Aka the long promised manifesto about what has become my favourite post DS9 Star Trek show, or version of Star Trek, full stop. Some preliminaries and disclaimers about what this isn't: A declaration that Discovery is best, or flawless. No ST movie or show is. Or that I'm 100% behind every plot or character decision. I'm not. People getting creative - which TPTB most certainly did with this show, which is one of the reasons why I fell in love with it - inevitably means that some of their ideas just doesn't work out the way they intended, or they didn't work out for this particular watcher. With every season, I praised and I nitpicked, in different degrees. This is how I do fandom. (When I reach the point where I catch myself only complaining and not enjoying anymore, I say goodbye.) With all these caveats being said, here's why I think Star Trek: Discovery isn't just a fabulous show, but specifically a fabulous Star Trek show:

( 1) Something New )

( 2.) Something Old )

( 3. Something Blue )

And there you have it: My personal Manifesto of love for Star Trek: Discovery!

The other days

Which scintilla10 requested. Before talking about my favourite examples, it's worth pointing out a few others.

( Spoilery musings for all four seasons broadcast so far await )


The Other Days

I continued with my occasional Discovery rewatch, so you're getting some s2 thoughts.

( Let's have a little more fun )

So this year, instead of giving just one month to the Mouse, I decided to give more, because there were several ongoing shows I wanted to watch (up to and including Ashoka next month). This means I also got to see Secret Invasion, which just finished and works as a text book of how not to do a tv miniseries along with how to get the wrong creative lessons from the success of Winter Soldier and Andor, respectively.

Here's the irony: I didn't expect much of anything from the Hawkeye miniseries back when it got dropped pre Christmas and only watched it because Peter Jackson's Beatles three parter was released at the same time and that was why I went to the Mouse back then. But as it turns out, Hawkeye was great, and along with Ms Marvel probably my favourite of the Disney Marvel shows even several years later. Whereas I'm practically the target audience for what Secret Invasion (I assume) aimed to be - a spy story/underbelly take on the MCU. Plus going in to the respective shows, I was certainly more invested in Nick Fury than I was in Clint Barton.

Now, rather than going on a rant of how Secret Invasion is bad, I'd rather go for a bit of why it failed (and why Hawkeye did succeed) (for me, as always this is subjective). Because it's not that there are new characters with a narrative focus (both shows have those) and new relationships in addition to the movie established ones. Or the inherent clichés or sillness of the premise (part of the parcel).

( Here we go, spoilers alert )

lightofdaye wanted a compare and contrast of Ezri Dax (DS9) and Elizabeth Lochley (B5).

Let's start with the obvious: what Ezri Dax and Elizabeth Lochley primarily share is that both characters were last minute replacements for show regulars in their respective show's final season, who came into existence because things with an actress playing a series regular did not work out for various reasons. As both characters had been very popular - Ivanova even more so than Jadzia Dax (which reminds me, I do wonder what would have happened if Nana Visitor had been the one to leave! Because DS9 without Kira is unthinkable...). This alone ensured a considerable part of fandom would resent the new characters, irrespectively from how well or badly they were written and acted.

Now, it's interesting that both shows used almost diametrically opposite narrative techniques to deal with this inheret drawback. DS9 went out of its way to establish Ezri as not simply being a Jadzia clone and devoted considerable screen time to her. She was given a different job (counselor to Jadzia's science officer, which reminds me, I don't think we ever found out who replaced Jadzia as science officer?). We got to know her pre-Symbiont family, the Tigans, and their background in an episode that was all about them. Where the last episode that had been Jadzia-centric without also being Worf-centric had been several seasons ago, Ezri in addition to the episode exploring her birth family got another Whodunit episode focused on her as the detective, this one co-starring former host Joran as Hannibal Lecter (it was very much the age of Silence of the Lambs) and an episode in which she had to counsel and prove herself to the show's most popular recurring guest star, Garak. There was a continous, unchanging relationship - the friendship with Sisko - and one relationship that turned out to be quite different from the one Jadzia had, with Worf, but had its commonalities and differences explored in great screen time detail. (And then there was the last minute romance with Bashir, which got so little screen time to develop that it never felt like the writers were either interested in it or believed in it.)

