it continually amazes me whenever I find a bit of TPTB characterization that is not completely, entirely stupid. Like: Sateda. They acknowledged that Sheppard was completely emotionally stunted! Let me tell you, that just blew me right out of the water.
ahahaha, truer words were never. your example makes me laugh, because yes.
And then, of course, there are times when you just know the writers weren't thinking very much at all, such as in the case of poor Melena, whose name is a rather unpleasant medical condition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melena).
By the way, who is that lovely lady in (both) your icons? She looks vaguely familiar, in that I've-probably-seen-her-on-TV sort of way.
"Melena is usually not a medical emergency because the bleeding is slow. Urgent care however is required." Thank you for drawing my attention to that OH NO STARGATE moment, this time bringin' the lulz.
Ms. Lovely is Stephanie Jacobsen, who was Kendra Shaw in the Battlestar Galactica: Razor TV movie and most recently Jesse in ten episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. IMDB tells me she played Maya in a US version of Life on Mars, though given the information it's possible that was only for some trial pilot and Lisa Bonet took over when the series actually started. I have mad love for Jacobsen as Jesse!
I have to say, I've heard many good things about that show. (Sarah Connor Chronicles, that is.) Admittedly, most of them were from sheafrotherdon, but it still stands. I'm just so leery of getting into a show that's - what, in it's third season now? Third season just ended? There's so much backstory to get caught up on. (Which is also why I was never very into Star Trek.)
But you have mad love. Wow. That's a tempting endorsement.
The second season just ended, and I echo the plaintive shrieking of however many thousands of fans when I say the network had better renew it. The S2 finale blew my mind. Right after I watched it, my friend called me and said the show had already been canceled as of a couple of days before that. I hope her source is wrong, because while the episode was incredibly satisfying on many levels, it wasn't just a cliffhanger, it was like BLOWING UP THE CLIFF and we want to see what's opened up! (As shati, another Sarah Connor Chronicles fan, commented at her journal.) As rachelmanija, an author who works in the TV industry in L.A., posted at her journal: Alas, though not officially announced yet, this seems to be the fate of one of the few shows on TV in which a non-stereotypical woman is the lead. (The reason for that: every network executive who has ever lived loves this question: "Does she have to be a woman?") The first season was a mid-season replacement and had only 13 episodes; the second season had 22 episodes. The last 11 episodes of S2 are available streaming at Fox on Demand (http://www.fox.com/fod/play.php?sh=tscc) (which provides their numbers to the Nielsens) and hulu.com, though it shouldn't be difficult to find the rest on one of your communities, for example.
It's hard to remember now what my original reason was for watching the show—I think I read really promising advance press at coffeeandink's journal before the first episode broadcast—but I kept on returning to it even after I dropped shows I'd started at the same time (Pushing Daisies, How I Met Your Mother). I love the show more than anything else I've seen on network TV (it might be head-to-head with my love for early-season Homicide, but they're different kinds of shows and I didn't start watching Homicide until after it was on DVD anyway). I hadn't thought I'd be the SCC target audience: since I ended up almost totally disillusioned with Firefly and the subsequent movie, the presence of Summer Glau was actually a deterrent (when all I could think of was all the things that grated on me in the writing and portrayal of her character on Firefly) before I started watching SCC. And I liked Terminator 2, with Linda Hamilton's feral, on-the-edge, totally-up-to-Spinal Tap-11 portrayal of Sarah, but I wasn't sure I wanted to sign on for a whole series, though I knew Lena Headey would be taking over the role. The show has rewarded me to the very end of S2 for going with it, and most fans think S2 (especially the later half) is even better than S1.
One of many very fine things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles is something monanotlisa noted on women's roles:
They have any number of traits, good and bad ones - action-hero traits too - but what sets them apart from dozens and dozens of other women especially in genre tv is that they are the driving force of this show: Their decisions and their actions set everything in motion. ...
The women are the ones that keep this world spinning. And I love that.
S2 in particular amps up the important speaking roles for women by a lot; from week to week, most weeks, there's a new female character or set of female characters, a few of whom stay on as important recurring characters, and all of whom have speaking roles more important than that of any new male character in the same episode. (And in my opinion at least, all the recurring female characters become pretty awesome.) During the first season, vee_fic wrote about another facet of how this plays out:
One of the things I find fascinating about The Sarah Connor Chronicles, that appears to be totally accidental, is the commonality of the reverse-Bechdel scene.
You know the Bechdel Test, right? Two women onscreen at the same time, talking to each other about something other than men. (More or less.) [SCC keeps] doing these scenes where two men are standing around onscreen, talking to each other (in a plot way, not a sexual way) about a woman. [T]hese conversations are necessary for the story to advance.
But the converse, conversations among men about men, are rare and rarely necessary. ...
I don't think there's any plan there, just a structure where the main plot drivers -- Sarah and Cameron -- are female. Sarah and Cameron themselves often discuss things, although never without Sarah's undertone of hostility. They even manage to discuss things which are not directly related to John, or indeed any man, only to the plot and its need to go forward in the 42 minutes allotted to it.
