:: a toe in the water... ::

:: Thursday, October 24, 2002 ::

Yesterday I went to Borders, headed straight for the geek mag section, as I always do. We have a ton of genre mags here in Britain and of the four biggies, Farscape was on the cover of three of them. Spent half my dole because, well, sometimes you just do that.

Got on the bus and opened TV Zone. Read the cancellation article. Read the one next to it, an interview done with DK before the news came down, which they'd decided to run anyway. All love and hope and enthusiasm.

Stared out the window and tried not to cry, all the way back to Moortown.

===

I burnt and crashed last night, lolled about being gloriously unproductive, watched six episodes of Odyssey 5 back to back. Sometimes skiving off is the best thing you can do for yourself.

This morning, I'm amused by the irony that I only heard of O5 because DK mentioned it. Word of blog: it's good. Most of it is potential cliche, from the caviar-swilling playboy scientist, to the gruff-but-loving All the Right Stuff astronaut. Not to mention the whole go-back-in-time-to-save-the-world scenario. But it's a lot like Farscape in its willingness to look for the truth beneath the cliches, to let the characters be three-dimensional and therefore sometimes unlikeable. Not as wild, and very little wack, but it's intelligent and generally manages to surprise.

So yeah, fourteen episodes in...I like it. I like it the way I like Six Feet Under, or Sex in the City, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Good entertainment. Intelligent television. I'll go out of my way to see those shows, to hunt down the episodes I've missed.

But I'm not joining their fandoms. Those characters don't live in my head and annoy me when I'm meant to be doing other things. They don't shake me awake with a story and beg me to write it down. Nor do I care enough to read more about them, what the shows give me is enough.

There's a ravenous monster in me that only two shows have ever awakened: XF and Farscape. Discovering both was like being shot up with the purest crack -- I was hooked and insatiable within the first half-dozen eps.

One of these days I'll figure out what the monster is, what it's addicted to and why those two shows supply it. Then maybe I'll bottle and sell it to the networks.

Until then there's a show to save, a ...thing...to organise, and a huge RL project being neglected. A pot of good coffee to my right, one of the excellent bagels from our local bakery to my left, all toasty and cream-cheesy and begging to be eaten. A virtual tim-tam, which I'm saving for next week, when I'm really going to need it.

Right. Let the day begin.

---

:: fialka 11:52 AM [+] ::

---

Frell me.

I was editing for format and blogger screwed it all up. So I deleted and reposted, totally forgetting I'd delete my comments. Hadn't read them yet either. So if I don't respond, well...it's because I'm an idiot.

Word to the wise, don't edit your blog at 5am.

---

:: fialka 5:40 AM [+] ::

---

A fic, a fic, a palpable fic!


FINER

Sunset. Midges crawling on his skin, making him itch. Gouache above the Nantahalas, red purple gold.

*What is this?*

*The sun, reflecting off the clouds.*

"Sun?"

He starts. It's only his father. Hand outstretched, a longneck beading perspiration down his fingers. John takes the beer, turns back to look out over the water. Realises he's humming.

*...nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina...*

"Son?"

He lifts the bottle to his lips. Clear, cold, slightly bitter. Fellip nectar, without the undertaste of banana.

She repeats the word, English sticking on her tongue. Sn. No vowel. It sounds like her name, even now.

"Yeah, Dad, I'm here."

Sixty thousand light-years, his universe still converges on one point.

John presses the bottle to his face, lets the cold glass ground him. Smell of citronella in his nose, a loon crying in the distance. How he longed for this once, the dock on the lake, the sunset. Chocolate and beer and --

Gold is Moya, purple Rygel's robe. Red is blood, pouring through the tiny fingers.

-- just a little quiet.

His father sits beside him, follows John's gaze through the wisp of clouds. "You want to be back up there." Statement. No need to question. Like father, like son, both of them permanently grounded.

"When I was out there," John begins. "Out in the Uncharteds..."

He closes his eyes for a moment, feels cool hair whispering through his fingers.

*What are you doing here? How did you get here?*

*The wormhole. It came back. I got in my prowler and...*

Fade to black, her hair beneath his lips. Love and hate feel like this, the sun in his arms, burning his skin.

*You can't be here.* Holding her tighter. *You're not meant to be here.*

She lifts her head. Her eyes are hollow black, the blue little more than a corona beyond the eclipse.

*I was meant to die--*

*You're not going to die. Who told you that?* Anger, rising when she doesn't answer. *Did Chiana...?*

"John?" Bottle clinking against his. Earth to Crichton. Come in, Crichton.

