![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Society and I do seem to have our problems
So, most of today was terrible. I am sick, circumstances are stressful, I didn't sleep much and the nightmares were particularly bad when I did. Two major bright spots I wish to remark on:
1. Roddy McDowall as Dr. Jonathan Willoway in The Fantastic Journey (1977). I discovered the show through links-of-links on the internet; it was referenced as a precursor to Sliders (1995–2000), though in some ways it reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' The Homeward Bounders (1981). The main cast hail from different points in Earth's history: having fallen through cracks in space-time (the Bermuda Triangle, in the case of the pilot), they are now journeying across a landscape of "zones" linked by mysterious gateways, each zone variously populated by other strays from past and future history, not all of them human; the way out is supposed to lie in "Evoland," so they are traveling east to find it. I skipped the first two episodes and started with the third, where the cast solidifies and the internet indicated that the show got good, or at least as good as it was going to get for its ten episodes and cult following. In the sense that it is low-budget, often clunkily scripted, and not necessarily subtle in its treatment of genre tropes and moral issues, we can argue about how objectively "good" that comes to. But the show has the property of some id-driven fiction where the shape of the stories can be seen through the shortcomings of their production and there's enough in the stories that's emotionally/intellectually compelling, or at least after five episodes I'm still watching. There is exactly one female character and one character of color among the protagonists, but the female character has agency (and inconsistently utilized telepathic abilities) and the black character has knowledge and authority (he's a doctor and his medical skills are plot-relevant), so that's better than not. And it has McDowall as a villain-of-the-week adopted into the main cast, where he makes a pleasing contrast to the essentially nice people around him.* I suspect him of growing out of Lost in Space's Dr. Zachary Smith, but Willoway is less of a bluntly comedic character and a more complex one. He isn't a snake in the grass—he doesn't scheme, he doesn't backstab, he's not always out for himself—but he is touchy, unscrupulous, and not wholly dependable, with some socialization issues to accompany his scientific talents. On the other hand, he can read ancient Greek and he's willing to use his amorality for good (he plays a very convincing double agent, partly because he's exaggerating only a little when he scoffs at the time and place that did not recognize his genius). Being played by McDowall, he runs a nice line in waspish irritation and light-voiced irony, leavened by his very real intelligence and a surprising perception when it comes to people. No matter how goofy the rest of the show gets, it's a clever dynamic, and I can see how it might have been taken up by later television that preferred its protagonists in ethical greys. Discovering that his scientific work helped found a better future, Willoway is shocked and touched, then defensively dismissive: "A lot of good that does me now . . ." And shoulders his pack and moves on, into the unstable whenever.
* Varian comes from a peaceful, enlightened future, Liana from a mythic, technologically superior past, Scott's a bright, all-American kid whose biggest source of angst is his separation from his parents. Fred is the wariest of the original four, but I can imagine that a young black man who's just graduated med school in '77 has reasons to be wary; he's a responsible, snarky physician. Willoway was lording it over an empire of stolen androids when they met him. He gets better.
2. WooRi sent me home with way more rice than I needed for my soft tofu stew (sundubu jjigae?) with pork, so I made the leftovers into improvised rice pudding.
Improvised Rice Pudding
Preparation:
Have a small container of steamed rice from an excellent Korean restaurant sitting uneaten on your dining table. Decide it would make a great base for rice pudding. Improvise wildly and estimate at least two measurements in hindsight, having paid no attention at the time. Regret nothing.
Rice pudding:
2 cups steamed white sticky rice
½ cup whole milk
½ cup condensed milk
1 egg
1–1½ teaspoons vanilla
cinnamon to taste
In a small saucepan, stir together milk, condensed milk, and steamed rice. Cook for ten minutes over medium-to-low heat until thickened, stirring intermittently and fiddling with the burner whenever the mixture starts to bubble at a viscosity more resembling lava than dessert. Belatedly search for recipes for rice pudding on the internet and write them all off, because they presume starting with uncooked rice. Beat egg in a spare coffee cup. When the rice and milk have thickened, becoming creamy rather than slurry, add beaten egg, vanilla, and a generous quantity of cinnamon (cinnamomum verum because we don't keep anything else in our kitchen, but cinnamomum cassia if you like it or it's what you've got). Stirring constantly, cook over medium heat another three to five minutes, until egg and milk have become custard. The color of the pudding will alter slightly from flecked white to warmly cream. In terms of consistency, it should just pull away from the saucepan when vigorously stirred with the same soup spoon you've been using from the start because for some reason it didn't occur to you to reach for a whisk. Remove from heat, split with husband who is fumingly angry about NASA, dash some more cinnamon on top if you feel like it. Eat way more rice than usual, also dairy. Keep on not regretting.