It's kind of refreshing.
Indeed, every major female character (and most of the one-offs) on the show has goals, and pursues those goals with varying degrees of finesse, overtly or covertly. Which is not to say all the major male characters don't have goals, but it warms me that SCC consistently avoids passivity in its women and that so many of its female characters have goals besides survival.
Since you've seen charmax's video, you've got a picture of certain themes SCC explores, but there's a lot more. As radiotelescope commented: Here is a show which is pretending to be about killer robots, gunfights, and a war against the machines. And it pretends just barely long enough to get through the credits, because *every* thread of the story is about parenting, growing, creating new life, constructing your relationships to new life. And how terribly fraught and difficult that can be, for both humans and AIs. (As malfeasanceses commented about SCC: I am loving a portrayal of robots that's actually challenging and ambiguous. Did anyone really doubt that Cylons are people with emotions and the capacity for love? Not for long, anyway.) By the end of S2 the show turns its ostensible paradigm on its head, in a way that I'd hoped for almost from the beginning, but hardly dared to expect. rachelmanija, who just finished watching S1, posted a review for that season (with some major spoilers for S1 after the overall review and white space) here (http://rachelmanija.livejournal.com/720046.html?thread=8089774&style=mine).
I want everyone to watch SCC! Which is not to say that there haven't been times when the show's made me angry or upset at casting or writing choices, in ways the showrunners probably wouldn't want an ideal audience to be. (Some of this is related to how, like almost every show that's supposed to take place in L.A., SCC is still way too white. I think the only TV series I've ever seen that approaches an accurate reflection of L.A.'s ethnic composition is Day Break (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Break), another outstanding show; DB stars Taye Diggs as an LAPD detective who wakes up framed for murder, stuck in a time loop, and trying to solve both of those big problems throughout the 13-episode run. There are a lot of good actors and complex characters, both women and men... plus the show starts out solid, gets better, and hits AMAZING in the last five episodes. Just wow, in case you ever want to check it out.) I can say that if I counted up the number of times I've had issues with SCC, I would probably only need my own fingers and toes. As I always say, there's no prize for being not-the-most-sexist/racist/transphobic, but SCC is truly extraordinary in so much of what it does—and for any two seasons of almost any other show I can think of, I'd need to round up some friends and take off their socks in order to tick off the number of times I've had a problem with the show's representations of people who belong to disprivileged groups.
Sidenote about SCC fandom: after the first season, I elected not to engage with it, for the most part. This is partly because the show itself succeeds to the extent that I usually felt I didn't really want fanfic the way I do with other shows. However, it's also because SCC fandom is 1) overwhelmingly dominated by one or two (one is non-canon, the other is kind of subtextual, both are hetero) pairings, neither of which I'm all that interested in, and 2) not infrequently preoccupied with Angsty White Guys when for heaven's sake, the show's called The Sarah Connor Chronicles and that's who the show IS generally about.
Not that I haven't liked those angsty white guys on SCC myself, because I have. But one of my two favorite regulars, James Ellison, is really sidelined in fandom; for example, schronicles, d_or_c, judgment_daily (SCC newsletter), and scc_vids don't even have him in the header, despite the fact that he's been billed as a regular from the beginning. As far as I can tell, this lack of fandom interest stems from a combination of two factors: his limited contact with Sarah's family and his status as a character of color. The former was a plot necessity as the writers had structured it, but it usually situated him in the supporting B-plot; I'm not sure that even means he has less face time than a supporting white male character in a given episode, but it made Ellison's story subordinate to the main plot, at least in S1. With respect to the second factor: it's great that a PoC is in the main cast in a less-stereotypical role, but the very fact that the one major CoC is in the B-plot and not the A-plot may say something about the show. And honestly, had said white male supporting character appeared in the pilot (which would not have been a good writing choice, but whatever), I really believe there would have been more fan creations about him even then than there is now about Ellison. After 35 episodes, I can only think of about five stories and one video featuring Ellison in a significant role. (For a similar example, see also Day Break... which is a very small fandom, it's true, but Taye Diggs is the leading man on the show. Yet I can think of literally ONE fan creation that's even partly about his character and at least 10x the number of fan creations about the white, male antagonist. To be fair, it's true that a lot of DB fans probably like Adam Baldwin's character in part because Baldwin was on Firefly, but still!) As lcsbanana commented elsewhere, a lot of people avoid shows that start out with CoC leads (or avoid the CoCs), and adding a CoC without changing the preexisting cast doesn't work to engage fan interest with the CoC.
