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icepixieI told you there would be babble.
I'm eighteen episodes in (because I have NO IMPULSE CONTROL WHATSOEVER), and they just keep. getting. better. Really, they do. I have some of the earliest and latest eps of the season on tape, but I missed most of the middle, and since it's been five years since the series was in reruns, I don't remember the specifics of most episodes. I swear to god, it's like rediscovering an old friend. Multiple old friends, really, since each episode is so distinctive.
(Actually, that may be a big factor in why I love this show. My very favorite type of television series is one that's episodic, but has consistent character development; there are arcs, but they have nothing to do with plot, only with how characters grow. There are callbacks to previous episodes, but you'll understand what's going on in any episode--with one or two exceptions--even if it's your first one. But the context gives it the underside of the iceberg, if you will, and it's the below-the-surface stuff that makes it great. It's definitely not as much fun when the episodic streaks is taken too far, a la the various Star Treks, wherein the characters never change, but at the same time, I get irritated with shows that have five minutes of previously-ons at the beginning of every episode, you know? I love BSG, but I don't claim to understand every thread that's been going on for two seasons. I think the increasing plot-arcyness is why I went off Farscape in season four. *shrug* Hey, what can I say. I'm lazy. *g*)
I think I'm actually most impressed by the endings to all these episodes. Ruth-Anne and Ed dancing on the grave he bought her for her birthday at the end of "A-Hunting We Will Go." The Indians paddling off in a canoe with the stolen body of "Pierre," a French soldier whose journal proves that Napoleon was in Alaska, not at Waterloo, while Chris in the Morning quotes about edifices of memory from The Remembrance of Things Past. That, not to mention the haunting music, gives me shivers. The raven pageant at the end of "Seoul Mates," all about the raven god giving light to the people so they won't have to live in darkness (after Joel gives Maggie a beautiful lighted Christmas tree, and Maurice is "enlightened" about his son).
I cried at Shelly's puppet show for Holling at the end of "Things Become Extinct." I defy anyone with half a heart not to watch that whole episode and end up doing the same thing.
I'd forgotten completely about "Get Real," in which the circus (Cirque de Soleil) comes to town. God! Everything about it is just so, so...I have no words. I love Chris's talks with the physicist-turned-magician about quantum theory, and how it's even less reliable than magic. I love Marilyn's romance with the mute "Flying Man," Bill Irwin, and how it doesn't need so many words. I love Marilyn's reason why she won't go with him--she has a job/identity in Cicely, whereas on the circus bus she'd just be The Flying Man's Girlfriend--and how sad, without being overwrought, both of them are (that little wave out the back of the bus). Chris reading "My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose" as they part and the bus drives away is fantastic.
And speaking of love--oh, you knew that I, a confirmed Fleischman/O'Connell shipper, would have to say this--ah, Maggie's palm reading. Lovelovelove Maggie going up to that guy whose type the palmist foresaw her marrying and insisting that she wanted to be happy.1 It might be another part of her curse being broken--she's rejecting this clone of Rick/Bruce/Glen/Dave/etc., all of whom were wrong for her, which was shown by them dying on her. Or something.
And then, of course, as soon as she says she wants to be happy, we have Chris's meditation/poem on love, and then we see Maggie helping Joel retrieve his dropped juggling balls from the dogs. Hmmmmm. ;)
Happily enough, despite all the complaints at Amazon about them changing the music, I've only noticed one substitution, which comes at the end of "Jules et Joel"--instead of "Over the Rainbow," there's this jazzy instrumental thing that's kind of but not really reminiscent of the tune. Other than that, I've noticed nothing. To be honest, all I really cared about was that Bobby McFerrin's "Common Medicine" was still at the end of "Lost and Found," and it is, so yay.
And the deleted scenes? Worth the price of the DVD set, if only for the one from "My Mother, My Sister" where Joel is holding a stuffed tiger and goes "RAWR" at Maggie, who is holding a stuffed pink elephant. I will be screencapping that soon and iconing it, oh, yes. Also entertaining is one from "Burning Down the House," where Maggie's mother reveals Maggie's full name to Joel, who then proceeds to gleefully refer to her as "Mary" several times, before she finally bites back with "Hyam" ("Chaim"?), his middle name. Heh.