I do not think this recipe would be difficult to recreate from scratch—I would cook the rice in milk, add the condensed milk near the end of the process, keep the rest of the ingredients as they are. At some point I will determine the coconut-milk version of the recipe and then I will make a lot more of it. But this took fifteen to twenty minutes and it was great.
I've watched a lot of '70's television. I must sleep.
1. Roddy McDowall as Dr. Jonathan Willoway in The Fantastic Journey (1977). I discovered the show through links-of-links on the internet; it was referenced as a precursor to Sliders (1995–2000), though in some ways it reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' The Homeward Bounders (1981). The main cast hail from different points in Earth's history: having fallen through cracks in space-time (the Bermuda Triangle, in the case of the pilot), they are now journeying across a landscape of "zones" linked by mysterious gateways, each zone variously populated by other strays from past and future history, not all of them human; the way out is supposed to lie in "Evoland," so they are traveling east to find it. I skipped the first two episodes and started with the third, where the cast solidifies and the internet indicated that the show got good, or at least as good as it was going to get for its ten episodes and cult following. In the sense that it is low-budget, often clunkily scripted, and not necessarily subtle in its treatment of genre tropes and moral issues, we can argue about how objectively "good" that comes to. But the show has the property of some id-driven fiction where the shape of the stories can be seen through the shortcomings of their production and there's enough in the stories that's emotionally/intellectually compelling, or at least after five episodes I'm still watching. There is exactly one female character and one character of color among the protagonists, but the female character has agency (and inconsistently utilized telepathic abilities) and the black character has knowledge and authority (he's a doctor and his medical skills are plot-relevant), so that's better than not. And it has McDowall as a villain-of-the-week adopted into the main cast, where he makes a pleasing contrast to the essentially nice people around him.* I suspect him of growing out of Lost in Space's Dr. Zachary Smith, but Willoway is less of a bluntly comedic character and a more complex one. He isn't a snake in the grass—he doesn't scheme, he doesn't backstab, he's not always out for himself—but he is touchy, unscrupulous, and not wholly dependable, with some socialization issues to accompany his scientific talents. On the other hand, he can read ancient Greek and he's willing to use his amorality for good (he plays a very convincing double agent, partly because he's exaggerating only a little when he scoffs at the time and place that did not recognize his genius). Being played by McDowall, he runs a nice line in waspish irritation and light-voiced irony, leavened by his very real intelligence and a surprising perception when it comes to people. No matter how goofy the rest of the show gets, it's a clever dynamic, and I can see how it might have been taken up by later television that preferred its protagonists in ethical greys. Discovering that his scientific work helped found a better future, Willoway is shocked and touched, then defensively dismissive: "A lot of good that does me now . . ." And shoulders his pack and moves on, into the unstable whenever.
* Varian comes from a peaceful, enlightened future, Liana from a mythic, technologically superior past, Scott's a bright, all-American kid whose biggest source of angst is his separation from his parents. Fred is the wariest of the original four, but I can imagine that a young black man who's just graduated med school in '77 has reasons to be wary; he's a responsible, snarky physician. Willoway was lording it over an empire of stolen androids when they met him. He gets better.
2. WooRi sent me home with way more rice than I needed for my soft tofu stew (sundubu jjigae?) with pork, so I made the leftovers into improvised rice pudding.
Improvised Rice Pudding
Preparation:
Have a small container of steamed rice from an excellent Korean restaurant sitting uneaten on your dining table. Decide it would make a great base for rice pudding. Improvise wildly and estimate at least two measurements in hindsight, having paid no attention at the time. Regret nothing.
Rice pudding:
2 cups steamed white sticky rice
½ cup whole milk
½ cup condensed milk
1 egg
1–1½ teaspoons vanilla
cinnamon to taste
In a small saucepan, stir together milk, condensed milk, and steamed rice. Cook for ten minutes over medium-to-low heat until thickened, stirring intermittently and fiddling with the burner whenever the mixture starts to bubble at a viscosity more resembling lava than dessert. Belatedly search for recipes for rice pudding on the internet and write them all off, because they presume starting with uncooked rice. Beat egg in a spare coffee cup. When the rice and milk have thickened, becoming creamy rather than slurry, add beaten egg, vanilla, and a generous quantity of cinnamon (cinnamomum verum because we don't keep anything else in our kitchen, but cinnamomum cassia if you like it or it's what you've got). Stirring constantly, cook over medium heat another three to five minutes, until egg and milk have become custard. The color of the pudding will alter slightly from flecked white to warmly cream. In terms of consistency, it should just pull away from the saucepan when vigorously stirred with the same soup spoon you've been using from the start because for some reason it didn't occur to you to reach for a whisk. Remove from heat, split with husband who is fumingly angry about NASA, dash some more cinnamon on top if you feel like it. Eat way more rice than usual, also dairy. Keep on not regretting.
