Freckles & Doubt (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2008-10-16 05:53 pm
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2008-10-16 05:53 pm
Entry tags:
can't index, out of alphabet. Bereft.
The faculty office is all over Mary Celeste today - three people down with the gastric bug. Another two were down yesterday, not counting me, and I await tomorrow's tally with bated breath. It seems to have been one of those friendly-puppy sort of bugs, bouncing around slobbering happily on all and sundry. I still feel pale and gut-punched, and words cannot express how bored I am with eating toast, but generally I'm a lot better. Yay.
In between the trail of end-of-term student angst piling up outside my door I've been doing a final editing pass through this index, and I just pressed "Send" to shunt it the hell off to the press, to cries of joy from the nice editing lady who appreciates my appreciation of deadlines. I feel... slightly lost. This thing has eaten my life for three weeks (I'm sorry to have been so boring), and it's incredibly weird to contemplate an evening in which I don't rush home at 4pm to index frantically for another four hours. Weird in a good way, though.
I'm not just out of alphabet, I'm also out of X-Files. Last night I finished watching the X-Files finale - the end, not just of poor limping Season 9, but of the series as a whole. On the whole, while I enjoyed quite goodly chunks of the season, I'm narked and disappointed by its closure.
Season 9 is a madly uneven thing, fighting the twin problems that (a) the X-Files really finished about a third of the way through Season 8, and (b) David Duchovny has hissy-fitted off, leaving a sort of lame off-centredness because the traditional centre of gravity has gone, and the new characters have their own weight which is pulling things into weird orbits. Mulder's absence is a huge issue, because of course the scriptwriters have to account for it, and there really isn't any way of doing so without leaving the impression that Mulder's a spoiled brat whose actions are selfish and illogical. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that this might actually be because Mulder's a spoiled brat whose actions are selfish and illogical. I reach this conclusion reluctantly, despite many years of fangirling Mulder's unavailable intensity, and at least partially as a result of falling hopelessly for Doggett, who, unlike Mulder, has the enormous and endearing advantage that he's actually a grown-up. He's a thoroughly decent, straightforward man made interesting by his competence, and by the tragic death of his young son nine years ago; it forms a fascinating counterpoint to the far more wild and fanciful obsession Mulder has with his sister's disappearance. His down-to-earthness is also a lovely sidelight cast on the show's frequently insane paranormal element.
Doggett really has enough weight to carry this series, which is why things possibly feel out-of-kilter - by the finale he's no more than a side dish to the mythology. Poor Scully limps along in Mulder's absence like the abandoned single mother she is, refraining, with remarkable heroism, from giving vent to any hope that her absent partner should just grow up, already. Reyes is not as irritating as she was, but still gets my goat a bit by being scatty and quite remarkably naïve at times. Honestly, how difficult is it to work out that Brad Follmer is a smooth-talking, manipulative, politically-minded son-of-a-bitch who's crooked as hell and no good for her or anyone else1? (I incidentally really liked Follmer's semi-redemptive story arc, and wish the writers had had space to tie him up a bit more neatly). But overall these characters don't quite find a rhythm together that works with the weird gravity effects from the missing Mulder, and it shows.
All that being said, there are some lovely episodes in this series, and some excellent script-writing. "4-D" is a tightly plotted, rather intelligent play with alternate universes pegged to some very telling emotional stuff. I loved "John Doe", which has Doggett in Mexico with a lost memory, fixing cars, dodging criminal cartels and rediscovering his son's death extremely poignantly. "Improbable" is one of those insane comic episodes which here really works, not the least because of a completely mad soundtrack, some exceptionally tongue-in-cheek games with numerology, and an improbably good turn by Burt Reynolds. Funny, slightly magical-realist, loved it. "Release" is another good one in the Doggett arc, creepy and emotional at the same time, and an excellent conclusion for Follmer. And "Sunshine Days" plays some entertaining games with the Brady Bunch and with the fruitless nine-year X-files quest for actual proof of the paranormal, goddamit. Good stuff.
Unfortunately the series quality is extremely uneven, which means there were some dreadful episodes, notably any one where they actually tried to deal with Mulder's absence - "Trust No 1", "Provenance", "Providence", "William", not to mention the extremely annoying and perfunctorily plotted farewell to the Lone Gunmen, "Jump the Shark". I'm fond of the Lone Gunmen, they deserved better. And, of course, the two-part finale, "The Truth". Ye gods. Will someone convince TV directors that the way to end a series is not, in fact, to cram in every memorable character from the whole thing, in some cases by dint of unconvincingly raising them from the dead? When they're not raised from the dead Mulder hallucinates them for no adequately defined reason. Honestly. Apart from the overkill, the plot was (a) boring (Mulder on rigged trial for his life, defending not just himself but the X-files, and thus rehashing all the plot highlights from the entire run of the show), and (b) made no sense. No sense at all. People did things for no reason other than that the writers clearly wanted to shoehorn in a reference to a bit of favourite fan trivia. The ill-developed supersoldier arc remained ill-developed and untied in to anything meaningful, and the whole thing ended with a sort of tacked-on, rather asinine religious message which came out of nowhere and basically did nothing. Nope: as far as I'm concerned, the X-Files ended on "Sunshine Days", and in any future viewings 2will boycott the finale with scorn, derision and mushrooms. (Hi, bumpy!)
Also, she says, frothing slightly, how weird is it that Mulder and Scully are romantically involved by the end of the show, and he calls her "Dana" but she still calls him "Mulder"? Also, if he'd tried to come back to me after all that stupid shilly-shallying and refusing to say what was going on, I would so have kicked him in the teeth.
