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'Cause what we're not is all we got
1. My initial reactions to the second season finale of Millennium (1996–1999), reproduced from comments with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grimmwire:
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
. . . Seriously, unless someone tells me it is one of the great treatments of the post-apocalypse in fiction, I do not understand how there is even a third season. Does anyone have thoughts on whether it is worth pursuing? The second season was inexplicable enough at times. Went out like Eliot, though.
2. Yesterday was not a Ridiculously Social Wednesday, but I did have two different people compliment me on my hair. The first was a thirteen-year-old kid on the platform of the Orange Line at Downtown Crossing; I heard someone say, "Excuse me, ma'am?" and when I glanced up from my book to see if they meant me, an earnest-looking boy in a baseball cap said, "You've got really nice hair," and then went very quickly back to his friends and there was giggling and high-fiving. (I was meetinglesser_celery for lunch at The Salty Pig. I have a new favorite drink there: the Bitter & Alone. Misanthropy, it appears, is made of Becherovka, grapefruit juice, honey, and Peychaud's. I like it.) The second was a woman in J.P. Licks, where derspatchel and I were repairing for dessert after dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company. (If you put merguez on a pizza with pomegranate molasses, it really doesn't have much of a half-life. Around us, anyway.) Being somewhat on autopilot with scanning the board and frankly not looking for people, I got all the way through a reflexively polite thank-you before I realized she was sitting at the same table as ratatosk, nurrynur, and some other people whose livejournal handles I wouldn't mind knowing if they have them. So we ate dessert with them. It was good. And nobody on the bus home said anything about my hair or the book I was reading, which was fine.
3. Realized in the shower: all musical and lyrical qualities aside, I think what makes Frank Loesser's "I'll Know (When My Love Comes Along)" such an immortal duet for me is that both Sarah and Sky have no idea what they're talking about. It's easier to laugh at Sarah as she lists the required traits of her "Scarsdale Galahad—the breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type," knowing as we the audience do that she'll end up with no such person, but Sky's chemistry-based philosophy is equally faulty; he's looking at the love of his life right now and all he knows is that Nathan Detroit really sucker-punched him with this bet. It's an unwitting love duet. They just think it's a difference of opinion.
4. I have been meaning for the last few days to link to this excerpt from the Dictionary of American Regional English, because it contains slang I didn't know. I think I like "slatchy" best.
5. The Harvard Film Archive is doing a series of Alex Cox and a series of Jack Clayton. I expect to spend a lot of June in that theater.
I am hoping this sore throat I woke up with is the result of dryness or allergies, because I haven't really been sick since the hell-cold in February and it's a remarkably pleasant state.
grimmwire:YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
. . . Seriously, unless someone tells me it is one of the great treatments of the post-apocalypse in fiction, I do not understand how there is even a third season. Does anyone have thoughts on whether it is worth pursuing? The second season was inexplicable enough at times. Went out like Eliot, though.
2. Yesterday was not a Ridiculously Social Wednesday, but I did have two different people compliment me on my hair. The first was a thirteen-year-old kid on the platform of the Orange Line at Downtown Crossing; I heard someone say, "Excuse me, ma'am?" and when I glanced up from my book to see if they meant me, an earnest-looking boy in a baseball cap said, "You've got really nice hair," and then went very quickly back to his friends and there was giggling and high-fiving. (I was meeting
lesser_celery for lunch at The Salty Pig. I have a new favorite drink there: the Bitter & Alone. Misanthropy, it appears, is made of Becherovka, grapefruit juice, honey, and Peychaud's. I like it.) The second was a woman in J.P. Licks, where derspatchel and I were repairing for dessert after dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company. (If you put merguez on a pizza with pomegranate molasses, it really doesn't have much of a half-life. Around us, anyway.) Being somewhat on autopilot with scanning the board and frankly not looking for people, I got all the way through a reflexively polite thank-you before I realized she was sitting at the same table as ratatosk, nurrynur, and some other people whose livejournal handles I wouldn't mind knowing if they have them. So we ate dessert with them. It was good. And nobody on the bus home said anything about my hair or the book I was reading, which was fine.3. Realized in the shower: all musical and lyrical qualities aside, I think what makes Frank Loesser's "I'll Know (When My Love Comes Along)" such an immortal duet for me is that both Sarah and Sky have no idea what they're talking about. It's easier to laugh at Sarah as she lists the required traits of her "Scarsdale Galahad—the breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type," knowing as we the audience do that she'll end up with no such person, but Sky's chemistry-based philosophy is equally faulty; he's looking at the love of his life right now and all he knows is that Nathan Detroit really sucker-punched him with this bet. It's an unwitting love duet. They just think it's a difference of opinion.
