was not then surprised to discover that the showrunner of Foundation is Jewish, even when so much of the rest of the Church of the Galactic Spirit runs on various models of Christianity. When I hear a sermon concluded by the person who should know, "The Galactic Spirit isn't supernatural, it's just progress," he might have to cut Mordecai Kaplan in for royalties.
I do not think of myself as normally resonant to representation in media as often discussed; I don't operate in narratives by seeing myself in characters, even the ones I like best. But I don't expect to see the kind of angular relationship to an ethnoreligion that I grew up with just cropping up in multi-million sf prestige drama as opposed to the novels of Phyllis Gotlieb or R.B. Lemberg. I certainly didn't expect it as the grace note on a cross-purposes functionary with the natural charisma of a lemon, which is another way of saying that I was absolutely glued to him. His daughter, incidentally, is as just awesome as he thinks she is, if not more so. I should very much like a third season of this show; it is an astonishing example of an adaptation that changes almost every detail of its source material while maintaining the essential concepts so centrally, I consider it a valid version. I should also like my mouth to stop hurting.
Chances are good that my favorite character from the second season of Apple TV+'s Foundation (2021–) would always have been Oliver Chris' Sef Sermak because he's a disapproving heron of a career bureaucrat with a core of pure marshmallow fluff where his daughter is concerned, but it doesn't hurt that his relationship with his religion reminds me more of cultural Judaism than anything I can remember seeing on science fiction TV. By the time of his tenure as Director, the Foundation has moved into what its creator will recognize as its religious phase, wherein the red-robed mendicants of the Church of the Galactic Spirit use sleights of science to build their following throughout the Empire-abandoned worlds of the Outer Reach. It is not merely a shell game; in the hundred and thirty-eight years since the digital ghost of Hari Seldon emerged from the vacuum-black mystery of his Vault to reveal the true purpose of the Foundation, the children's flags that once marked the extent of its protective null field have been augmented by cairns of pilgrimage and handmade rag trees clinking with charms and bells in the cold dust-drifting winds of Terminus. Not just his priests when they preach, but ordinary citizens speak casually, seriously of the Prophet and his Plan. It isn't a faith that Sef shares. He believes in Hari Seldon as the founder of psychohistory, the architect of the slow sculpture by which the chaos of Empire's inevitable fall may be amended from thirty thousand years to a mere millennium and the intelligence which has presided over the Vault since the settlement of Terminus, but he doesn't believe—even after he's seen a man incinerated for zealous presumption, stood at his daughter's side within the tesseract of the Vault—in a god in the mainframe, or outside of it. He acknowledges the political usefulness of the Church and dismisses it spiritually as salvation for sale. And when his daughter may have died in the service of her vocation, those true-hearted trickster's red robes he wanted so desperately for her to choose anything but, he goes alone and shitfaced to the edge of the null field to have it out with the next best thing to God, from whom he is not expecting a response. Quite honestly, this quality of not needing to believe in God in order to yell at them would have sufficed for me, but as
sholio has been listening to me explain, it matters so much to me that Sef never becomes a believer. He is not in a conversion narrative. If anything, he has the opposite of a theophany: he met his daughter's god and it had no answers for him, even whether the sparrow that fell in its name was caught or not. It consoles her other father to think of her in the hands of the Prophet, but Sef can't offer a faith he doesn't feel. And none of it means he doesn't know the words to the prayer of the dying or a congregation's call-and-response or even how to play the ringer for a cleric working an impossible crowd; he chants guide me through the darkness like it means something to him because it does. It isn't his faith, but it is his culture. I was not then surprised to discover that the showrunner of Foundation is Jewish, even when so much of the rest of the Church of the Galactic Spirit runs on various models of Christianity. When I hear a sermon concluded by the person who should know, "The Galactic Spirit isn't supernatural, it's just progress," he might have to cut Mordecai Kaplan in for royalties.I do not think of myself as normally resonant to representation in media as often discussed; I don't operate in narratives by seeing myself in characters, even the ones I like best. But I don't expect to see the kind of angular relationship to an ethnoreligion that I grew up with just cropping up in multi-million sf prestige drama as opposed to the novels of Phyllis Gotlieb or R.B. Lemberg. I certainly didn't expect it as the grace note on a cross-purposes functionary with the natural charisma of a lemon, which is another way of saying that I was absolutely glued to him. His daughter, incidentally, is as just awesome as he thinks she is, if not more so. I should very much like a third season of this show; it is an astonishing example of an adaptation that changes almost every detail of its source material while maintaining the essential concepts so centrally, I consider it a valid version. I should also like my mouth to stop hurting.
