A Certain Slant of Light

As I commented in yesterday’s post, I am returned from Massachusetts! An excellent trip! Extra shout-out to skygiants and genarti for letting me show up a day early when my initial plan to stop in Ithaca fell through when my hostess’s son took ill. (This resulted in a fourteen-hour drive and PERHAPS the course of wisdom would have been to stop at a hotel, but no regrets.)

Highlights of the trip, in roughly chronological order:

Two days in Concord! On the first day, I recreated (backward) Georgie’s walk in The Fledgling from her house to Walden Pond. (Did not meet a Goose Prince who could teach me how to fly. Perhaps if I had started at Georgie’s house and walked to Walden Pond rather than the other way around.) Also waded in Walden Pond as it was very warm.

Second day: visited Louisa May Alcott’s house, which featured a video of an LMA reenactor warmly welcoming us into the house, when we all know that the real LMA would have been climbing out the back windows to avoid annoying literary fans. Particularly enjoyed the paintings that May (Amy in Little Women) sketched directly on the wall.

In the evening we watched the Biggles movie, in which a perfectly good Biggles movie has been inexplicably chopped up to introduce a time-traveling TV dinner salesman, who is somehow the main character, even though the movie is called Biggles and also the time-traveling TV dinner salesman actor can’t act. Baffling.

(However it did later on contribute to a conversation about plotting, action sequences, World War I pilots etc. which may have finally cracked the story of the World War I princess fighter pilot and her communist BFF who overthrew the monarchy and is now trying to have the princess executed by firing squad! “It’s not personal, Fritzi.” “If it’s so impersonal, then why don’t you shoot me yourself? Or are you too good to complete the same tasks as common soldiers?”)

On Saturday, skygiants and genarti and I visited the Athenaeum! If I lived in Boston I would be DEEPLY tempted to get a membership. If only I could split in two and the second me could make it her life’s work to read in the Athenaeum all day long… Told them the v. important story about how Josephine Preston Peabody and her BFF Abbie Farwell Brown used to use a specific book in the Athenaeum as a post office to leave notes to each other. Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a novel in itself?

Then the second leg of my journey began! I went to western Massachusetts to visit asakiyume, and we went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where I would happily leave yet another, third self simple to read through the entire picture book library… However, I suspect this third self would eventually finish the holdings (it is a small library, and picture books are quick to read; I zoomed through Christopher Denise’s adorable Knight Owl about an owl who becomes a knight and befriend a dragon), at which point perhaps it would pop over to the Yiddish Book Center (literally right across the street! asakiyume and I went on a tour with a wonderfully knowledgeable guide) and teach itself Yiddish, because if you can subdivide like an amoeba and have infinite selves then why not?

…Curiously enough asakiyume and I also watched Severance, which is about a different and darker kind of subdivision of selves. Amazing. Can’t believe it ended on a cliffhanger like that. Fascinating to see the different ways that these characters have adjusted (or refuse to adjust) to life in this totalizing workplace that their subdivided selves never get to leave.

Oh, and we made an apple pie! I made the crust and it turned out pretty nicely if I do say so myself.

And then back on the road, with a stop in Ithaca after all, as my friend’s son had recovered from his indisposition and it was safe for me to come! I took along the picture books Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Anatole as presents and said son (two years old; obsessed with trains; “Can’t he get to his dinosaur phase yet?” my friend sighed) requested each one read at least twice, so overall successful presents.

And then home again! And then right back to work yesterday, and now I am weary. Today perhaps will be a quiet day to rest, but I do want to get back to writing soon… I rattled off the first chapter of The Princess and the Communist (working title; had to set aside The Flying Princess) while on the road but of course one needs all the subsequent chapters too!

The second season of The Babysitters Club came out last month, and yesterday I at last watched the first two episodes. The second one was "Claudia and the New Girl", in which book I am deeply overinvested, and it turns out that the episode is not actually a retelling of the novel and my heart was CRUSHED.

So in the novel, the new girl is Ashley Wyeth. Claudia, a talented artist herself, swiftly falls into a fast and all-consuming friendship with Ashley when she realizes that Ashley is a brilliant artist, too. In the pursuit of this friendship and their intense artistic talks, Claudia neglects her old friends, her babysitters club duties, etc. etc., until she realizes that as much as she loves Ashley, she does not in fact want her life to be All Ashley, All the Time. Ashley is a human disaster in all areas of life that are not Art and does not cope well with this change, and the friendship collapses under the strain.

At no point in this book are Claudia's feelings for Ashley referred to as a "crush," but that's definitely what it is. She obsesses over Ashley when they're not together; she's intensely, physically aware of Ashley whenever they're in the same room; she can't see Ashley in the hallway without enthusing about how beautiful and delicate and fragile she is.