Meanwhile, JMS went almost the opposite way with Elizabeth Lochley. Technically, she got Sheridan's old job, not Ivanova's, but it was evidently the job Ivanova would have had if Claudia Christian had not left the show. There was no Lochley-centric episode to introduce or explore her the way there had been when Sheridan had taken over as station commander in s2; instead, she got introduced through the telepath story arc on a professional basis and through the confrontations with Garibaldi on the subject of her loyalties on a personal one, until the one episode not written by JMS but Neil Gaiman, Day of the Dead, which did more to flesh out Lochley's character and background than anything that had come before (as JMS himself freely admitted in the preface to the published script). The one relationship with a regular she was established to have had before her introduction to the show, with Sheridan, got as little screen time as possible; it's almost till thet last but one episode that the two of them share a scene and conversation which isn't about the plot of the week and feels a bit personal. Where Ivanova had been given key parts in the show's political arcs (both in the Shadow War and the Earth Civil War) as well as two popular romantic relationships (with Talia and then with Marcus, Lochley during season 5 had no screen time devoted to her personal life (this changes in Crusade, but we're talkingn about B5 here), and while she had a role to play in the telepath mini arc that dominated the first half of the season, she had no part in the Drakh/Fall of Centauri Prime arc dominating the second half. Her main scenes in the second half of the season involve Garibaldi's storyline and are a great pay-off to the hostility between them established early in the season, but they're still mainly about Garibaldi, not Lochley. In short, I'd say s5 goes out of its way to signal to the audience that Lochley isn't taking anything away from beloved regulars; she's the unexpected houseguest who keeps to herself most of the time, not the one insisting on sharing every conversation and choosing what's on the menu for dinner.

There are pros and cons to either approach. For example, my guess as to why JMS went out of his way not to give Lochley and Sheridan any one on one scenes together that aren't about station business is that he wanted to avoid even the whiff of a suspicion he was setting up a love triangle here between Sheridan, Lochley and Delenn, which in a season where there's already an emotional triangle between Sheridan, Delenn and Lennier, fair enough. (Not to mention that Sheridan/Delenn was the most popular relationship on the show, and Lochley really didn't need any shippery resentment directed her way.) Still, that meant, and my most recent B5 rewatch underlined this for me, that the Sheridan & Ivanova friendship, which had been one of the most endearing platonic m & f relationships on the show and brought out the best in either party, had not only disappeared along with Ivanova, but that Sheridan now shared personal screentime only with Delenn, what with Garibaldi having his Bester-caused off the wagon arc and Franklin also not given to hanging out with Sheridan, while Londo and G'Kar were busy with the unfolding tragedy on Centauri Prime, so the effort to not let Lochley intrude might have actually backfired and robbed Sheridan of something of his human warmth. Equally: given that one of the key ways in which DS9 made Ezri different form Jadzia was that Ezri had ended up with the Dax symbiont accidentally, had not been prepared for it and had not originally wanted the symbiont life, it made narrative sense to let the audience see Ezri Tigan's family and have her interact with them to explore whether and how Ezri Dax was different from Ezri Tigan. I have my problems with that episode, but not with the basic premise. Just as, to look at another Ezri episode, the idea of Ezri facing the challenge of playing Counselor to Garak, of all the people, is a good one - can't ask for a bigger challenge - but the execution...

All of this, btw, still didn't stop me from liking both characters. I thought making Lochley someone who'd been on the other side of the war was an interesting premise, as was her different relationship with Bester. She had great chemistry with Garibaldi, and both their initial hostility and the way she ended up helping him really worked for me. Day of the Dead, and the reveal of Zoe, the story of Lochley's youth and how it still haunted her was great. And I took the additional tidbits we were given about Lochley - for example, that she speeks a little Centauri - and used them in fanfic. And I loved all three of her Crusade episodes. Meanwhile, Ezri's scenes in the opening s7 three parter are just what the doctor had ordered to get me and Sisko out of post-Jadzia gloom, Nicole de Boer had a knack for projecting likeability, and the story with Worf worked on a "exes who don't get together again because they realize they're (literally) different people now, but people who know each other still really well and thus can be each other's confidants" for me. If there's ever a Star Trek: Sisko show the way there was Star Trek: Picard, I do want to meet Ezri again and find out who she has become in the intervening decades. Especially without the writerly pressure of having to present her in a last season situation.