*A hand scorching his face, the gesture out of practice.*

*You're not going to die. Not like this. Not here.*

"John."

"Yeah, Canaveral, I copy." He throws his dad a smile. Half a smile. Maybe a quarter.

His dad gives him a quarter back. "Out in the Uncharteds...?"

John shakes his head, doesn't know what he wanted to say. There can't be much dialogue on that subject, not from him. Monologues - where, when, how -- mostly from them. Answers he knows better than to give. Grilled and toasted, pensioned off at the ripe old age of thirty-nine.

"Nothing. I missed this."

Forty-two. He should be forty-two. Three years lost in the wormhole.

John curves the corners of his mouth, raises the bottle to the shade of Douglas Adams. Pours the cold beer down his throat. They both know the question now.

"John, all I've ever wanted is to understand what happened to you out there."

"I know."

"Whatever it is."

Wind in the pines, sweeping the colours from the sky.

She huddles on the ground, dirt on her face, beneath her nails. Looking up, needing stars. The fire is low, barely enough to illuminate her face. He holds an armload of wood gathered from a small stand of birch. Enough for a bit of warmth, a speck of light against the dark. No pine, pine crackles and snaps, but the dead needles will be their bed tonight.

Another pull off the bottle. Almost finished. He wonders if there's more in the cabin. He's lost count, finished quite a few last night.

"The years that you were gone...I always believed that you were out there, somewhere."

"I was."

The cut along her jaw is red and angry, streaks running down her neck. Coming to earth, swooping low, disoriented. She landed badly. Atmosphere never was her friend.

He piles the wood beside the fire, gives her time to bring her mind back from the distance. It's a disorientation he knows too well, the vertigo of different stars.

His father sighs. "I think I worry about you more now. Up here all alone."

"Alone is okay." Less ripples. Nothing to chance, not this time around.

He lays a hand on the unmarked side of her face and she turns toward it, nuzzling her cheek against his palm.

Hot, too hot.

*You shouldn't sit so close to the fire.*

*I like it.*

She picks up a few sticks, lays them on the others in a crosshatch pattern, the way he taught her.

*Not too much. We don't want to be seen from the road.*

She nods and hugs her knees. He sits behind her, embracing her with his legs, buries his face against her hair. She smells like scorched sugar. So long since they've been this close, he'd almost forgotten.

He breathes her in, sebacean sweat and summer smoke. She leans against his chest and for a moment it's okay, he's here and so is she. Miracle on the 34th parallel, Aeryn stumbling down the road, twenty-six miles from the military cordon around the wreck of her prowler. Staring as he climbs down from the jeep, touching his face, eyes bright with wonder.

Not wonder. He should have known.

"Son?"

Heard it right that time. "Yeah, Dad. You want another beer?"

"This is about DK isn't it? The launch. You're worried about the new drive?"

He combs the tangles from her hair, fingers gentle as he can make them. She shivers, hard.

*You cold?*

*No.*

He's missed her voice, honey over gravel. Missed it so much he almost doesn't realise what he didn't hear -- the inhaled click that signifies the negative in Sebacean.

She's speaking English. Simple words he taught her. Sun. Gun. No.

"I'm not worried about the launch."

He's not worried at all. Tomorrow morning, he knows exactly what he's going to do. Knows it because he's done it before, time folding back upon itself.

18 hours to Canaveral. The jeep is gassed.

"I'm not even going to ask how you got in here."

"Don't."

DK's eyes drop to the slim wooden box John carries.

"You can't do it, man. You know you can't."

Red on Rygel's hands, on the dark purple robes, on the golden floor of the Command. Fire by the side of a lake in the Carolina mountains.

"If I'm there I can't be here. If I'm not here, she'll never follow. I'll be there, when the Scarrans come--"

"John, you can't."

"I can."

Stack of birch as high as his head. Burnt from within, then from without. Frozen in space, somewhere on the other side of a blue ribbon, a Scarran karn thrust deep into her chest.

Walk the middle road. Neither here nor there. A hundred microts between a rock and a ribbon and a Luxan fist.

A target small as a postage stamp.

"I'd like to hear that paper delivered at the next Cosmic Society conference."

John shifts the box under his arm, reaches out to clasp his friend's outstretched hand. "Never say the universe has no balance."

"This is gonna hurt, isn't it?"

"If you want to hang on to your career."

DK nods and John lets go. The last human touch he's ever going to feel. He puts the box carefully aside and shrugs off his long leather coat. Months it took him to find what he wanted, but it never felt the same. Never smelled right, even after the tremors started and he wrapped her in it, tried to shield the fever from the cold night air.

Never smelled like there, always like here.

