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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
A semi-antihero like that is God's gift to a character actor --I'll say!
we never hear him whinging about the loss of his robot army, even when it’s clear that the physical hardship of backpacking eternally across an ever-changing landscape is not high on his list of life goals ---ha!
The more you write, the more I like him.
no subject
Thank you. Tricksters are a necessary part of the world. And so are characters who aren't plainly one thing or the other: neither is the world they reflect.
The more you write, the more I like him.
I find him very likeable! I also find him complicated, which is rare and sometimes more important. Last night before bed, I was talking sleepily to
The last two episodes are not the strongest of the series.* They suffer from the loss of Katie Saylor, the actress who played Liana; she became ill during filming, the character might have needed to be written out if the show had continued, and her absence really does change the dynamic of the core cast: there's an aspect missing. Additionally, the script of the last filmed episode would have been flimsy no matter what, involving as it does a society of people so peaceable that not only are theft and lies unheard-of among them, they build their houses without doors (they can't conceive of personal space being invaded without permission) and their leader doesn't even understand the concept of murder, which creates something of a problem when a pair of twenty-first-century criminals crash-land in their zone and the more aggressive and violent of the two decides to take his "innocent prey" for all they've got, including their lives. Anyway, Willoway is the first to be suspicious of them. He quickly deduces that they're not the professional pilots they claim to be; he talks Varian into investigating their crashed spacecraft and finds evidence of their true status. And then he's reluctant to interfere. He's willing to tell the pacifist leader of their discoveries and even urge him to take action, but that's as far as it goes. "Nobody really appointed us as policemen." And this could either be boundary-respecting (no one should force their ways on another culture; they haven't been asked to get involved) or completely morally irresponsible (look, it's not our problem) and because it's Willoway, it could go either way. Eventually he goes along with the effort to stop the killer, of course. But it's not his first impulse. The goal of their travels is Evoland, not solving the problems of every society they encounter along the way. It's also quite possible that on some level he considers a community of people who can't imagine a reason for doors too stupid to live.
[Comment limits are not my friend.]
* From the third episode through the seventh is a very strong run, showcasing each of the main characters in turn: Liana and Willoway in "Beyond the Mountain," Scott in "Children of the Gods," Varian in "An Act of Love," Willoway again—and his strengthened relationship to the rest of the group—in "Funhouse." (Liana was introduced in "Atlantium," which I haven't watched yet.) The eighth episode, "Turnabout," is unfortunately an unmitigated A-plot disaster, as it attempts to grapple science-fictionally with misogyny, gender roles, and women's liberation in the space of forty-five minutes on mainstream TV in 1977. It's pretty much saved by the B-plot, which at least features Willoway being a clever computer scientist. (Apparently he worked at different points for NASA, JPL, and Caltech, none of which actually helps when he can't get the replacement parts for a burnt-out artificial intelligence. Hence the defusing.) "Riddles," the ninth episode, is nowhere near as awful—it contains the first hint of an overarching series plot, rather than just a zone-of-the-week picaresque—but Liana is badly missed and its futuristic take on a haunted house comes too quickly after the sinister carnival of "Funhouse." Backstory for Fred and reminder of Willoway's essential ambiguity notwithstanding, "The Innocent Prey" is just a disappointing note to go out on. A rough patch of a couple of episodes wouldn't have mattered so much in a full season. In a truncated ten episodes, it's frustrating.
no subject
The Borg have forever changed my interaction with the word "assimilate," and now I'm thinking about the difference between assimilate as we usually use it--which is to moosh something into the collective so thoroughly that its individuality is lost (in Willoway's case, his edge would have/could have been lost, if that-style assimilation had occurred) and what the Borg claim, which is that your uniqueness will become part of the whole--I mean, it amounts to the same thing, except they seem to be promising, and wanting, to use and adopt whatever's unique and beneficial, which would mean that they'd *use* Willoway's cynicism and edge.
Okay. Now that I'm done derailing the conversation with the Borg, can I also add that the *names* in this show are also excellent. I was already thinking that about Willoway (which I want to repeat over and over: Willoway Willoway Willoway), but Varian too! And Liana.
Maybe he has an I-can't-miss-this-train-wreck fascination with what will happen if you take the dry tinder of a hopelessly trusting society and put it to the match of a hopelessly exploitative duo.
--And comment limits may not be your friend but I appreciate your subverting them with a rather awesomely long footnote.