1 I definitely don't remember Maggie being so forward about her interest in Joel this early, even if it was to a visitor. Asking if the man she was going to marry was from New York? Implying that it's him who'll make her happy? Iiiinteresting. Given Maggie's forthright nature, it makes me wonder why she didn't address this issue for such a long time (I mean, outside the constraints of TV wanting to drag the will-they-won't-they aspect out for as long as possible). Maybe she enjoyed bickering with him and didn't want to change it, or was somehow scared to change it, or wanted to keep her options open, but figured he'd still be there when she got around to it? The more I think about it, the more I wish the Mike Monroe thing in season four had been a girlfriend for Joel. If nothing else, seeing Maggie go crazy with jealousy would've been entertaining. *g*
I'm eighteen episodes in (because I have NO IMPULSE CONTROL WHATSOEVER), and they just keep. getting. better. Really, they do. I have some of the earliest and latest eps of the season on tape, but I missed most of the middle, and since it's been five years since the series was in reruns, I don't remember the specifics of most episodes. I swear to god, it's like rediscovering an old friend. Multiple old friends, really, since each episode is so distinctive.
(Actually, that may be a big factor in why I love this show. My very favorite type of television series is one that's episodic, but has consistent character development; there are arcs, but they have nothing to do with plot, only with how characters grow. There are callbacks to previous episodes, but you'll understand what's going on in any episode--with one or two exceptions--even if it's your first one. But the context gives it the underside of the iceberg, if you will, and it's the below-the-surface stuff that makes it great. It's definitely not as much fun when the episodic streaks is taken too far, a la the various Star Treks, wherein the characters never change, but at the same time, I get irritated with shows that have five minutes of previously-ons at the beginning of every episode, you know? I love BSG, but I don't claim to understand every thread that's been going on for two seasons. I think the increasing plot-arcyness is why I went off Farscape in season four. *shrug* Hey, what can I say. I'm lazy. *g*)
I think I'm actually most impressed by the endings to all these episodes. Ruth-Anne and Ed dancing on the grave he bought her for her birthday at the end of "A-Hunting We Will Go." The Indians paddling off in a canoe with the stolen body of "Pierre," a French soldier whose journal proves that Napoleon was in Alaska, not at Waterloo, while Chris in the Morning quotes about edifices of memory from The Remembrance of Things Past. That, not to mention the haunting music, gives me shivers. The raven pageant at the end of "Seoul Mates," all about the raven god giving light to the people so they won't have to live in darkness (after Joel gives Maggie a beautiful lighted Christmas tree, and Maurice is "enlightened" about his son).
I cried at Shelly's puppet show for Holling at the end of "Things Become Extinct." I defy anyone with half a heart not to watch that whole episode and end up doing the same thing.
I'd forgotten completely about "Get Real," in which the circus (Cirque de Soleil) comes to town. God! Everything about it is just so, so...I have no words. I love Chris's talks with the physicist-turned-magician about quantum theory, and how it's even less reliable than magic. I love Marilyn's romance with the mute "Flying Man," Bill Irwin, and how it doesn't need so many words. I love Marilyn's reason why she won't go with him--she has a job/identity in Cicely, whereas on the circus bus she'd just be The Flying Man's Girlfriend--and how sad, without being overwrought, both of them are (that little wave out the back of the bus). Chris reading "My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose" as they part and the bus drives away is fantastic.
And speaking of love--oh, you knew that I, a confirmed Fleischman/O'Connell shipper, would have to say this--ah, Maggie's palm reading. Lovelovelove Maggie going up to that guy whose type the palmist foresaw her marrying and insisting that she wanted to be happy.1 It might be another part of her curse being broken--she's rejecting this clone of Rick/Bruce/Glen/Dave/etc., all of whom were wrong for her, which was shown by them dying on her. Or something.
And then, of course, as soon as she says she wants to be happy, we have Chris's meditation/poem on love, and then we see Maggie helping Joel retrieve his dropped juggling balls from the dogs. Hmmmmm. ;)
Happily enough, despite all the complaints at Amazon about them changing the music, I've only noticed one substitution, which comes at the end of "Jules et Joel"--instead of "Over the Rainbow," there's this jazzy instrumental thing that's kind of but not really reminiscent of the tune. Other than that, I've noticed nothing. To be honest, all I really cared about was that Bobby McFerrin's "Common Medicine" was still at the end of "Lost and Found," and it is, so yay.
