![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieAn exceptionally cool poem: "Beach Climbing," by Elizabeth Barrette. Science fiction and poetry, the best things ever, combined into one! Lots more at the Strange Horizons site.
*
I was watching one of my favorite episodes of Northern Exposure tonight. It's from near the beginning of the third season, and is called "Oy, Wilderness." The reason it's so close to the top of my favorites list is because of the absolutely beautiful extended metaphor involving hearts and airplanes contained within it.
The plot is set up thusly: Maggie and Joel are on their way back from somewhere--not sure if it's mentioned--when something in Maggie's plane's engine suddenly breaks and they have to make an emergency landing in the middle of the 4.2 million acres of the Something-Or-Other Nature Preserve. If they're lucky, help might arrive in two to three days. But maybe nobody even heard the SOS.
Maggie can't fix the plane, despite her best efforts. In addition to that irritation, Joel is getting more and more on her nerves, because it's Fleischman in the wilderness, and yeah, that goes over like a lead balloon. (There's a great scene with a roasted squirrel and a discussion of cannibalism in there. Not to mention the cavemen dream sequence, where he's painting a picture of a hamburger on a cave wall while she's complaining about how he ought to be out hunting some food. Then of course she claims she doesn't care that he's not good at killing, and she "wouldn't have had all these little mini-Magnons with [him]" if there wasn't something more to him besides a lack of hunting skills.) Finally, two days later, she storms off into the woods to find water, leaving Joel bored and alone with the plane.
He summarily begins to tinker with the engine, despite express warning not to touch it, not to even think about touching it, not to come within ten feet of it. (Yeah, he doesn't listen well.) When Maggie inevitably comes back and realizes what he's done, she's extremely upset: "Did you tamper with my engine? You tampered with my airplane! You tampered with my engine!" (As Joel points out, she's irrationally upset about it; after all, she's pretty much given up, and it's not like he can "make it not work worse.")
Dr. Joel describes his thought process: an engine has valves, not unlike the human heart. In hearts, valves can get clogged, backing up blood flow and causing a serious problem. He thought the same thing might have happened to the engine; indeed, he found that a couple of the valves were clogged with gunk. Maggie is still outraged: "You messed with my engine!"
But of course, his tinkering with herheart engine did in fact fix it. After a few false starts, it starts, and both exclaim over how he's fixed her engine.
Ahem.
This is even more interesting when you consider Maggie's history: she's got issues that rival Kara Thrace's. She's had no fewer than five boyfriends die under strange circumstances (Rick having a satellite fall on him, one of the others falling asleep on a glacier and dying of hypothermia, one hit by a freak lightning strike on an oil rig, etc.), and in fact, every single man she's slept with has died not long after. She's not thrilled with the idea of committment. Her family was uninterested in showing affection, to say the least, so she has that demon to battle as well. Her heart is perhaps a bit broken. A valve is clogged, if you will.
Is it any wonder that next season, Joel becomes the first man to survive Maggie's Black Widow curse?
*
Also on my tape with that episode is "Animals R Us," which end's with Ed's first movie. It's a short black and white paean to Cicely, and it never fails to make me tear up. It's certainly not a sad short film, but you know, it's obvious that the work of the writers and actors and all the production people produced something greater than the sum of their parts, and that thing is the town of Cicely, Alaska. And I'm a sucker, so the fact that the short film is a microcosm of that--the same combination of mundane and absurd, quirky and conventional--definitely gets to me.
And right after that on my tape is "It Happened in Juneau," with the return of Bernard, and the best song ever used on TV: Toy Cows in Africa. Click the link for the mp3; youwill undoubtedly won't regret it. ;)
God, I love this show. Yay for rediscovering it through DVDs.
*
I was watching one of my favorite episodes of Northern Exposure tonight. It's from near the beginning of the third season, and is called "Oy, Wilderness." The reason it's so close to the top of my favorites list is because of the absolutely beautiful extended metaphor involving hearts and airplanes contained within it.