In the TV show, Ashley is actually friends with Claudia's older sister Janine. She is not even slightly a human disaster (is she even Ashley Wyeth if she has actual social skills?), and serves as an uncomplicated mentor figure for Claudia. But the emotional center of the episode (and the "New Girl" to whom the title refers) is Mallory, whom Claudia definitely does NOT have a crush on. In fact, she finds Mallory annoyingly talkative and needy, and the story focuses on figuring out how to get along with someone you find annoying when you are in a situation where you are frequently thrown in their company.

This is a perfectly fine story on its own, but NOT "Claudia and the New Girl," and I will mourn forever What Might Have Been if they had the guts to make it as gay as the book.

I’ve finally finished The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and boy, do I have mixed emotions about it. Some parts of it I loved! Some parts did not come together at all! Really a bit of a mess, but mostly a mess I enjoyed? Although the last episode in particular seemed EXTREMELY rushed and choppy.

( Spoilers ahoy )

I meant to watch season 5 of She-Ra all in one go when it first came out, and then it had so many EMOTIONS that I couldn’t, so I’ve only just now finished it.

I suspect that I’m the last She-Ra fan on earth to finish the season, but nonetheless I’m putting my thoughts behind a ( Spoiler cut )

My Flash in the Pan fic was Chicken Soup, an Agent Carter fic set soon after the finale of season 2. Peggy and Daniel bring Jack chicken soup after he’s shot. Jack thinks he doesn’t deserve it. (Jack is also definitely happy for them because they’ve finally gotten together and not at all pining for both of them, not even slightly.)

We’ve reached the part in season 2 of Agent Carter where the show begins to unravel. The first half of the season is actually pretty solid (which surprised me; I suppose the song-and-dance “which man shall I choose?” number in episode nine colored my memory of the whole season), but things start to go downhill after Peggy gets mildly impaled in episode 5. (Don’t worry, she’s back on her feet in episode 6.)

I’m fairly sure the impalement occurs mostly so there’d be an excuse for an unlikely team-up with Dottie Underwood, and in theory I love this idea - more Dottie! More of Dottie and Peggy forced to work together!!! Of course it’s inherently a rather silly plan, but this is a superhero spy show, I’m willing to revel in silly plans if the characters pull them off with competence and panache.

Unfortunately that’s not the case here. Peggy has no reason to believe that Dottie will cooperate, or indeed do anything at all except run the moment she gets the chance - and she does nothing that might change Dottie’s mind about that. Her approach is all stick, no carrot, even though we’ve seen before that this approach doesn’t work on Dottie (it ended with Jack Thompson pinned to the floor with a table at his throat) - and also that Peggy knows that, because she knows how to handle Dottie, at least as well as anyone does.

Of course, the carrots that Peggy can offer are somewhat limited: given the nature of Dottie’s crimes, Peggy can’t exactly let her go free, for instance. But there are other carrots she could offer. A long personal chat with Peggy is probably high on Dottie’s wishlist, for instance, and the prospect might at least make Dottie delay her inevitable escape.

At very least, Peggy ought to pretend to be friendly, instead of being so clipped and cold. As Whitney Frost notes, Dottie wants to believe that Peggy is her friend; Peggy could win a lot of ground simply by playing into that hope. Yes, still take all possible precautions, but talk to Dottie as if she’s a valued and trusted teammate, and the tracking device that will explode if Dottie tries to escape is an unfortunate bureaucratic necessity. Sure, Dottie will see through it, but she’ll eat it up anyway.

As it is, Peggy gives Dottie no reason to cooperate, so when the plan goes all pear-shaped it feels like a foregone conclusion. What did Peggy expect? She gave Dottie no reason to cooperate, and so Dottie didn’t.

And I think this sort of encapsulates a lot of the problems in the second half of the season: the characters, who hitherto have been so clever and on top of things, suddenly seem like incompetent pinballs tossed around by the levers of an increasingly out of control plot. I think the writers made the villains in the story just a little too powerful (the Arena Club controls everything; Whitney Frost is an unstoppable force of destruction); even by the generous standards of “realistic” one expects in a superhero spy story, it’s hard to see how our heroes could realistically win. So the story loses its thread.

We've started rewatching season 2 of Agent Carter (about which more anon), and we've just gotten to the part where Ana Jarvis gives Peggy a hug and Peggy looks so SURPRISED, as if she hasn't been hugged since she was approximately eight, and I feel like touch-starved Peggy is an amazing fic premise, although sadly not one that is compatible with Peggy/Dottie because you know who has probably not been hugged ever? and therefore would not know how to do it? Dottie.