I do not think this recipe would be difficult to recreate from scratch—I would cook the rice in milk, add the condensed milk near the end of the process, keep the rest of the ingredients as they are. At some point I will determine the coconut-milk version of the recipe and then I will make a lot more of it. But this took fifteen to twenty minutes and it was great.
I've watched a lot of '70's television. I must sleep.
no subject
Please feel free to recreate and experiment! I think it is a very basic recipe; I made it with the first ingredients that came to mind. I would have put in cardamom if I had some ground—I have green cardamom pods, but I think I would have wanted them in the initial cooking stage with the rice from scratch.
Jayne! He's like this too, don't you think? On this spectrum, anyway?
I don't know! I've seen very little of Firefly—two episodes and a movie—and years ago. Mostly I imprinted on Wash. That turned out well. Talk about Jayne to me?
And I'm wondering what other shows have a character like this.
Well, I just went straight back to mythology . . . Max Eilerson from J. Michael Straczynski's Crusade (1999)—the short-lived Babylon 5 spinoff—is this archetype, I think: a corporate archaeologist for the famously exploitative Interplanetary Expeditions, currently working as the xenolinguist for the Excalibur. He's a former child prodigy, brilliant, successful, abrasive; he runs most of his social life on withering sarcasm and intellectual intimidation while, iceberg-like, the larger portion of his emotional life is still floundering its way out of defensive, geeky adolescence. He watches a lot of alien porn, still cares for the ex-wife from the marriage he crashed and burned, loves the hell out of the cat she took with her in the divorce. He can be breathtakingly short-sighted and selfish, not exactly counteracted by years of being a company man rather than Earth's last altruistic hope for survival. At least once that I recall he places the ship in appalling danger by trying to make a profit from an alien find; he has to be stopped from poaching the secrets of another galactic treasure. He clashes regularly with the captain; he clashes regularly with his colleagues. He also stays awake for nights on end when an alien plague threatens the crew, living off protein bars while he cracks the code of a logbook written in an unknown language. He was my favorite character. I was also fond of the technomage Galen.
Here's to a lessening of stress....
Thank you. I hope so! It turns out I have a sinus infection, so I've just started the antibiotics and with any luck I will feel better by the end of the week, not worse.
[There was previously a lengthy comment here about Willoway, but it exceeded the character limits even when excerpted by itself. Thanks, LJ.]
no subject
I've seen more than two episodes, but still only a handful, and my memory is as strong as wet toilet paper, BUT
I found him a somewhat welcome corrective to a kind of aspartame sweetness in the show overall. Whereas Mal seemed (to me; I know I'm in the minority here) awkward in his cowboy language, only every now and then remembering to stick in an ain't or to use don't instead of doesn't, Jayne felt like the real thing. His self-interested behavior was what I would expect from at least *someone* in a crew of smugglers. The problem with not just Mal but the group overall--except for Jayne--is that their hidden hearts of gold aren't hidden at all; they're right their on the surface. I felt like the writers didn't trust us to discover the goodness in the characters and so signposted it screamingly from the very beginning--except for Jayne.
This makes it sound like I disliked the show, which isn't true. I thought the plots of the various episodes I saw were fun. But I saw a lot more weakness in it than a lot of people did.
no subject
That's a great line.
The problem with not just Mal but the group overall--except for Jayne--is that their hidden hearts of gold aren't hidden at all; they're right their on the surface. I felt like the writers didn't trust us to discover the goodness in the characters and so signposted it screamingly from the very beginning--except for Jayne.
He sounds like a valuable jolt of emotional grounding, then, as well as an interesting character to watch. So his self-interest is genuine, but he's also capable of more kindly behavior?
I thought the plots of the various episodes I saw were fun. But I saw a lot more weakness in it than a lot of people did.
I had worldbuilding problems with the show—I enjoyed the Chinese profanity, but it felt like there should have been more evidence of cultural fusion than just the dialogue. Like, some regular Asian characters couldn't have hurt. I was never sure how their absence was supposed to be explained. [edit] I can't believe I remember that when I can barely remember some of the main cast's characterizations. It must have really stuck out.
no subject
Yeah; my hazy recollection is that he's got a streak of pretty strong devotion to Mal.
I had worldbuilding problems with the show Me too. I heard, re: the Asian profanities but no Asian characters, that they'd intended to make there be more Asian characters, but that that got nixed somewhere along the line, and so you had the leftovers (language, writing), but not the characters themselves. I don't know whether that's true or just a plausible explanation created for something that otherwise would be pretty dang inexplicable.