4. I have been meaning for the last few days to link to this excerpt from the Dictionary of American Regional English, because it contains slang I didn't know. I think I like "slatchy" best.
5. The Harvard Film Archive is doing a series of Alex Cox and a series of Jack Clayton. I expect to spend a lot of June in that theater.
I am hoping this sore throat I woke up with is the result of dryness or allergies, because I haven't really been sick since the hell-cold in February and it's a remarkably pleasant state.
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I always, always wanted to know the ingredients of misanthropy. Now I will add this recipe to my grimoire.
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It's some pretty tasty stuff.
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Which they managed somehow to do, though of course it's disappointing when Season Three starts and the apparent Apocalypse turns out to have been a fizzle.
I still can't go near any dead birds I encounter.
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I just don't see how they could do that without significant backpedaling. They killed the world: stylishly, bleakly, and almost believably. I'm not sure you should get take-backs on the apocalypse.
I still can't go near any dead birds I encounter.
It was definitely not the correct moment for my mother to ask me and John whether we thought the Cornish hens she'd just bought from the local grocery were suspicious (which they were).
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Is it anything like the storyline the show would have followed if the second season hadn't been given to Morgan and Wong (since I see that the third season reverted to Carter), or is it yet another direction again?
Lucy Butler appears again in the most disappointing way. That was it for me.
Bah. Her two or three appearances thus far have been very effective.
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. . . Seriously, unless someone tells me it is one of the great treatments of the post-apocalypse in fiction, I do not understand how there is even a third season.
Please, please, please do not watch Season Three. It's crap, and ignores the beautiful ending of Season Two. Trust me. And yeah, the ending of Season Two...wow. "Horses."
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Taken under advisement.
And yeah, the ending of Season Two...wow. "Horses."
Yes. That was stunning. Somebody on the show had a real ear for Patti Smith; the setting of the first few minutes of "Anamnesis" to "Dancing Barefoot" was the video I didn't know I wanted for that song.
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I don't object to either of those elements in principle, especially the second. I just have a basic conceptual problem with the idea that the world kept going and Frank's life returned to something like normal, or as close as it ever passed for it.
At least one of the episodes also scared the shit out of me, in terms of re-framing (parts of) the Millennium Group as a virtual mass murder factory.
Which has already been hinted at, the way the Group will inoculate its members against the plague of the season finale, but not anyone else—including their families.
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I'm pretty much of this mind, too. It's... well, it's something like Fringe.
And there is some really Walter Bishop-grade crack in there (...Thirteen Years Later!).
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<3
Also, I need one of those cocktails. And I have told my Bechi-fanatic brother about its existence.
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"Mizzle-witted" was one of the terms I knew! Also "mizzling," "whoopensocker," "wapatuli" (although my brain wants to spell it more like "wapatoolie," which must reflect the context in which I first read it), "larruping," "jasm," and "buffle-brained." I have no idea why. I suspect children's literature.
Also, I need one of those cocktails. And I have told my Bechi-fanatic brother about its existence.
I'd never heard of Becherovka; I had to ask the waiter before I ordered in case it turned out to be something in the coffee line or an inexplicably Slavic-sounding tequila. If it was the primary flavor in the Bitter & Alone, I really like it.
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I really like it.
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I've always associated Sarah's part of this duet with My White Knight from The Music Man, which has a lot of the same sentiment, except that Harold Hill doesn't have a part in the song to refute Marian's vision. I sometimes think that Sarah and Marian would get on, or possibly go to therapy together, after they both discover that they've fallen madly for incurable rogues and that they aren't actually all that unhappy about it.
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Interesting. I've never paid that much attention to "My White Knight"; it doesn't do much for me musically and lyrically its function seems to be taken up already by "Goodnight, My Someone" and Marian's mother's half of the "Piano Lesson."
except that Harold Hill doesn't have a part in the song to refute Marian's vision.
No, but he does have "The Sadder But Wiser Girl for Me," which is an equally flawed assumption about his romantic future. And you get the wonderful swap-off of theme songs when Harold finally notices he's in love with Marian—he finds himself marveling sweet dreams be yours, dear and she's humming a hundred and ten cornets.
I sometimes think that Sarah and Marian would get on, or possibly go to therapy together, after they both discover that they've fallen madly for incurable rogues and that they aren't actually all that unhappy about it.