Actually, touch-starved Dottie would also be an amazing fic premise. But Dottie would definitely become the woobie of the fic if she were involved, what with the whole "what is a hug?" thing she has going on.

Is touch-starved Peggy thing that exists out there? Or is this an untapped mine of possible angst and cuddles?

I recently finished rewatching season 1 of Agent Carter, and you guys, I had forgotten how completely fucking delightful this show is. Well, not forgotten, obviously, or I wouldn't have watched it again - but watching it again has reminded me of all of its wonderful qualities.

In no particular order:

The scene where Peggy and Jarvis beat up a whole bunch of SSR agents in the diner while cheery music plays is probably one of my favorite scenes in anything of all time. Followed by the bit where Daniel has her at gunpoint (after she's knocked Jack out cold!!) and then he can't shoot her... Ah, the glory.

In general, this show is really amazing at putting together these glorious set pieces that basically just let the characters show how awesome they are. This is most obvious with Peggy, as the protagonist - I am in awe of her strength as a rough-and-tumble fighter who can use whatever material comes to hand: the bit in the aircraft control tower where she fights Dottie using nothing but an aviator scarf!!!

But they have these showcase moments for other characters, too. Like the scene where Angie throws the SSR agents off the scent by sobbing into Jack Thompson's chest - especially impressive because we've seen aspiring actress Angie practice a few auditions in front of Peggy before, and she's not that good. Apparently she just needs the adrenaline of actual danger to get her going!

I will remain FOREVER SAD that the showrunners didn't follow up on this in season 2 by having Peggy recruit Angie to the SSR. Come on! She's just shown that she'd be amazing undercover! My God.

My feeling is that the showrunners got spooked by the popularity of Cartinelli, and while I don't ship it myself (Angie doesn't try to kill her even once and I guess that's what I like in a ship?), I am baffled by their surprise. They made Angie THAT emotionally invested in Peggy - personally offended when Peggy doesn't leap at the chance to move into her building - they have a dramatic reconciliation IN THE RAIN with ROMANTIC MUSIC playing - and they're surprised that people shipped that over Peggy/Daniel?

I like Peggy/Daniel fine, but surely someone involved in production noticed at some point that the show gave all the romantic beats in the first half of the season to Peggy/Angie? Surely.

I have a weakness for OT3s so I've read a certain amount of Peggy/Daniel/Jack Thompson fic, so it's been interesting to rewatch the show and remember what an absolute jerk show Jack Thompson is. I think fic tends to lean on his self-loathing aspects, which do exist, but so do his self-aggrandizing jerkface "Sure, I'm going to take credit for the case that Peggy just blew wide open" aspects, and the fact that he's probably going to torment himself about it the same way he torments himself about accepting a Medal of Honor he didn't deserve does not, in either case, substitute for actually not doing the thing.

...I still love the OT3, but it's definitely a case where I am also so so glad that the show never went there.

Going back to the way that this show gives everyone great character moments, though, I love the scene at the Black Widow training facility in Russia, where Thompson just freezes, and he's watching Peggy single-handedly hold off a whole bunch of guards to cover everyone else's escape (also an amazing moment for Peggy! The part where Dum Dum's all "What would Cap say if I left his best girl behind?" and Peggy's all "Cap would say 'Do as Peggy says,' MY HEART) - anyway, I'm pretty sure that's the moment when Thompson realizes that what he has previously considered a desire to do Peggy is in fact a desire to be Peggy, that Peggy is the person he would like to be and simply is not, and he's not too much of a misogynistic jerkface to recognize that fact. (But because he is a misogynistic jerkface, that fact makes him hate himself.)

ALSO SO HAPPY TO SEE THE HOWLING COMMANDOES, that whole episode is probably my favorite episode, I'm very happy with the show that we got but I'm also, let's be real, just a little sad about the imaginary show which is Peggy and the Howling Commandoes Kick Ass and Take Names. Mmm. That would have been beautiful.

But getting back to "Do I want to do her or be her? OR KILL HER?" - that brings me to Dottie Underwood, because GOSH I love the confused obsessive energy that she brings to her relationship with Peggy. This actually becomes much more prominent in the next season, but I was DELIGHTED to realize that it starts here, with the scene where Dottie sneaks into Peggy's room and looks in her mirror and pretends to be Peggy Carter. And also steals her knock out lipstick AND THEN KNOCKS HER OUT BY KISSING HER and look, we've seen Dottie's skillset, I think we can all agree that she could have incapacitated Peggy in MANY other ways, she just really really wanted to lay one on her, and I for one am DELIGHTED.