He slides Aeryn's pulse pistol out of the pocket, tries not to notice DK's grimace at the size of it. Tosses the coat in a corner. No more need for it after this.

"Do me one favour, buddy, friend to friend?"

John nods. "Anything, man."

"Don't fucking miss."

DK closes his eyes, bends his head. It's over in a step, the grip of the pistol meeting its target. More practice at this kind of thing than either of them, stoned on cosmic theory, could have dreamed he'd have.

Fate may be sealed, but the seals are only wax.

Fire in her skin, faith in her eyes. Last shimmer of blue around the black.

Promise, the final word to fall from her lips.

John folds himself into the suit, back to the man now crumpled on the floor. Tucks Aeryn inside, hard against his chest.

So easy with the drive, waves of blue undulating to his call. A mote in the galactic eye, one small white pod roaring fast above a watery ball. The monster opens its maw and John closes his eyes, envisions Moya beneath his feet, pulling him into her golden embrace. Aeryn's face in the window of Command. Eyes full of stars, shaking with fury, hair down to her hips.

He guides the nose of the Farscape Two into the wormhole, Canaveral screaming in his ears. One hand on the accelerator, the other on the canopy release.

Click three times.

*Beside you, no matter where.*

---

:: fialka 5:33 AM [+] ::

---

Cool things discovered (thanks to Una in a roundabout way):

Belated (embarrassingly so) but very funny, especially put together with the first: Dork Tower's second FS strip. Oh yeah, I have those days.

Hmf is a German scaper who writes wonderfully in English. I did the chasing-FS-around-Sat1 thing (*nothing* more annoying when you're trying to tape a show!) so I have great sympathy for the Germans. Mind you, I also gave up after the first time I finally managed to catch it, because the only thing worse than Dana Scully sounding like Marlene Dietrich was Aeryn Sun sounding like...anyone else. Also, Farscape, like Buffy, just isn't as funny in German.

Which is something that's always made me stop and wonder -- in Germany as well as France (and probably most other countries) an actor signs on to dub another pretty much for life. That means most people in that country know that face only with that voice. If you're talking about an actor with a very distinctive voice -- Sean Connery, James Earl Jones and yeah, Claudia Black -- they're often rendered completely banal by dubbing. Probably to the point where foreign audiences wonder -- as I would if I'd only ever heard Gerard Depardieu dubbed by some guy with an accent out of The Sopranos -- why these people are considered great actors at home. If an actor is dubbed, you're only getting half the intended perfomance. Or sometimes, a completely different one.

I remember, after months of watching XF in German, how high and shrieky Gillian Anderson seemed when I'd get tapes from the US, and yet her voice was actually quite deep by then. The woman who dubs Scully has a lovely voice tonewise, but it's in the bass register, and emotionally monotonous. Since Anderson relied heavily on her voice to convey the tension between Scully's feelings and her carefully chosen words, in German the underlayer of her performance disappeared altogether. Dubbed Mulder, on the other hand, is tonewise much like Duchovny, but far more expressive. The end result was that in Germany Mulder remained geeky and energetic all the way to the end of the show and Scully was...basically robotic. Add that to the fact that using their last names meant they *had* to address each other formally (or so the translators decided) and the show had a completely different dynamic.

Yeah, I'm a purist. Dubbing drives me nuts -- it obliterates not just half an actors' performance, but all the elegance of writing as well. You've never heard anything as flat as Buffy with all the teenspeak and half the cultural references removed. Subtitles are an even worse truncation of text, but at least they retain the emotional tonality and give those that do understand the language a fighting chance.

Here's the most pertinent example -- Autumn Sonata, by Ingmar Bergman. Both Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman performed in Swedish, then dubbed their roles for the English version. I've seen the film in both languages and there is a richness lost in the English version, despite the fact that it's the same actors dubbing themselves. How much more is lost when reinterpretation is involved?

By the same token, I've often wondered how much is lost or gained in the ADR process, where the actors are both trying to recreate the emotional quality they had in the original scene, but also have nothing else to distract them -- no marks to hit, no lights to find, no camera to be aware of. Sometimes, I'm sure they find things in ADR that they missed when putting the scene on film. Sometimes too, you can actually hear it, something in the voice not conveyed in the actor's face or eyes or body language.

Anyway. Ramble, ramble, not like I don't have to get dressed and out the door. And all I was trying to say was that after weeks of trying to catch it, I was so traumatised by hearing some ordinary bland voice coming out of Claudia Black's mouth that I never could bear to watch Farscape in German again {g}

On the other hand, while we're talking distinctive voices, I'll admit it was really weird to see CB in some of her older TV appearances. She looks very different all glammed up, so it's visually another character, but the minute she opens her mouth...well, dammit, that's Aeryn. I kept expecting John, Chi and D'Argo to swoop in and drag her back to Moya to be deprogrammed.