My sense is that the majority of people in a lot of TV fandoms are white (and female), and there's a disproportionate tendency to embrace the snarky white male character, especially if he has or acquires a traumatic history. I don't blame the show itself in SCC's case, mainly because I feel it vindicated me by NOT embroiling Sarah in a romance with said character, which was one of the two things I most feared would happen. But I guess that leads me to my final point about why I'm not that into general SCC fandom: 3) a troubling tendency toward internalized misogyny. That usually takes on one or both of the following forms: either there's only a very limited number of ways fans approve of with respect to how to be a woman on the show (you can be Sarah, or if you don't like Sarah, you can be Cameron whose concept of gender may not be the same as a human's, but every other major/recurring female character is boring/icky)... or they're not really interested in any of the female characters (in which case I have to wonder why they're watching the show). And if there's even the slightest possibility of a love triangle, or pentagon, or non-Euclidean whatever—even if the original pairing was just in fandom! this is so prevalent in SCC, I can't overemphasize it—a lot of fans will immediately start slamming (often in highly sexist terms) the new addition to the mix, especially if that addition is female.
To be sure, the show set up relationships in S2 which in some ways (at least initially) encouraged this reaction, and I'm not entirely sure the showrunners succeeded in walking that line. But even in those cases, I think SCC did succeed in overturning a lot of important gendered expectations, and any success in that respect derives from how intense, conflicted relationships between female characters are so important in the show... and in many cases, their emotional underpinning ultimately has more to do with a given female character's personal history than with (romantic ties to) any man.
I've seen at least one of these types of major problems in every fandom for shows that include female characters or CoC at all, and very often all three. Which is probably part of the reason fandom drives me to look (often futilely) for stories with either strong nonsexual relationships between women, or femslash... for example, when it comes to Homicide, almost everyone seems to 'ship what's apparently that fandom's One True Female Character, Kay Howard, with John Munch, but I'm not interested in that non-canonical pairing at all; I'd mostly rather see her with other interesting women on the show (at the beginning of S3, Kay had a huge, obvious crush on a major new female character that was deflated only when the latter cut her down, but there's all of one story that's ever been written about them). Well, and I think fandom in general could stand to celebrate more heterosocial relationships that aren't necessarily romantic or sexual. And in SCC, the subtext is so strong in one of the two relationships I thought had the most chemistry that the IMDB page for the most important episode in that relationship actually lists "Lesbian Subtext" as a keyword. Yet there are all of three tiny stories about that relationship in all the interwebz, as far as I can tell.
Oh... so where was I? Heh. Well, I know someone who only started watching with the third-to-last episode of S2, and she's enjoyed what she's seen even if she is confused! I think she is going back and filling in the gaps. It's not so hard! I encourage it!
I've got most of a nine-page post put together that's all about why I love Jesse in particular, but I'll leave you with a few Jesse quotes (not in chronological order), hopefully minus major spoilers. (Though I think it's not too much of a spoiler to say I love a woman who'll deliberately pick a fight with a bar full of military!) Imagine them being said in a totally alluring, sardonic Australian drawl...
[at a bar] Man: What you drinkin'? Jesse: I don't know. Man: [amused] You don't know what you're drinking? Jesse: There's booze in it... some sugary crap to cut the hell out of the burning taste, and some ice.
Man: What happened to your face? Jesse: You ask a lot of questions for a guy who wants to get in my pants. Man: Do I? Jesse: Yeah, see, there's another one.
*** Derek: I don't think I've ever thanked you for what you said that day. Jesse: I think the exact words were... "Your fly is open." Derek: Yeah. Jesse: It was.
*** [in a hospital bed, close to death] Jesse: You know what Oscar Wilde's last words were? "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." [laughs]
You know, SGA is over, I'm between seasons with everything else I watch, it's almost past crunch time with school and I'm finished with Carnivale (at least until get my season 2 DVDs); I have time. Based on this recomendation - because I really do trust your opinion when it comes to television; it seems like you have good taste - I might start up with this show. Though I might have to make the rounds with my friends, see if anyone has season 1, at least, on DVD - I really rather hate watching it online, more so lately, because my computer seems determined to never ever play videos correctly and in general just behave like a small mechanical bitch.
And you're right; Jesse sounds like the absolute bomb. (Is it strange that she reminds me of His Girl Friday Rosalind Russell?)
yay! hearing that you're thinking about starting SCC is the best thank-you possible for my tl;dr, heh. I was going to offer some links for episodes if you were interested, but if your computer's having trouble playing downloaded videos as well as streaming, that's probably no good.
Jesse is complicated and amazing, and I think it's not weird at all to be reminded of Hildy Johnson! At least with respect to the wit and the no-nonsense, type A attitude. Of course, only about five other people in all of SCC fandom feel the way I do about Jesse (one of them is making a video about her, something I had not even dared to hope for!), but I remain undeterred. A woman who throws the first punch in a bar brawl is the woman for me—plus there's other spoiler-y things I love about Jesse. And that guy in the bar, despite being kind of cute and funny, entirely fails at getting into her pants. Not his fault at all, but hee!