I also love that one of Dottie's go-to moves is to play the helpless fluttery female, both because she's SO good at it, but also because it establishes a connection between her character and Natasha's - because that's one of Nat's moves, too. It's nice to see that bit of continuity in Black Widow tactics over time (although I think that people often vastly overestimate how static the program would be: just because Stalinist-era Black Widows were handcuffed to their beds doesn't mean that Yeltsin-era Black Widows would be, for instance. The political situation is so different!)

I could go on (in fact, I may go on in another post at some point: I've barely touched on Jarvis, and not at all on Howard Stark, or the plotline about Peggy's grief over Steve, or...), but I think this is long enough for now.

I’ve been researching the Civil War in a low-key way for a while now, so when I discovered Mercy Street, a PBS TV series set at a hospital in Union-occupied Alexandria, Virginia during the Civil War, of course I had to watch it - especially once I discovered that three episodes in the first six-episode season were directed by women.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t terribly impressed. It didn’t help matters that last year I read Pamela S. Toler’s Heroines of Mercy Street, a nonfiction book that was published as a series tie-in (although the book is more well-researched and in depth than you might expect from a tie-in), because that background made it even more obvious where the filmmakers had sensationalized things - and also made that sensationalization more frustrating, because they had plenty of drama already at their fingertips if they had just trusted their material.

Basically, the showrunners decided that they needed to have not one, not two, but three villains: a doctor, a nurse, and a hospital steward, united in their singular focus on personal gain, indifferent to the well-being of the patients.

I’ll grant them the hospital steward. Many of the hospital stewards really do seem to have been grasping men, lining their pockets by selling supplies on the side even though that means the wounded men in their care go hungry and sometimes die because they can’t recover without proper nutrition. However, one villain would have been enough - especially because the bad doctor and nurse could have produced much more interested and varied conflict in the narrative if they had been less one-dimensional.

So, of instance, the army surgeon character is not merely devoted to outdated medical theories (which seems to have been common among army surgeons, and caused friction with civilian contractors), but also a venal, grasping toady who is utterly indifferent to the well-being of his patients. But wouldn’t it be more interesting (and more informative about nineteenth-century medical theory!) if the army surgeon and the civilian contractor both sincerely cared about their patients, and their conflict really did center around the differences of their medical opinions?

Similarly, the show could have gotten plenty of conflict from two well-meaning nurses, one of whom served under Florence Nightingale in the Crimea - yet finds herself subordinate to a nurse with no formal training and comparatively little experience, who nonetheless was appointed head nurse by Dorothea Dix. Instead, it turns the first nurse into a secret tippler who is having an illicit affair with the evil army surgeon.

I found this last particularly annoying, because this nurse character shares a name and backstory with a real person, Anne Hastings. But otherwise the character seems like practically a libel on the real person, who may have been a little officious about the fact that she had more training than all the other nurses combined, but by all accounts was a good and dedicated nurse.

The show does have some good medical information: there was an unavoidably gruesome but nonetheless very informative amputation scene. ( Cut for amputation details. )

However, one informative amputation in six episodes isn’t enough reason to watch the second season - especially given that only two of season two’s six episodes were directed by women. I won’t be continuing the show.

I wrapped up The Last Czars, which either got better in the last few episodes or else I had gotten used to its flaws. Certainly it helps that Nicky and Alix (a.k.a. Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra) become much more sympathetic the moment that they’re out of power. As soon as they lose the power to make disastrously poor decisions but instead are placed in the power of others, their more sympathetic characteristics come to the fore: their stoicism in the face of adversity, their love for their children, their desire to protect the family.

Of course, there’s a sort of dramatic irony about this, because the whole family is going to die and we all know it. Perhaps the show’s greatest success, despite its flaws, is the fact that it makes the viewer really hope that the Romanovs will escape this time, even though we went into it knowing that they won’t. The frame story makes much more sense as the story goes on: I began to hope that Anna Anderson really was Anastasia, just because it seemed so cruel that every single one of the children died.

And the creative team seems to have been much more comfortable on the level of intimate family drama (albeit a family in desperate circumstances) than it was with the grand politics of the earlier episodes. The writing sharpens once the Romanovs have lost their power and are all imprisoned - imprisoned in a palace at first, but nonetheless imprisoned.

I particularly liked the part where the first round of guards become so fond of the Romanovs (and, you remember, their four beautiful teenage daughters) that they actually had to be replaced by newer, tougher guards who have been specially warned against fraternizing. Of course this only ratchets up the “If only…” feeling.

Still totally baffled by the fact that the showrunners tried to wed a historical drama with a documentary by suddenly having historians pop up to give us background about this or that, though. All of the relevant information could have been woven into the episodes, and the viewing experience would have been so much smoother.