The morning call has been and gone

I would have liked the timing better if I had woken before one-thirty in the afternoon, but I slept almost ten hours last night. I did not have nightmares. I dreamed of catching up on a television show that had been popular when I was in high school or college, a science fiction ensemble drama with some dimension-jumping element on the model of Stargate: SG-1 or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but it had very obviously been filmed in the alternate America that had more sensible standards and practice than this one, because it was full of canonically queer characters and poly all over the place. I imagine it had about the same ratio of galaxy-affecting politics to relationship drama as most shows of this nature. So the officious bureaucrat has two boyfriends and the B-plot of one of the episodes I can remember watching (true to my experiences with real-life TV, I can remember nothing about the A-plot) follows their increasingly frustrated efforts to organize him a birthday party in the face of his tendency to overschedule himself and everyone around him, with the traditional screwball yet heartwarming results; one of the hotshot pilots is a trans man and the other is a cis woman and their emotionally intimate friendship is the longstanding will-they-won't-they of the show; almost all I can remember about another character is that every time she's seen getting out of bed, there's someone else in it with her, of varying genders and occasionally species, and it wasn't treated as a promiscuity joke. One of the scientists was asexual and not an AI and not an alien, just this rather sweet South Asian dude who cultivates extraterrestrial plants. I mean, there's a real possibility here that it wasn't a very good show. The fragments of plot I can remember were a weird blend of interstellar office politics and space exploration engineering, with mostly humanoid aliens. But everybody had told me that I really missed out by not watching it when it originally aired and it is true that I had enjoyed at least a dozen episodes by the time I woke up. Predictably, I became very fond of the overscheduled bureaucrat and his boyfriends.

I am off to see some film noir.