'Cause what we're not is all we got

[sovay]

1. My initial reactions to the second season finale of Millennium (1996–1999), reproduced from comments with 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.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I have a new favorite drink there: the Bitter & Alone. Misanthropy, it appears, is made of Becherovka, grapefruit juice, honey, and Peychaud's.

I always, always wanted to know the ingredients of misanthropy. Now I will add this recipe to my grimoire.

[grimmwire.livejournal.com]

Millennium Season Two had to be written and shot before Ten Thirteen Productions got word of whether it was going to be renewed for a third season. So they had to figure out a way to write an ending for the series (and the world) which maybe wasn't actually the end of the series (and the world).

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.

[greygirlbeast.livejournal.com]

. . . 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."

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I can't quite agree that Millennium Season 3 is crap. For one thing, it's really cool to see Jordan get older, and the relationship she and Frank are carving out together is heartbreaking. For another, there's Klea Scott, the first young female agent of colour partner/pilgrim character I can recall having seen on TV. And there's more Peter Watts, which is always worthwhile. 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.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

So, if you were a mizzle-witted burglar, you might break into a house, get mizzled, trip the alarm, and then mizzle with your loot into the mizzle. Sans raincoat.

<3

Also, I need one of those cocktails. And I have told my Bechi-fanatic brother about its existence.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

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.

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.

[selidor]

put merguez on a pizza with pomegranate molasses, it really doesn't have much of a half-life.

Pomegranate molasses is one of the Good Things™. I have a friend who uses it to make hummus and capsicum sweet bell pepper dips that are small marvels.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I suppose I'm feeling glad I didn't follow Millennium that far.

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.

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I ragequit Millennium at the end of season 2.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

I was watching the show on TV when it originally aired (that bit with the family sitting down to Mother's Day dinner -- not so obviously part of the show if you're watching it on broadcast TV with commercial breaks rather than on a DVD without ads...), so whether or not to watch S3 wasn't an immediate question then -- the S2 finale was mindblowing, then there was that whole summer between seasons when I wasn't sure if it was over or not, and then it was back in the fall. Not knowing what they'd do, I kept watching.

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.)

[nurrynur.livejournal.com]

the dinosaursashayers are nurrynur, kdsorceress (hair-complimenter) and inukshuk (Genni) (who was not there). The other person was Sparr / sparr0 here.