In conclusion: not having written a multi season tv show set on a space station with a big ensemble and multiple storylines, I'm not sure what I'd have done when faced with the need to replace a popular character with only one more season to go, whether I'd taken the Ezri Dax or the Elizabeth Lochley solution, and whether all those things I as a watcher concluded should have been done differently would have occured to me as a stressed out writer. But these are my thoughts on a character comparison.

The other days

watervole asked me to talk about A Midsummer Night's Dream, a performance of which, starring the late Gareth Thomas, we both watched together. (In tandem with James Barrie's play Dear Brutus which it partly inspired and with it shares some themes.) Now because I attended an entire class about this play in my university days, I saw a lot of live and filmed performances as well as some movie versions, and I can easily ramble on about it. In Sandman, Neil Gaiman uses the idea that A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest are the sole two Shakespeare plays whose plot doesn't have an obvious source (be it another play or prose) to let these plays be written by Shakespeare for Morpheus, the King of Dreams, in payment for getting his poetical gifts unlocked. He's not the first or the last writer to bring these two plays into context; both have magic, play-within-a-play structure, characters who double as directors putting on a show in more than one sense, and comments on the theatre itself in the text.

The Dream is the more popular of the two (though it also has its haters, like Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote in his journal that it was the most insipid thing he ever saw). I saw it first when I was still in school and my hometown's theatre put it on. I only remember a few details: the actors playing Oberon & Titania als played Theseus & Hippolyta (something that happens a lot and only is tricky at one point where the fairies come on stage directly after Theseus and Hippolyta leave, and it spares a provincial ensemble two extra actors), there was a lot of overt homoerotic subtext between Oberon and Puck (when I later saw productions where Puck was either made up to look like a youth/child or like a hobgoblin, I was startled because of that first impression - the actor from my hometown was just dressed in green and very much an adult when fondling and rubbing himself against Oberon's legs), and the most prominent actor of our ensemble played Nick Bottom (go figure). In contrast to the majority of more recent productions, Oberon, who is the successful director in this play as opposed to Peter Quince who tried to direct but finds his star taking over, was definitely presented as the play's winner, getting all he wanted by the end, with the overall production implying this was how harmony gets restored. That was in the 1970s; Oberon as the clear winner is also what Max Reinhardt's 1930s film version presents. (A Midsummer Night's Dream was one of Max Reinhardt's most famous theatre productions in both pre and post WWI German theatre, and he toured the world with it; alas, by the time of the Hollywood film, he was old, film wasn't his medium of choice anyway, and what so many attendants of the stage productions had described as the most perfect theatre magic they ever watched comes across as very stagey and creaky glitter on film.)

In the early 1990s, when I was at college and attending that Dream-devoted class, that was changing. The stage Oberons in the productions we were studying tended to, via some pantomime or redistributed lines, at the very least share their win, and more often it was Titania who took them back. Meanwhile, Theseus, whether or not he was played by the same actor as Oberon, went from standard (and not interesting) gracious Duke - this play's Athens being the most Elizabethan place imaginable - to taking on more villainous colors, as people started to examine the implication of him having defeated Hippolyta in war before marrying her. I don't think I ever saw Fascist!Theseus before the most recent RTD tv film, but I did see several Colonialist!Theseus versions.