... yeah, my love for SCC, like my love for Jesse, has become pretty epic. I can think of several occasions when I've had problems with the show's treatment of female characters, but the other 80-85 percent is consistently good. (No knowledge of the films is required in order to understand what's going on in the show, btw. Anything a viewer would need to recall, the show incorporates in as much detail—usually not much—as necessary.) I love how in general, the show's women make hard choices unflinchingly and without tragical closeups even when the human cost ends up being so high. I love the way the show's handled violence, at its best making violent acts by its major female characters intense and disturbing but not gratuitous or voyeuristic. I'll close this round of tl;dr with a few minimally spoiler-y comments by others on this aspect of SCC.
Terminator: TSCC's "The Good Wound" [and "Some Must Watch, While Others Must Sleep," plus other SCC episodes] and Dollhouse's "The Target" are object lessons in how to do and how not to do female suffering. In one of them it's treated as a serious subject, we see pain and strength, we see the least eroticized female fear and pain I've ever seen. I mean, seriously, the camera work! It's amazing.
And in the other one a nubile girl with heaving breasts is hunted like a deer. After the camera work and writing explicitly equate the death of the prey with sexual climax.
And okay, I personally think Eliza Dushku is sexier than Lena Headley, but it's really not about the actresses or the ages of the actresses. It's about cinematography and writing and framing.
And the terrible thing, as sisabet and sockkpuppett 's "Women's Work" demonstrates for Supernatural and implies for other visual media, is that the rare one of this pairing is Terminator.
oh, I agree completely! I have been going on and on about SCC and how they are so very careful, whenever a woman is shown to be suffering or bound or tortured or hit, to give her loose clothes that show no cleavage, to focus the camera on her face, to let her get as bloody and sweaty as male characters on other shows get - bloody and sweaty in a way that implies suffering and resilience, rather than snuff porn. They take such care with that, and I am just so grateful every time. ["Some Must Watch, While Others Must Sleep"] does especially well on those terms, because it doesn't deny the power dynamics present in a man keeping a woman bound and captive (they do the thing with her pants being undone), but it's quick and subtle and not at all eroticized. It's like the writers and directors really get that you can't just "treat women like men," that you have to think through the presentations of women in pain very carefully. I love them for it.
mswyrr:
I would love to be a fly on the wall for some of the discussions the directors, writers, etc. have about this stuff. I'd love to see how the culture of such a positive set works compared to the others; right now I'm picturing merry chats about deconstructing the male gaze at the craft services table. An everything bagel and coffee with a side of Laura Mulvey's criticism. Yum.
It's like the writers and directors really get that you can't just "treat women like men," that you have to think through the presentations of women in pain very carefully. I'm sorry I don't have more to say to this until I get my grab-hands on some of the episodes*, but I can say: wow. That's a strange and rare thing, right there.
Speaking of fantastic portrayals of women in media: are you a comic reader, and if so, have you ever heard of Y: The Last Man? If not, I strongly urge you to check it out. It's like the SCC of the comic pantheon. I'm not saying it doesn't have its problems, because it does, but it for what it's worth it's got an interesting and thought-provoking premise, and an almost all-female cast (out of necessity, but still). Most importantly, like SCC, it uses a pretty far-fetched SciFi premise to examine a real world theme: how women define themselves. (Like the Congressmen's wives who define themselves through their husbands, or the soldier in Israel who defines herself in opposition to her male copatriots.)
*Actually, some of those download links might be useful afterall. Are they downloading (like, .avi files), or streaming? It's mostly the latter my computer has problems with.
I'll e-mail you about the episodes. (I don't want to get bounced for linking in a public post.) Same e-mail address, right?
I've read about Y: The Last Man before: one negative review (I don't remember the specifics, although the points seemed interesting at the time) and at least one positive review. How women define and redefine themselves is definitely of interest to me; I'll look into it! I admit I've never bought a graphic novel. I have read a few from the public library and online. A friend recently recommended Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, which is not available through my library system... a little frustrating, because everything I've read about it has been full of accolades.
I was thinking a little more about SCC fandom... about 10 percent of what gets out there is Sarah/Cameron, which interested me for the first few episodes; I think that pairing is holding steady at third place in fandom. Then, well, I don't think it's overly spoiler-y to say that as Sarah's attitude became more rather than less unrelenting toward Cameron, the pairing lost my attention. As usual, fandom did not bend to my wishes (hee!) by providing stories about Sarah and Cameron as two women in a difficult partnership, raising a rebellious teenager—a partnership in which it gradually becomes still more clear that one of the partners is (incorrigibly, and not necessarily in a positive way) alien in how she perceives human beings and her own relationship to humans and their human reactions. Which wouldn't even be the biggest emotional issue. Also, subsequent developments would probably make the pairing too uncomfortably Oedipal for me, especially given an initial setup that already tended that way. (Not that I didn't love the initial setup too, because I did!) However, in S2 I found a different relationship between two female characters fascinating, and would read stories capitalizing on the heavily implied subtext any day. Yet as I noted before, there are virtually none. Oh, SCC fandom!