Heh. Now I want to know why there aren't more webcomics about characters from classic musicals hanging out with each other.
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I was thinking about that after I wrote this, because, as always, I continue thinking about things in true esprit d'escalier style.
I sometimes think that Sarah and Marian would get on, or possibly go to therapy together, after they both discover that they've fallen madly for incurable rogues and that they aren't actually all that unhappy about it.
Heh. Now I want to know why there aren't more webcomics about characters from classic musicals hanging out with each other.
I may have to learn to draw just to do that.
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Pomegranate molasses is one of the Good Things™. I have a friend who uses it to make hummus and
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capsicumsweet bell pepper dips that are small marvels.Would buy from seller.
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I'm glad for the compliments and good things. And I'm grateful to know the ingredients of misanthropy--one never knows when that might come in handy.
...Frank Loesser's "I'll Know (When My Love Comes Along)"...
Nice piece of songwriting, that. Thanks for sharing.
4.
I like "slatchy" as well. I feel vaguely ashamed at not being familiar with not being previously familiar with more of those. "Chinchy" is a commonplace from my mother and the rest of her family, and that's about it for me.
The Harvard Film Archive is doing a series of Alex Cox...
I'm surprised I'd not heard before that someone had done a post-apocalyptic version of The Revenger's Tragedy. Admittedly, I really only know the play from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (1991), but still...
I am hoping this sore throat I woke up with is the result of dryness or allergies,
I hope so as well. I've had a persistent scratchiness this week, myself.
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Honestly, I thought it was a fine apocalypse—Catherine isn't even a fridge casualty, if the whole world is ending. I just can't imagine how they continued on without handwaving themselves back from a fairly drastic set of irreversible decisions (and if life is supposed to return to Frank-normal, then Catherine is a fridge, which I don't like) and I am hearing extremely mixed opinions about whether it's worth even cherry-picking the season to come.
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There was another switch in showrunners that had a different vision for the show between seasons. They backpedal and retcon the scale of the apocalypse to a local disaster, and it is awkward, and inevitably a huge let down that they didn't go the post-apocalyptic route. However they still do interesting things, and it's often a better show than so many others even when it's not really coherent, so it's tough to either dismiss outright or recommend wholeheartedly. YMMV, as the comments above show.
S3 is a weird mix, not visionary along the same lines as S2's, but not a total return to baseline S1 either. There is grief over the regrettably fridging-in-retrospect of Catherine. There are other cases of pre-millennial angst. There are cases that could be classified as X-Files or Fringe events, and more run of the mill crimes. There is Frank in a reindeer-patterned fleece jacket (http://pics.livejournal.com/ide_cyan/pic/000rq949/s640x480). (...it makes sense in context, although the episode's twee-ness is... uncharacteristic.)
It's hard to pin down as a whole.
(The post-S3 fully-integrated-finale where characters from Millennium appear on The X-Files episode titled "Millennium" is itself a major letdown, FYI; while it's nice to see the characters again, the whole thing is utterly nonsensical with regard to Millennium mythology, as the two shows' mythologies don't mesh.)
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Nice. I hadn't thought of that angle—it's filmed in the same lovingly super-saturated, almost Norman Rockwell American pastoral light as the first season gave the yellow house—but the scene would be even more of a shocker if you weren't expecting the next awful thing in a pre-apocalyptic world.
Not knowing what they'd do, I kept watching.
That's fair.
They backpedal and retcon the scale of the apocalypse to a local disaster, and it is awkward, and inevitably a huge let down that they didn't go the post-apocalyptic route.
I would indeed have given a post-apocalyptic third season the benefit of the doubt.
There is Frank in a reindeer-patterned fleece jacket. (...it makes sense in context, although the episode's twee-ness is... uncharacteristic.)
All right, I'm curious. What?
(The post-S3 fully-integrated-finale where characters from Millennium appear on The X-Files episode titled "Millennium" is itself a major letdown, FYI; while it's nice to see the characters again, the whole thing is utterly nonsensical with regard to Millennium mythology, as the two shows' mythologies don't mesh.)
I won't seek it out.
Thanks for the input!
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It has to do with making the holidays (http://pics.livejournal.com/ide_cyan/pic/000rrcb6/s640x480) more cheerful for Jordan. But it's a weird episode. (The Hallowe'en one is weird, too.)
I won't seek it out.
That episode is included in the Millennium S3 DVD set.
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Thank you!