Though, on the *other* other hand (because one must always have three) when I lived in France I actually learned to enjoy Moonlighting, since I didn't have to listen to Cybil Shepherd anymore.

Shallow thoughts, yeah, but I'm tired today. I'm just going to float on the surface for a couple of hours. Anything to avoid CNN.

---

:: fialka 12:59 PM [+] ::

---

Today's blog brought to you by Danny Horn...

If this guy doesn't work for Television Without Pity, he should. Horn decided to throw himself into the deep end and see if he could swim through Season 4 as a casual viewer. My Summer With Farscape is the very funny result.

After all the Deep Philosophical Speculation here (tm) and on other blogs about the meaning of 411 (ah, remember those good old days, when all we had to get up-in-arms about was interpretation of plot?) Horn's post-cancellation spin may turn out to be the most accurate:

"So this is my interpretation of what's going on in this episode: The Sci-Fi Channel executive is upset, so he pulls Crichton in through the wormhole for a meeting. The meeting analogy actually works pretty well -- the lake represents the conference room, and the ice floe represents the fact that the air conditioner is up too high. Crichton trying to shoot the Sci-Fi executive is not necessarily metaphorical; that kind of thing happens in every network meeting.

The problem, according to the exec, is all about the show's budget. Farscape is imaginative and cool, and they keep creating new worlds -- but every time they do, the show gets more and more expensive. He's trying to encourage Crichton to keep the budget down to a manageable level -- that's what that whole "destination is key" thing is all about. He sends Crichton back to his own past, showing him reruns to prove that he could do the entire show using flashbacks and sets that already exist. But if he gets too far away from the stuff they've already built -- going to an "unrealized reality" every single week -- then production costs skyrocket, and everything gets out of control, until it all collapses. He wants Crichton to stick to the stuff they already know how to do, and stop experimenting, or else he's going to have to pull the plug.

Finally, Crichton is convinced -- he's scared, he'll go back and do his best to keep things under control. The exec is satisfied, and sends him back.

Now, here's the moment that proves that this interpretation is the only one that makes any sense: The ice floe melts away completely, and Crichton is left standing on the surface of the lake. The lake swirls underneath him, forming a wormhole... and Crichton/Farscape is actually flushed down the drain. I mean, they might as well just hand us the Cliffs Notes if they're going to make the symbolism that obvious."

And in other news, fic is being committed. Still in bitty bitty bits, but...committed. Or perhaps I shall be, before it's finished.

Until then -- speaking of Unrealised Reality -- Maayan and Makiko have been diving through some wormholes.

Where do that lot find time?

---

:: fialka 11:38 AM [+] ::

---

Not done yet

Farscape is still making the rounds of the comics -- the newest is Foxtrot. I tend to think these are going to wind up being some of the best advertising we've had.

And thanks to the one who sent me the link. You know who you are *g*.

---

:: fialka 9:24 PM [+] ::

---

Long time no update

At some point I will start writing fic again. I *will* talk about something other than the campaign. And on Sunday I will go cycling on the Yorkshire moors, possibly the last time before the cold sets in.

It's been a looooooong month for everyone. Thanks for hanging in there.

===========

THE FARSCAPE FRIDAY TO-DO LIST -- 4th October

Well, what we hope everyone is doing is getting ready for a rally tomorrow.

We've compiled a comprehensive list of rallys. If you've been dithering about attending, here's the info you need to change your mind. If nothing else you're going to make some great new 'scaper friends in your own hometown.

For those not going to the rallies, we've decided to give you the weekend off (because we're planning to take it off ourselves, and we don't want to slack off alone). Letter-writing will resume on Monday. Until then, if you'd like to get a head start on the upcoming Blockbuster Blitz, feel free to download some flyers and spend Saturday in front of BB handing them out. Be sure to tell people to ask at the counter to reserve/order more copies if they have none or everything is out. Blockbuster has recommended this as the only way they can get more copies into the shops.

Colour flyer at: http://divinecollective.bitchenvy.com/Images/flyer-c.JPG
Black and white at: http://divinecollective.bitchenvy.com/Images/flyer-b.JPG

That's all for now. Have a great rally, folks, and don't forget to send your reports to savefarscapeannouncements@yahoogroups.com

"You don't mind if we fight for you, do you?" -- Crichton Kicks

---

:: fialka 2:19 AM [+] ::

---