Yuletide Madness has gone live as well, and as it turns out, I got a treat there together with my two fellow Frederician Salonnières mildred_of_midgard and cahn, and (wittty and touching) poetry, no less: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Frederick.

Meanwhile, my three Yuletide tales have all received lovely comments by their recipient, and I've been busy exploring all the others. An early selection of those which caught my eye so far:



The Americans:


Motherland: post-show, Elizabeth and Martha.

Stand in the place where you are: also post show, Stan and Oleg.


Frankenstein (Mary Shelley's original novel):


Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: AU in which the second Creature lives, and a very different story unfolds.


Galaxy Quest:


Boys go to Jupiter: in which the Feds want to know what exactly happened at that Convention, and Gwen deals with it. Superbly.


James Asher Vampire Series - Barbara Hambly:

The Road Home: The WWI era story I didn't know I wanted but so much did. James Asher (undercover, of course) has been too long with his small German bataillon not to feel responsible for them, and Simon Ysidro feels responsible for James Asher. (The title happens to be that of a Erich Maria Remarque novel, the sequel to All Quiet at the Western Front.)


The Last Kingdom:

A Lady To Guide Him: in which Hild, warrior nun extraordinaire, is mentoring young Athelstan.


The Lion in Winter:

Zeal Now Melted: How being a son of Eleanor of Aquitaine worked out for Geoffrey.


Midnight Mass:

Sundowning: can't be well described unspoilery for a rather recent show, so I'll just say it's a John Pruitt character portrait.


Cut and Run: whereas this one is shows Sarah in the show's backstory, at the moment of her graduation.


Much Ado About Nothing:

Skirmish and Retreat: which takes Beatrice's cryptic answer to "you have lost the heart of Signor Benedick" and comes up with a plausible backstory for these two.

The great Sigourney Weaver turns 70 today. Like a great many viewers, I first encountered her as Ripley in Alien, and ensuing sequels. Think about the four movies of the franchise as you will - my own takes are on Alien and Aliens here and on Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection here -, I think there can be general agreement that SW never brought less than her A-Game. She made Ripley so intensely memorable that you believed every moment with her in it, no matter whether she faced outsized monsters or human greed - or her own humanity. Or saved her cat. There are so many iconic Ripley scenes; one that stuck deepest with me doesn't feature, strictly speaking, Ellen Ripley, but Ripley8 from Alien: Resurrection, in the sequence where she finds out what the number on her means. Trigger warning for massive body horror, but it's what Weaver does with her face that makes it so visceral to me:



She's a superb comedienne as well - in Working Girl, for example, and wonderfully so in Galaxy Quest. Gwen de Marco speaks for all of us here:



(This episode is badly written!" is what I constantly want to say about the present, but alas...)

Lastly, some funny interview moments:

"18 amazing moments with Sigourney Weaver" (Watch on YouTube)

Day 26 - Lots of Star Trek Parodies out there. Which do you dig?

The sinister Federation in Blake's 7 just happens to have the same insignia as the one in Star Trek, turned sideways, and in the s3 episode Deathwatch there's even a direct parody of the "space...the final frontier..." speech. More than one B7 fan has speculated that Star Trek is simply government propaganda produced by the Blake's 7 Federation. As amusing as this is, it makes it only just that my (and probably most people's) favourite Star Trek parody makes fun of B7 as well. By Graphtar's Hammer, what a parody!

Yes, of course I dig Galaxy Quest most. Both because it's hilarious and because it's made with such obvious love for the subject. It laughs with, not about the fans. Which is why it rules.

( The other days )

More Yuletide. Incidentally, I haven't had the chance to watch either of the Christmas specials I want to watch yet - Doctor Who and Call The Midwife, that is - and might not get the chance until after New Year. Being with the family is tricky that way. But it does offer the occasional time to read! And thus, without further ado:

( Recs for Breaking Bad, Dexter, Galaxy Quest, The Last Unicorn, Psycho, Robot Series by Isaac Asimov, Sarah Jane Adventures and Watership Down )

5 greatest (or favorite) examples of breaking the fourth wall, or canon material going meta.

Sometimes it's very borderline, somewhere between meta-ness and fourth wall breaking, which are really not the same thing. (Incidentally, for Brecht readers: does fourth wall in breaking in tv shows count as episches Theater?) I find most overt fourth wall breaking self satisfied, and intelligent meta in an ongoing canon is tricky to pull off without coming across as too masturbatory, too. However, here are five examples that please this particular viewer and reader very much indeed.

1.) Babylon 5: Sleeping in Light, the final episode, very near the end includes a tiny cameo by the show's creator and writer, J.M. Straczynski. ( Spoiler: ) Now all the gods in the Centauri pantheon now that JMS could, in some of his writing, be infuriating or smug when trying for meta (A View from the Gallery comes to mind, but it's by no means the only example), but that tiny scene was and remains to me earned, incredibly touching and very apropos.

2.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Storyteller. I could have choosen Superstar as easily; both are episodes written Jane Espenson which tackle the show itself and certain well-loved fanfic clichés (not just of BTVS fandom, of all fandoms) with gusto and wit. Indeed it's very enlightening to watch both as a double feature. andraste wrote a fabulous essay about them which if you haven't already I all urge you to read right now. To quote from it: If Jonathan behaves like Mary Sue - the fan within the story - then Andrew behaves like the fan outside the story, analysing the relationships and histories of the group just as we do. (Note the reversal of the external/internal there.) He treats the gang as if they're a shiny new fandom whose canon he's plunging into, even memorising their dialogue and postulating slashy UST. (All the better to write fanfiction ...) The reason why I picked Storyteller in the end for this meme is that it actually is both meta and fourth wall breaking: at one point Andrew addresses us, the audience directly, and it's one of the few examples which totally works for me.

3.) The X-Files: Jose Chung's From Outer Space, written by Darin Morgan, and one of my all time favourite episodes of the entire show. It's a standalone story (sort of), told by various unreliable narrators, and within the episode, you also have a novelist (the Jose Chung of the title) writing a book about the whole event. This was a third season episode, so by that point there were a lot of X-Files tropes it could parody with relish, BUT, and that's crucial, it did so without ruining the premise. And the comments from Chung's book on Mulder and Scully as people will never not be funny. :)

4.) Galaxy Quest. Which manages at the same time to be a spoof directed mainly, but not exclusively, at Star Trek and an affectionate love declaration; and both poked fun and celebrated fandom. I was torn as to whether or not to include because, as opposed to the other examples, it wasn't meta created by the original writers/producers, but it is such an from-the-inside thing that I declare it unavoidable on such a list. Hard to single out one particular meta moment, but it's got to be either Gwen complaining about the writer of the episode, Guy worrying about being a red shirt, or Alexander observing Jason managed to get his shirt off.

5.) Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. I was in varying degrees entertained and intrigued by the other Rushdie novels I read, but this one is the only of his which I really, really love. At the time he wrote it, the idea of a storyteller silenced had an obvious personal resonance, and Kattam Shud works as a Khomeini avatar, but this children's book works splendidly if you have not the slightest idea about its author's biography. It has a fairy tale/fantasy quest structure while at the same time going meta on these stories, and stories in general, every bit of the way; the characters are both themselves and archetypes; and Rushdie puns like a madman and alludes to everything from Bollywood films to the Kathāsaritsāgara,from Lewis Caroll to the Beatles. ("They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.")