There are a couple of times that stand out in my memory, with respect to SCC failing at presentations of women in fear and pain: in one episode, the strangling of a woman taking a shower; in another episode, twenty plotless minutes too many of a teenage girl crying and fleeing in horror-movie style terror. As far as I recall, the show avoids cleavage shots on either. The relatively brief shot of the woman in the shower is from the neck up and the girl is wearing loose-fitting clothing that covers her from neck to ankle.
I thought about the show some more, and there are more close-ups of Sarah looking melancholy-stoic-tragical than I indicated earlier, though I think they're mostly in early S2 and drop off to an acceptable level thereafter. And at the beginning of S2 the voiceovers go away, to reappear in only two episodes (one is okay, the other is awesome). That's a good thing, because while Sarah's voiceovers are never as stupid as Mohinder's were on Heroes, SCC's creator realized the show works better without them most of the time.
Since you're bound to notice... there's one exceptionally ludicrous instance when the basic biological science is wrong wrong wrong in a way that could totally have been avoided, and it's likely you'll also laugh at the emergency medicine in at least one episode.
This Married to the Sea comic startlingly evokes Sarah's archetypal nightmare, but with hilarity! (http://www.marriedtothesea.com/011808/same-city-different-universe.gif)
Oh, curse you, ticketsonmyself! All this talk of themes and character dynamics is downright intriguing. Now you have me wanting to watch just so I can write for this (sadly-lacking-in-femslash) fandom!
Bwee! My job is done! (And I guess Sarah/Cameron started pinging me as possibly overly incestuous—not Oedipal like I said earlier, that's the wrong gender... though Oedipal would kind of apply to a different-and-also-charming relationship, especially earlier in the show—due to other increasingly pseudo-incestuous developments that were deliberately developed on the show. I found the dynamic between Sarah and Cameron intriguing and even charming at the beginning, though! I should also—if somewhat begrudgingly—correct what I said earlier about SCC's most popular pairing, in that on the show the pairing does eventually move up from slightly weird subtext to a weird, non-teenybopper, unconventional level. I actually didn't disapprove too much of the execution of that. Not really a spoiler out of context: incestuous ribcage surgery!)
If you ever do end up writing my favorite femslash pairing that's almost nonexistent in SCC fandom, watch out! All seven [redacted pairing] fans will get the bulletin, and so will every general SCC or femslash-friendly community I know of! (Uh, but only if you want that to happen. Hee!) Be told!! (In other words, THUMBS UP for any such enterprise. Or SCC fic from you in general, if you do go for it.)
Oh, trust me, I laugh at almost every mention of emergency medicine in pop culture. Maybe it's because we've all been on an ambulance once or twice, but no one ever seems to consult with the professionals, like they do with doctors; they just assume they know exactly what happens, which is inevitably always wrong. Then again, I've heard that Terminator - the movies, anyways - are actually pretty good when it comes to details. My teacher actually used a clip from the second movie to illustrate the stages of cardiopulmonary arrest.
Maybe it's because we've all been on an ambulance once or twice, but no one ever seems to consult with the professionals, like they do with doctors; they just assume they know exactly what happens, which is inevitably always wrong.
Hee!
Then again, I've heard that Terminator - the movies, anyways - are actually pretty good when it comes to details. My teacher actually used a clip from the second movie to illustrate the stages of cardiopulmonary arrest.
I haven't seen the movies in years, but interesting! There's one particular SCC episode in which the emergency medicine, and indeed the basic biological science, struck me (and I guess everyone, judging from fan reactions) as particularly ridiculous. A transparent exchange of science for plot device!
On a different note: if you're watching Stargate SG-1, I thought you might be interested in dsudis's ongoing series of fix-it episode tags for SG-1 episodes that fail the Bechdel-Wallace rule (http://dsudis.livejournal.com/tag/bechdel+test?format=light) (as vee_fic wrote, a pass basically means the episode includes two women talking to each other onscreen about something other than a man). dsudis and ceresi recently put up a wiki called Characters Count (http://characterscount.pbwiki.com/) for charts relating to character demographics -- how many characters were female, how many were persons of color, and how often they talked to each other about things other than men/white people. Right now it's got charts for SG-1 seasons one and two, Torchwood, and Merlin. Most episodes in at least those two seasons of SG-1 fail both the Bechdel and the race-Bechdel. I've been loving dsudis's episode tags so far. If you've started watching SG-1 from the beginning, I recommend them!
I haven't been watching Stargate SG-1 in any serious way; as I recall, I hunted down "48 Hours", "The Pegasus Project", and "The Road Not Taken" (or whatever it is) because they had to do with Atlantis canon, and since then - having liked what I saw - I've caught an episode or two on SciFi when they're on. (And, of course, I saw the movie, which probably doesn't count.)
Usually, I'm not too excited about fix-its, but I'm game to give them a look-see. Do you know up to what point she's written them so far?