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I liked his daughter very much too.
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Thank you for this morning's chuckle. Me and my yeast needed that.
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You're welcome!
*hugs*
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Thank you! So long as it works, it can taste however it feels like.
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Thank you! I'm just feeling a little cascaded right now.
The mention of of it startled me for a moment, because I hadn’t logged onto DW for a couple of days and saw this post before your previous post— but also just below a post for the little_details community in which a writer was asking questions about pneumonia (for plot-research reasons).
Fortunately, I am not available as a resource at this time. (I have had pneumonia in the past. -8/10, would not recommend.)
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I was extremely dismayed to finish the second and check the news and see that production on the third season had just been shut down again for budgetary reasons. Apple TV+ cannot possibly have budget shortfalls. It is a juggernaut of a corporation with more money than it's healthy to know what to do with. The show is critically acclaimed and commercially doing numbers: just leave it alone, don't break it, it'll pay off. Art shouldn't have to, but it always has.
I liked his daughter very much too.
I loved everything about Constant and her fathers and Hober Mallow. (I loved everything about Bel and Glawen. This show is very strong on its seasonal/supporting casts.) And was charmed that she is textually not interested in many people, but when she does want someone, she'll just tell them so, that being the most efficient way to achieve results. I don't see a lot of that on TV, either, or even necessarily in written fiction unless it's being educational.
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I want more about Demerzel! Don't leave me hanging, mega media corporation!
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Yay for no pneumonia, but could your lungs please stop with the pneumonia tribute band thing!
I'm not entirely awake right now and I initially misread that as throat, not mouth. Cue brain-image of someone swallowing their arm up to the elbow in pursuit of application.
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Thank you! It took a little while for me to crystallize what I was seeing, because it would have been so much more conventional for him to be the atheist in the foxhole, but the fact is that in a foxhole he is an atheist, even if it would be more comforting to be able to take the word of Hari Seldon on faith ("If that was so, you'd have chosen the robes"), and it makes no difference to his connection through tradition to his family and community. It snapped into focus with the scene in the church, actually, because Sef's just had his cold comfort of a conversation with Vault Hari and he still doesn't know if his daughter is dead or alive and he leaps straight in to assist Poly's command performance of preaching as if they were old confederates and not people who probably haven't said a civil word to one another since before Constant was born and for all the proselytizing flying around, I realized I was thinking of this post. I can't believe the number of fic for any of the characters in this dynamic is one and it's Brother Constant/the Cleons, what the fuck. It is very clear that I am going to have to write some of it myself and I am too tired right now.
(I should mention that I also love Poly; he is in fact the kind of weirdly dignified disaster that under normal circumstances I go for like a shot. "It took me over a century to find a way to be useful to [the Prophet] and less than a week to fuck it up." I said to
I also hope we get another season!
I wish I thought writing a letter would make a difference rather than net me some kind of algorithmic auto-reply. I have certainly given the show my merry and legal views.
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It was high space opera and I was here for it. I think it would have been true even without my preexisting attachment to Ben Daniels, who played Bel Riose. I don't know many of the actors in this show who aren't Jared Harris, but when they turn up, they are all people that I like! (Oliver Chris is among them.)
I want more about Demerzel! Don't leave me hanging, mega media corporation!
Right?
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Thank you!
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Thank you. I will be making an appointment with a pulmonologist. I used to have a quite good one, but the professional lifespan of a doctor is slightly worse than a mayfly's around here these days.
I'm not entirely awake right now and I initially misread that as throat, not mouth. Cue brain-image of someone swallowing their arm up to the elbow in pursuit of application.
Is that better or worse, conversationally, than the more familiar foot in the mouth?
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I have a follow-up appointment, including a pulmonary function test, next month.
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Since my referral is to Mount Auburn, this is useful information to me; thank you.
I hope your pulmonary function test goes well and that she's good enough for what you need.
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(I also hope your mouth stops hurting soon <33)
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Thank you for providing the impetus for his introduction! He was something of a solid gold bet as a stiff vulnerable streak of marshmallow, so everything else was lagniappe, but it was lagniappe that seems to have been unexpectedly important to me!
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I haven't seen any of Foundation, but that sounds very cool.
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The one and only! It is a very different part from anyone else I have seen him play and he's wonderful in it. The show seems to have a thing for obstructive bureaucrats who complicate human, so I feel a little bit personally attacked (me to
(I also hope your mouth stops hurting soon <33)
Thank you! I have just survived my first full day on regular intervals of nystatin! Not recommended unless you have a fungal infection in your mouth, but that I recommend even less!