The plot is set up thusly: Maggie and Joel are on their way back from somewhere--not sure if it's mentioned--when something in Maggie's plane's engine suddenly breaks and they have to make an emergency landing in the middle of the 4.2 million acres of the Something-Or-Other Nature Preserve. If they're lucky, help might arrive in two to three days. But maybe nobody even heard the SOS.
Maggie can't fix the plane, despite her best efforts. In addition to that irritation, Joel is getting more and more on her nerves, because it's Fleischman in the wilderness, and yeah, that goes over like a lead balloon. (There's a great scene with a roasted squirrel and a discussion of cannibalism in there. Not to mention the cavemen dream sequence, where he's painting a picture of a hamburger on a cave wall while she's complaining about how he ought to be out hunting some food. Then of course she claims she doesn't care that he's not good at killing, and she "wouldn't have had all these little mini-Magnons with [him]" if there wasn't something more to him besides a lack of hunting skills.) Finally, two days later, she storms off into the woods to find water, leaving Joel bored and alone with the plane.
He summarily begins to tinker with the engine, despite express warning not to touch it, not to even think about touching it, not to come within ten feet of it. (Yeah, he doesn't listen well.) When Maggie inevitably comes back and realizes what he's done, she's extremely upset: "Did you tamper with my engine? You tampered with my airplane! You tampered with my engine!" (As Joel points out, she's irrationally upset about it; after all, she's pretty much given up, and it's not like he can "make it not work worse.")
Dr. Joel describes his thought process: an engine has valves, not unlike the human heart. In hearts, valves can get clogged, backing up blood flow and causing a serious problem. He thought the same thing might have happened to the engine; indeed, he found that a couple of the valves were clogged with gunk. Maggie is still outraged: "You messed with my engine!"
But of course, his tinkering with her
Ahem.
This is even more interesting when you consider Maggie's history: she's got issues that rival Kara Thrace's. She's had no fewer than five boyfriends die under strange circumstances (Rick having a satellite fall on him, one of the others falling asleep on a glacier and dying of hypothermia, one hit by a freak lightning strike on an oil rig, etc.), and in fact, every single man she's slept with has died not long after. She's not thrilled with the idea of committment. Her family was uninterested in showing affection, to say the least, so she has that demon to battle as well. Her heart is perhaps a bit broken. A valve is clogged, if you will.
Is it any wonder that next season, Joel becomes the first man to survive Maggie's Black Widow curse?
*
Also on my tape with that episode is "Animals R Us," which end's with Ed's first movie. It's a short black and white paean to Cicely, and it never fails to make me tear up. It's certainly not a sad short film, but you know, it's obvious that the work of the writers and actors and all the production people produced something greater than the sum of their parts, and that thing is the town of Cicely, Alaska. And I'm a sucker, so the fact that the short film is a microcosm of that--the same combination of mundane and absurd, quirky and conventional--definitely gets to me.
And right after that on my tape is "It Happened in Juneau," with the return of Bernard, and the best song ever used on TV: Toy Cows in Africa. Click the link for the mp3; you
God, I love this show. Yay for rediscovering it through DVDs.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-29 11:08 pm (UTC)I love Canada.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-30 01:59 am (UTC)*wonders how that has anything to do with Canada*
no subject
Date: 2006-10-30 03:57 am (UTC)What?? All this time, I thought the show was based in Canada! I've been living a lie!
Didja know that 1 out of 8 Americans believe that Alaska is a foreign country? No, really, they did a survey.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-30 05:29 am (UTC)Silly person! As if there would ever be a show on primetime network TV not based in the US. ;)
Didja know that 1 out of 8 Americans believe that Alaska is a foreign country? No, really, they did a survey.
*headdesk* One in ten Americans can't find their own head without a map.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-30 06:39 am (UTC)That's an awfully kind estimate.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-31 03:47 pm (UTC)