In between the trail of end-of-term student angst piling up outside my door I've been doing a final editing pass through this index, and I just pressed "Send" to shunt it the hell off to the press, to cries of joy from the nice editing lady who appreciates my appreciation of deadlines. I feel... slightly lost. This thing has eaten my life for three weeks (I'm sorry to have been so boring), and it's incredibly weird to contemplate an evening in which I don't rush home at 4pm to index frantically for another four hours. Weird in a good way, though.
I'm not just out of alphabet, I'm also out of X-Files. Last night I finished watching the X-Files finale - the end, not just of poor limping Season 9, but of the series as a whole. On the whole, while I enjoyed quite goodly chunks of the season, I'm narked and disappointed by its closure.
Season 9 is a madly uneven thing, fighting the twin problems that (a) the X-Files really finished about a third of the way through Season 8, and (b) David Duchovny has hissy-fitted off, leaving a sort of lame off-centredness because the traditional centre of gravity has gone, and the new characters have their own weight which is pulling things into weird orbits. Mulder's absence is a huge issue, because of course the scriptwriters have to account for it, and there really isn't any way of doing so without leaving the impression that Mulder's a spoiled brat whose actions are selfish and illogical. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that this might actually be because Mulder's a spoiled brat whose actions are selfish and illogical. I reach this conclusion reluctantly, despite many years of fangirling Mulder's unavailable intensity, and at least partially as a result of falling hopelessly for Doggett, who, unlike Mulder, has the enormous and endearing advantage that he's actually a grown-up. He's a thoroughly decent, straightforward man made interesting by his competence, and by the tragic death of his young son nine years ago; it forms a fascinating counterpoint to the far more wild and fanciful obsession Mulder has with his sister's disappearance. His down-to-earthness is also a lovely sidelight cast on the show's frequently insane paranormal element.
Doggett really has enough weight to carry this series, which is why things possibly feel out-of-kilter - by the finale he's no more than a side dish to the mythology. Poor Scully limps along in Mulder's absence like the abandoned single mother she is, refraining, with remarkable heroism, from giving vent to any hope that her absent partner should just grow up, already. Reyes is not as irritating as she was, but still gets my goat a bit by being scatty and quite remarkably naïve at times. Honestly, how difficult is it to work out that Brad Follmer is a smooth-talking, manipulative, politically-minded son-of-a-bitch who's crooked as hell and no good for her or anyone else1? (I incidentally really liked Follmer's semi-redemptive story arc, and wish the writers had had space to tie him up a bit more neatly). But overall these characters don't quite find a rhythm together that works with the weird gravity effects from the missing Mulder, and it shows.
All that being said, there are some lovely episodes in this series, and some excellent script-writing. "4-D" is a tightly plotted, rather intelligent play with alternate universes pegged to some very telling emotional stuff. I loved "John Doe", which has Doggett in Mexico with a lost memory, fixing cars, dodging criminal cartels and rediscovering his son's death extremely poignantly. "Improbable" is one of those insane comic episodes which here really works, not the least because of a completely mad soundtrack, some exceptionally tongue-in-cheek games with numerology, and an improbably good turn by Burt Reynolds. Funny, slightly magical-realist, loved it. "Release" is another good one in the Doggett arc, creepy and emotional at the same time, and an excellent conclusion for Follmer. And "Sunshine Days" plays some entertaining games with the Brady Bunch and with the fruitless nine-year X-files quest for actual proof of the paranormal, goddamit. Good stuff.
Unfortunately the series quality is extremely uneven, which means there were some dreadful episodes, notably any one where they actually tried to deal with Mulder's absence - "Trust No 1", "Provenance", "Providence", "William", not to mention the extremely annoying and perfunctorily plotted farewell to the Lone Gunmen, "Jump the Shark". I'm fond of the Lone Gunmen, they deserved better. And, of course, the two-part finale, "The Truth". Ye gods. Will someone convince TV directors that the way to end a series is not, in fact, to cram in every memorable character from the whole thing, in some cases by dint of unconvincingly raising them from the dead? When they're not raised from the dead Mulder hallucinates them for no adequately defined reason. Honestly. Apart from the overkill, the plot was (a) boring (Mulder on rigged trial for his life, defending not just himself but the X-files, and thus rehashing all the plot highlights from the entire run of the show), and (b) made no sense. No sense at all. People did things for no reason other than that the writers clearly wanted to shoehorn in a reference to a bit of favourite fan trivia. The ill-developed supersoldier arc remained ill-developed and untied in to anything meaningful, and the whole thing ended with a sort of tacked-on, rather asinine religious message which came out of nowhere and basically did nothing. Nope: as far as I'm concerned, the X-Files ended on "Sunshine Days", and in any future viewings 2will boycott the finale with scorn, derision and mushrooms. (Hi, bumpy!)
Also, she says, frothing slightly, how weird is it that Mulder and Scully are romantically involved by the end of the show, and he calls her "Dana" but she still calls him "Mulder"? Also, if he'd tried to come back to me after all that stupid shilly-shallying and refusing to say what was going on, I would so have kicked him in the teeth.
1 That Bad Boy thing? I seem to be so over it.
2 For some reason I have a sudden wild desire to rewatch the whole thing from Season 1, blogging each episode. Someone distract me with something shiny, quick.
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He does multi-national conspiracy quite well.
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(Anonymous) 2008-10-16 10:14 pm (UTC)(link)everymoment
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Glad to hear you're feeling better, soon you'll be able to go celebrate having finished your index. Til the proof-reading!