In case it has not become obvious, I would recommend Foundation. It is simultaneously a full-tilt space opera cherry-picking its favorite tropes from the Golden Age of Science Fiction and tags from AO3 and a diversely written and freewheelingly inventive meditation on big questions like immortality and free will and the incremental business of building a better future into which the writers have put way more human interest than they could have gotten away with, given the incredible prettiness of the show. It has a sense of humor which is not based in meta-irony. It has only ever made one plot decision I really hate (although I really hate it). It should probably be approached as a remix of Asimov rather than any kind of normal adaptation, but I am enjoying the results and it does feel like it got what made the Foundation stories work, it just discarded everything else it wasn't interested in. It's the passion project of the showrunner who is a second-generation sf fan; he's also name-checked Gene Wolfe as an influence. The first season is a slow burn and the second is shot out of a cannon and I just want to find out what a third will look like. Also the AO3 situation is mystifyingly dire in that it is almost all smut about the clone emperors and I understand that one-third of them is played at any given time by Lee Pace, but even so.
[edit] Actually what I should be telling you is that this show has a superlative example of a girl with a morally ambiguous mentor (as opposed to a girl with a disaster mentor, of which a very fine example is also featured) and while I would not place any of the main female characters on the ferality index of Frances Hardinge, the mixed motives of the found family might rate Kage Baker vibes.
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I love your analysi s and I really really wish I could undo your pain.
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Thank you! I have more doctor's appointments tomorrow. I will have to feel better someday.
I haven't seen any of Foundation, but that sounds very cool.
It surprised me and I am so glad of it. I was surprised in general by how much I enjoyed the show, since it had been on my radar from the time Jared Harris was cast (he's terrific, 10/10 Hari Seldon variations, no notes) and then for years no one said anything that made it sound necessary to burn my TV-watching capacity on and as it turns out it was totally worth the time.
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*hugs*
Thank you for wanting to!
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You're my friend. Of course I want to.
hugs you gently back
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Thank you! It tastes like it should.
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Thank you!
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What? Oh no! I had read that it was renewed for a third season, I just assumed that things were delayed due to the strikes and other production issues. Fingers crossed they'll get back on track! I would be very sad to never have more of it.
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It was renewed! Cast and crew had reassembled for filming! Apple TV+ stepped in without apparent warning and shut the production down. It feels like serious bullshit. The show doesn't waste its budget; it's visible in the reality of the location shooting, the practical effects, the VFX that actually look beautiful. Apple cannot possibly be hurting for cash. You see why I feel I should be offering one of those little cairn-icons with the tassels and the Radiant-shaped bells. (. . . if you ever see one at a prop auction, please alert me.)
Fingers crossed they'll get back on track! I would be very sad to never have more of it.
Very same.
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(I emphasize with your complaint about the neighbors partying on Saturday night. Here's why: I unexpectedly had to take a trip to Philadelphia this weekend and on Saturday at 10pm, bone tired, I collapsed in a hotel bed and turned off the light. Suddenly, I heard a deafening blast of drumming outside, accompanied by the explosion of firecrackers. The racket continued for the next two hours, while I buried my head under the covers. The next morning, I realized that the hotel was Chinatown, and remembered that it was the Lunar New Year. I'm surprised I did not dream of dancing dragons.)
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Thank you!
The next morning, I realized that the hotel was Chinatown, and remembered that it was the Lunar New Year. I'm surprised I did not dream of dancing dragons.
I'm glad you had the chance to dream at all! I can remember being kept awake my first year at Brandeis by the roving noise of Purim.
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I am happy to be able to provide that experience! I don't know if it's a matter of the show not being able to find its audience or its audience not being able to watch it, but it doesn't seem to have anything near the fandom I would expect for it and it also took me until this year to hear a description from a friend with sufficiently overlapping taste that it sounded worth the trouble. I have sincerely enjoyed its tropetastic swings for the fences and attention to emotional connective tissue that I complain about big-budget sf in theaters mostly forgetting about. It isn't a puzzle-box show, but it is overall good at twists for which the necessary information has been distributed to the audience, at least to catch the shape of what's coming. And it produces unexpectedly characters like Sef, who I usually get out of books, and I appreciate it.
Here from a comment in an isis post
...and now I have another great reason to get Apple TV+ back.
Re: Here from a comment in an isis post
Enjoy!
(And thank you!)