She started with the first episode of season one, "Children of the Gods," and has written stories through episode six, "Cold Lazarus." New ones almost daily! I do hope she keeps it up... I think she just started watching season three.
I like dsudis's series because the (very short) stories are like missing scenes: she provides a screen cap or two of the characters if they're very minor ones so you have a visual, and the stories themselves are anchored in circumstance and theme to important things left unexplored in the series; they're not frivolous at all, even if it's just an brief conversation between two people, one of whom has a name the other character can't recall. And of course, I'm always delighted to encounter dialogue between women in fiction that's not about a man—or stereotypically "girly" subjects, for that matter!
Not to mention, when she does tackle the "girly" subjects - and yes, I have been reading them, though not as fast as I'd like - she does them with respect and thoughtfulness, like in Uncommon Threads (http://dsudis.livejournal.com/498246.html). I love that story, even though I have no idea of the context; for scarcely a thousand words, it touches on so many issues, provokes so much thought.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-04-10 05:52 am (UTC)ahahaha, truer words were never. your example makes me laugh, because yes.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-12 05:12 pm (UTC)By the way, who is that lovely lady in (both) your icons? She looks vaguely familiar, in that I've-probably-seen-her-on-TV sort of way.
I almost wish the naming fiasco had been intentional, 'cause I'm not sure that'd even make it worse.
Date: 2009-04-13 12:56 am (UTC)Ms. Lovely is Stephanie Jacobsen, who was Kendra Shaw in the Battlestar Galactica: Razor TV movie and most recently Jesse in ten episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. IMDB tells me she played Maya in a US version of Life on Mars, though given the information it's possible that was only for some trial pilot and Lisa Bonet took over when the series actually started. I have mad love for Jacobsen as Jesse!
Re: I almost wish the naming fiasco had been intentional, 'cause I'm not sure that'd even make it wo
Date: 2009-04-15 08:07 pm (UTC)But you have mad love. Wow. That's a tempting endorsement.
they say California is a recipe for a black hole / I say I've got my best shoes on / I'm ready to go
Date: 2009-04-16 08:43 am (UTC)It's hard to remember now what my original reason was for watching the show—I think I read really promising advance press at
One of many very fine things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles is something
long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 2
Date: 2009-04-16 08:47 am (UTC)Since you've seen
I want everyone to watch SCC! Which is not to say that there haven't been times when the show's made me angry or upset at casting or writing choices, in ways the showrunners probably wouldn't want an ideal audience to be. (Some of this is related to how, like almost every show that's supposed to take place in L.A., SCC is still way too white. I think the only TV series I've ever seen that approaches an accurate reflection of L.A.'s ethnic composition is Day Break (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Break), another outstanding show; DB stars Taye Diggs as an LAPD detective who wakes up framed for murder, stuck in a time loop, and trying to solve both of those big problems throughout the 13-episode run. There are a lot of good actors and complex characters, both women and men... plus the show starts out solid, gets better, and hits AMAZING in the last five episodes. Just wow, in case you ever want to check it out.) I can say that if I counted up the number of times I've had issues with SCC, I would probably only need my own fingers and toes. As I always say, there's no prize for being not-the-most-sexist/racist/transphobic, but SCC is truly extraordinary in so much of what it does—and for any two seasons of almost any other show I can think of, I'd need to round up some friends and take off their socks in order to tick off the number of times I've had a problem with the show's representations of people who belong to disprivileged groups.
Sidenote about SCC fandom: after the first season, I elected not to engage with it, for the most part. This is partly because the show itself succeeds to the extent that I usually felt I didn't really want fanfic the way I do with other shows. However, it's also because SCC fandom is 1) overwhelmingly dominated by one or two (one is non-canon, the other is kind of subtextual, both are hetero) pairings, neither of which I'm all that interested in, and 2) not infrequently preoccupied with Angsty White Guys when for heaven's sake, the show's called The Sarah Connor Chronicles and that's who the show IS generally about.
long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 3 (I should re-up those Ellison icons)
Date: 2009-04-16 08:53 am (UTC)My sense is that the majority of people in a lot of TV fandoms are white (and female), and there's a disproportionate tendency to embrace the snarky white male character, especially if he has or acquires a traumatic history. I don't blame the show itself in SCC's case, mainly because I feel it vindicated me by NOT embroiling Sarah in a romance with said character, which was one of the two things I most feared would happen. But I guess that leads me to my final point about why I'm not that into general SCC fandom: 3) a troubling tendency toward internalized misogyny. That usually takes on one or both of the following forms: either there's only a very limited number of ways fans approve of with respect to how to be a woman on the show (you can be Sarah, or if you don't like Sarah, you can be Cameron whose concept of gender may not be the same as a human's, but every other major/recurring female character is boring/icky)... or they're not really interested in any of the female characters (in which case I have to wonder why they're watching the show). And if there's even the slightest possibility of a love triangle, or pentagon, or non-Euclidean whatever—even if the original pairing was just in fandom! this is so prevalent in SCC, I can't overemphasize it—a lot of fans will immediately start slamming (often in highly sexist terms) the new addition to the mix, especially if that addition is female.