And the deleted scenes? Worth the price of the DVD set, if only for the one from "My Mother, My Sister" where Joel is holding a stuffed tiger and goes "RAWR" at Maggie, who is holding a stuffed pink elephant. I will be screencapping that soon and iconing it, oh, yes. Also entertaining is one from "Burning Down the House," where Maggie's mother reveals Maggie's full name to Joel, who then proceeds to gleefully refer to her as "Mary" several times, before she finally bites back with "Hyam" ("Chaim"?), his middle name. Heh.
1 I definitely don't remember Maggie being so forward about her interest in Joel this early, even if it was to a visitor. Asking if the man she was going to marry was from New York? Implying that it's him who'll make her happy? Iiiinteresting. Given Maggie's forthright nature, it makes me wonder why she didn't address this issue for such a long time (I mean, outside the constraints of TV wanting to drag the will-they-won't-they aspect out for as long as possible). Maybe she enjoyed bickering with him and didn't want to change it, or was somehow scared to change it, or wanted to keep her options open, but figured he'd still be there when she got around to it? The more I think about it, the more I wish the Mike Monroe thing in season four had been a girlfriend for Joel. If nothing else, seeing Maggie go crazy with jealousy would've been entertaining. *g*
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-07 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-07 05:04 pm (UTC)They have sex in the fourth season ("Ill Wind"), but decide that it was purely the product of these winds that make everyone in town kind of crazy. They say there's no way they'll ever have a romantic relationship.
However, in the middle of the fifth season, without much fanfare, they...start dating. It stays on the backburner for the rest of that season and into the sixth, although it does provide for some lovely moments between them. (Like "Fish Story," where Maggie wants to prepare Seder dinner for Joel and he feels weird about it; he then has a dream where he and his old rabbi are in the belly of a big fish and the rabbi says that not sharing Passover with Maggie means he's denying her intimacy; they have Passover with a bunch of other characters, and it's a really lovely ending.)
In the mid-sixth season episode "Full Upright Position," they're on a plane to St. Petersburg and have a real knock-down, drag-out fight, at the end of which Joel proposes. (Yeah, it's a bit of a headscratcher.) When they get back home, they decide to get unengaged, and just live together for a while. This lasts, um, half an episode. In "Upriver," every time they try to have sex, a gun goes off somewhere nearby. Joel is understandably freaked out. Maggie finds it kind of a turnon. She realizes it's not going to work, and kicks him out. He goes very native for several episodes up in an Indian village, and they bring in the doctor who replaced Rob Morrow. (So if only Rob had wanted to stay, this madness might not have happened!)
Several episodes of that later, Joel comes back, finds Maggie, and drags her on a quest for the Tlingit version of Atlantis. What follows is an episode so allegorical I'm not totally sure what it's allegorizing. In any event, in the middle of the woods, he sees the skyline of New York. He somehow realizes it's like a transdimensional portal, and asks Maggie to come with him. She says her place is in Cicely. He kisses her goodbye, and...goes back to New York. Or something. Days later, Maggie gets a postcard in the mail reading "New York is a state of mind. Love, Joel."
And then the rest of the season gets sadder and sadder. Maggie takes up with Chris. The doctor who replaces Joel is really boring.
So, yeah, I basically disown the sixth season, except for a few really good ones at the very beginning. *g* And this was kind of essay-like, wasn't it? Sorry! But then again, I suppose "complicated" is a given with this show...
no subject
Date: 2006-11-08 11:21 pm (UTC)But then all her boyfriends died strangely so who knows... besides she wasn't even in the last episode was she?
Thanks for the essay, I really appreciated it!
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:53 am (UTC)It definitely wasn't anything I bought, that's for sure.
besides she wasn't even in the last episode was she?
I don't think so. I forget where tehy said she was off at; I know in real life, Janine Turner was having emergency gall bladder surgery or something.
Thanks for the essay, I really appreciated it!
Hee. No problem! *g*