My computer has been making a clicking sound and been running really slowly with a bunch of crashes, so it’s word processor o’clock for me until that’s fixed. I’ve been using an Alphasmart 3000 for freewriting and focus and have found it super useful, if only I could get the space key to stop sticking.
This week in TV I finally caught up where I wanted to be with The Librarians. I have a list of TV to watch in a certain order, and I guess this is going to take some explanation. Since I went to grad school for two years I fell very behind in weekly television – and it turns out I prefer to watch my TV shows all mixed up with each other in the order that they aired instead of binging one particular show. I started grad school in September of 2016 and because I keep getting distracted by other shows or adding new shows to the list I am currently in the third week of November 2016. I realize it is 2020 and that it’s very slow going and that I will probably never catch up. I’m not absolutely beholden to the list. I frequently take breaks to watch other shows too – especially older ones that aren’t on the list at all, but it’s nice to feel that I have a direction and something to fall back on when I’m not sure what to watch next. Another thing that takes up a lot of the time is when I decide “oh hey, 3rd season of Librarians is here, why don’t I just watch the first two and then integrate it into the list?” Except that I also then do that to The Goldbergs and Black-ish and Humans. So, I recently finished the second season of Librarians to integrate the 3rd season premiere into the Nov 2016 lineup, and will continue watching the show that way. Overly complicated, I know. That’s just how my relationship with TV is. (For those who dabble in enneagram, that’s how aggressive my 5 wing can be. I’ve been framing things a lot with enneagram recently and am not quite sure if that’s a good sign or not. Anyone else?)
ANYWAY, Librarians is delightful and charming but very low-budget and such an obnoxious rip off of the Smith-Moffat era of Doctor Who that I find myself scoffing at the barely altered score. The artifacts and mythology they use is different enough to be fun and interesting (Prospero as a villain was certainly a huge and entertaining step up from season 1) but they reaaaaally want the viewer to think of Flynn as a Doctor figure and it doesn’t quite work because the movies didn’t have that aspect. I’m a little less invested in the Egyptology theme of season 3 (literary stuff is my JAM) but I’m sure it’ll be fun and Indiana Jones-y enough to hold my interest. The show frequently goes into tropey and campy territory to almost be too much but then the writers will pull out something clever or just nerdy enough that I can’t help but love the show. Definitely written by people who grew up loving the shows I loved, and you can’t really fault them for trying to bring that back.
I watched an episode of Grand Designs earlier this week (finale of S17) and then introduced some of my roommates to the show on Saturday. There was a lot of discussion about the spectacle of reality television, especially since Peter Nolan makes a meal about every bad housing decision a couple makes. The episode we watched was particularly bad, it seemed like Nolan was intentionally fuelling the fire, but there’s so much reality TV that I enjoy that revolves around bad decisions. It’s not very generous or forgiving, and the fact that they are choosing to participate in reality TV just fuels the creation of more reality TV, but at the same time I feel like I’m learning about architecture and the process of building. It’s calming to me in the way that Bake Off is but hilarious to me at the same time in a way that doesn’t involve making fun of things that feel more inherent to a person (like fashion or relationships.) As much as I love Bake Off and it’s a positive atmosphere, I enjoy watching shows that aren’t a competition at all. It’s a hard balance to strike but important for me to consider. Also, sometimes spectacle is great?
The other show I started watching this week is Blindspot. A lot of my friends are into the show as a sort of elevated CSI procedural with a central mystery. It helps that I like almost all the actresses in it already from various other things. It’s SUPER interesting to me that Jane gets her first memory back as a result of tapping into a muscle memory of extreme violence. I hope the show is aware enough that it goes into this aspect of culture and training, but even if it doesn’t I think it’s something to keep tabs on and can end up coalescing into a really interesting study and reflection on police procedurals. Outside of that one specific moment I’ve only watched a few eps but I’ve found it very engaging and likeable so far. It seems like another show built on spectacle but not in an obnoxious way.
The last thing on my mind was an episode of Star Trek (TOS) I watched. “Taste of Armageddon” is about a society at war that has moved from battlefields to computer simulations. The computer tallies how many casualties a theoretical hit would incur and then citizens of the society have to report to disintegration chambers to carry out the sentence, while keeping the “culture” and architecture of the society intact. It’s a really interesting, and I think prescient, idea. Kirk’s moral at the end is that war is supposed to be bloody and dirty and gruesome because that encourages people to avoid it. It’s both true in an ideological sense and false in practice because a) the society was losing just as many people as it was before, shouldn’t that in itself be an incentive to stop the war? But I guess not for politicians, which leads into b) it seems like a lot of governments don’t actually care how gruesome a war is as long as they get the results they want. It’s another case of Star Trek believing in the better nature of people and trying to reason out why “good” people are behaving badly. As a sort of Cold War critique, I guess it was against the idea of the Cold War because the threats didn’t feel as real or immediate? Or it was using Cold War imagery/ideas to make a separate point.
I did enjoy the one scene where the leader of society (an UNCLE alum, actually. Both episodes I watched were crawling with UNCLE alums both in the main cast and guest stars) explained to Kirk and Spock his concept of the war and Spock is like “yeah, ok, that seems logical” and the dude is like “I’m glad you approve” and Spock goes “no no no,I don’t APPROVE, I just understand.” Which is pretty badass for Spock.
A lot of the shows bringing up themes of morality, spectacle, government and violence these days. I love how television talks to itself.
The Star Trek ep is not far fetched at all. We lived through the neutron bomb era, which essentially killed people but left structures intact. It was horrifying that scientists would come up with something like that. True Dr. Strangelove.
I didn’t know the context of the neutron bomb and can understand why the show would want to make an argument against using it. I do still think the argument is interestingly flawed though.