To be sure, the show set up relationships in S2 which in some ways (at least initially) encouraged this reaction, and I'm not entirely sure the showrunners succeeded in walking that line. But even in those cases, I think SCC did succeed in overturning a lot of important gendered expectations, and any success in that respect derives from how intense, conflicted relationships between female characters are so important in the show... and in many cases, their emotional underpinning ultimately has more to do with a given female character's personal history than with (romantic ties to) any man.
long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 4 (final part!)
Date: 2009-04-16 09:04 am (UTC)Oh... so where was I? Heh. Well, I know someone who only started watching with the third-to-last episode of S2, and she's enjoyed what she's seen even if she is confused! I think she is going back and filling in the gaps. It's not so hard! I encourage it!
I've got most of a nine-page post put together that's all about why I love Jesse in particular, but I'll leave you with a few Jesse quotes (not in chronological order), hopefully minus major spoilers. (Though I think it's not too much of a spoiler to say I love a woman who'll deliberately pick a fight with a bar full of military!) Imagine them being said in a totally alluring, sardonic Australian drawl...
[at a bar]
Man: What you drinkin'?
Jesse: I don't know.
Man: [amused] You don't know what you're drinking?
Jesse: There's booze in it... some sugary crap to cut the hell out of the burning taste, and some ice.
Man: What happened to your face?
Jesse: You ask a lot of questions for a guy who wants to get in my pants.
Man: Do I?
Jesse: Yeah, see, there's another one.
***
Derek: I don't think I've ever thanked you for what you said that day.
Jesse: I think the exact words were... "Your fly is open."
Derek: Yeah.
Jesse: It was.
***
[in a hospital bed, close to death]
Jesse: You know what Oscar Wilde's last words were? "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." [laughs]
Re: long comment on SCC, SCC fandom, and fandom in general, part 4 (final part!)
Date: 2009-04-18 11:59 pm (UTC)You know, SGA is over, I'm between seasons with everything else I watch, it's almost past crunch time with school and I'm finished with Carnivale (at least until get my season 2 DVDs); I have time. Based on this recomendation - because I really do trust your opinion when it comes to television; it seems like you have good taste - I might start up with this show. Though I might have to make the rounds with my friends, see if anyone has season 1, at least, on DVD - I really rather hate watching it online, more so lately, because my computer seems determined to never ever play videos correctly and in general just behave like a small mechanical bitch.
And you're right; Jesse sounds like the absolute bomb. (Is it strange that she reminds me of His Girl Friday Rosalind Russell?)
"No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-19 07:03 am (UTC)Jesse is complicated and amazing, and I think it's not weird at all to be reminded of Hildy Johnson! At least with respect to the wit and the no-nonsense, type A attitude. Of course, only about five other people in all of SCC fandom feel the way I do about Jesse (one of them is making a video about her, something I had not even dared to hope for!), but I remain undeterred. A woman who throws the first punch in a bar brawl is the woman for me—plus there's other spoiler-y things I love about Jesse. And that guy in the bar, despite being kind of cute and funny, entirely fails at getting into her pants. Not his fault at all, but hee!
... yeah, my love for SCC, like my love for Jesse, has become pretty epic. I can think of several occasions when I've had problems with the show's treatment of female characters, but the other 80-85 percent is consistently good. (No knowledge of the films is required in order to understand what's going on in the show, btw. Anything a viewer would need to recall, the show incorporates in as much detail—usually not much—as necessary.) I love how in general, the show's women make hard choices unflinchingly and without tragical closeups even when the human cost ends up being so high. I love the way the show's handled violence, at its best making violent acts by its major female characters intense and disturbing but not gratuitous or voyeuristic. I'll close this round of tl;dr with a few minimally spoiler-y comments by others on this aspect of SCC.
Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-20 08:23 pm (UTC)Speaking of fantastic portrayals of women in media: are you a comic reader, and if so, have you ever heard of Y: The Last Man? If not, I strongly urge you to check it out. It's like the SCC of the comic pantheon. I'm not saying it doesn't have its problems, because it does, but it for what it's worth it's got an interesting and thought-provoking premise, and an almost all-female cast (out of necessity, but still). Most importantly, like SCC, it uses a pretty far-fetched SciFi premise to examine a real world theme: how women define themselves. (Like the Congressmen's wives who define themselves through their husbands, or the soldier in Israel who defines herself in opposition to her male copatriots.)
*Actually, some of those download links might be useful afterall. Are they downloading (like, .avi files), or streaming? It's mostly the latter my computer has problems with.
more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-21 12:29 am (UTC)I've read about Y: The Last Man before: one negative review (I don't remember the specifics, although the points seemed interesting at the time) and at least one positive review. How women define and redefine themselves is definitely of interest to me; I'll look into it! I admit I've never bought a graphic novel. I have read a few from the public library and online. A friend recently recommended Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, which is not available through my library system... a little frustrating, because everything I've read about it has been full of accolades.
I was thinking a little more about SCC fandom... about 10 percent of what gets out there is Sarah/Cameron, which interested me for the first few episodes; I think that pairing is holding steady at third place in fandom. Then, well, I don't think it's overly spoiler-y to say that as Sarah's attitude became more rather than less unrelenting toward Cameron, the pairing lost my attention. As usual, fandom did not bend to my wishes (hee!) by providing stories about Sarah and Cameron as two women in a difficult partnership, raising a rebellious teenager—a partnership in which it gradually becomes still more clear that one of the partners is (incorrigibly, and not necessarily in a positive way) alien in how she perceives human beings and her own relationship to humans and their human reactions. Which wouldn't even be the biggest emotional issue. Also, subsequent developments would probably make the pairing too uncomfortably Oedipal for me, especially given an initial setup that already tended that way. (Not that I didn't love the initial setup too, because I did!) However, in S2 I found a different relationship between two female characters fascinating, and would read stories capitalizing on the heavily implied subtext any day. Yet as I noted before, there are virtually none. Oh, SCC fandom!
There are a couple of times that stand out in my memory, with respect to SCC failing at presentations of women in fear and pain: in one episode, the strangling of a woman taking a shower; in another episode, twenty plotless minutes too many of a teenage girl crying and fleeing in horror-movie style terror. As far as I recall, the show avoids cleavage shots on either. The relatively brief shot of the woman in the shower is from the neck up and the girl is wearing loose-fitting clothing that covers her from neck to ankle.
I thought about the show some more, and there are more close-ups of Sarah looking melancholy-stoic-tragical than I indicated earlier, though I think they're mostly in early S2 and drop off to an acceptable level thereafter. And at the beginning of S2 the voiceovers go away, to reappear in only two episodes (one is okay, the other is awesome). That's a good thing, because while Sarah's voiceovers are never as stupid as Mohinder's were on Heroes, SCC's creator realized the show works better without them most of the time.
Since you're bound to notice... there's one exceptionally ludicrous instance when the basic biological science is wrong wrong wrong in a way that could totally have been avoided, and it's likely you'll also laugh at the emergency medicine in at least one episode.
This Married to the Sea comic startlingly evokes Sarah's archetypal nightmare, but with hilarity! (http://www.marriedtothesea.com/011808/same-city-different-universe.gif)
Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 10:31 pm (UTC)You evil, evil creature. ;)
Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 11:22 pm (UTC)If you ever do end up writing my favorite femslash pairing that's almost nonexistent in SCC fandom, watch out! All seven [redacted pairing] fans will get the bulletin, and so will every general SCC or femslash-friendly community I know of! (Uh, but only if you want that to happen. Hee!) Be told!! (In other words, THUMBS UP for any such enterprise. Or SCC fic from you in general, if you do go for it.)
Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 10:36 pm (UTC)Re: more rambling on SCC?
Date: 2009-04-23 11:37 pm (UTC)Hee!
Then again, I've heard that Terminator - the movies, anyways - are actually pretty good when it comes to details. My teacher actually used a clip from the second movie to illustrate the stages of cardiopulmonary arrest.
I haven't seen the movies in years, but interesting! There's one particular SCC episode in which the emergency medicine, and indeed the basic biological science, struck me (and I guess everyone, judging from fan reactions) as particularly ridiculous. A transparent exchange of science for plot device!
Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-21 12:32 am (UTC)Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-23 10:28 pm (UTC)Usually, I'm not too excited about fix-its, but I'm game to give them a look-see. Do you know up to what point she's written them so far?
Re: "No, he should make some girl real happy. ...Slap-happy."
Date: 2009-04-23 11:27 pm (UTC)oh, I forgot to note: SCC episodes are .avi format!
Date: 2009-04-27 04:04 pm (UTC)Re: oh, I forgot to note: SCC episodes are .avi format!
Date: 2009-05-02 02:17 am (UTC)Re: oh, I forgot to note: SCC episodes are .avi format!
From:"We have our own battles. We carry other weapons."
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From:Re: oh, I forgot to note: SCC episodes are .avi format!
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From:WARNING for triggers re: rape
From:Re: oh, I forgot to note: SCC episodes are .avi format!
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From:... the guy who actually cried because I corrected him on the nutritional content of peanut butter.
From:Re: oh, I forgot to note: SCC episodes are .avi format!
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From:just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
Date: 2009-04-23 06:24 pm (UTC)Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
Date: 2009-04-23 10:29 pm (UTC)...Or something like that, anyway. I'm not very coherent right now.
Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
Date: 2009-04-23 11:28 pm (UTC)Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
Date: 2009-05-02 02:18 am (UTC)Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
From:Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
From:Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
From:Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
From:Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
From:Re: just remembered SCC season one has nine episodes, not thirteen...
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