The young lovers were probably the characters where the interpretations least vary through the many productions I saw. Well, except in quite how harshly Demetrius treats Helena when she chases after him, but other than that. (Again, the RTD film was the first production I saw where Lysander and Demetrius came across as two distinct personalities to me, and which had Lysander fall for Demetrius instead of Helena first when the magical love drop business starts.) In more recent productions, the lines that near the end of play make the lot of them sound like the type of aristocratic snobs Shakespeare must have known a lot of as they make fun of the mechanicals get either removed or redistributed to Theseus (if it's Villain!Theseus time, though he in the play is the only not to not make fun of the actors). Given that the lovers earlier sounded almost exactly like Pyramus and Thisbe, overwroughtness included, I always thought that them mocking the actors both was a comment on how we never recognize our reflection and Shakespeare making fun of himself to boot, since Romeo and Juliet preceded this play, and when he has the mechanicals declare that while Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, their parents are now reconciled, he's definitely spoofing himself rather than the Ovidian tale (which says nothing about the parents reconciling).

But there's a reason why our leading actor back in the day didn't go for Oberon and certainly not for one of the young lovers, but for Nick Bottom. "Let me play the lion, too" Bottom is both a great reflection on a star actor and a perfect part for one, and here I've seen the most variations, from Dream to Dream. I've seen Bottoms who are good natured and Bottoms who are bullies towards their fellow mechanicals, especially Peter Quince, Bottoms who turn out to have genuine talent when they play Pyramus, and Bottoms who are hamming it up to the nth degree. The encounter with Titania maintains its charm through most productions because while Titania might be ensorcerelled, Bottom, his good opinion of himself as an actor not withstanding, does respond to her compliments with the matter of fact statement that he doesn't quite see why she has this opinion, but okay, and responds to the high flown poetry with good natured prose instead of pouncing on her. (Whether Titania does more than kiss and stroke him varies from production to production, but in the ones I've seen, the initiative is always with her.)

There's quite a lot of magical roofying going on, and the play isn't particularly bothered by consent questions regarding this. (See: Demetrius still under the spell when everyone wakes up.) That Oberon does this to Titania in order to get the better of her in an argument - and not by using the magical flower to make her hopelessly in love with himself, but with a creature he sees as grotesque, to humiliate her - is a disturbing quality of many the play has, and one that's hardly remedied by him feeling sorry for her and lifting the enchantment - after she handed over the "Indian boy", the symbol of their quarrel. The boy is another element that increasingly doesn't seem to make the cut in modern productions. Why does Oberon want him? Why is Titania first so insistent on keeping him as the child of her dead friend and then, once the magic is lifted, no longer waste a thought on him? There's the association of fairies stealing children, of course - which btw Gaiman also uses in Sandman - and it all contributes to making the woods, and the fairies, so powerful and disturbing a storytelling element. Victorian depictions not withstanding, they're never, in any sense, safe.

There are all kind of theories as to whether the play was written for or premiered at an aristocratic wedding, and I've seen productions using this idea, too, with yet a third framing. There is a passage - when Oberon tells Puck about the story of the magical flower - that's assumed to be a compliment to Elizabeth the Queen, the "fair vestal throned in the west":

A certain aim he [i.e., Cupid] took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west
And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,
And the imperial votress passèd on
In maiden meditation, fancy-free. (II.i.)

If you believe many a historical novelist, it's also an allusion to the spectacular masques and plays Leicester, Robert Dudley, Elizabeth's most enduring favourite, put on for her visit at Kenilworth, and which a child William Shakespeare may or may not have seen if he with some other Stratfordians walked from Stratford at Kenilworth. (It's doable.) You even have people theorizing that if this passage is a compliment to Elizabeth, the Titania/Nick Bottom affair is a critique, since Elizabeth-as-the-Fairy-Queen certainly was an established trope by the time Shakespeare was an adult, and none of her favourites, with the exception of Essex, was ever popular with the people. Personally, I don't quite see it, mostly because Bottom is not aiming for his fairy queen's favor and is generally a figure of sympathy throughout the play, and if you want to critisize supposed bad favourites, you don't make the audience love them. (Shakespeare was far too much of a pro not to know any audience will love Nick Bottom.) But it's certainly easy to imagine Elizabeth's court watching this play, laugh, and ever so slightly remain disturbed, not quite sure what exactly they have seen, any more than the characters in it are.

The other days

I had a couple of stressful weeks - not in a bad way, I hasten to add, but there was a lot of work to be done - so now and then, I dipped into popcorn tv, so to speak, which in my case was the first season of The Flash. (Having encountered the titular character in the Supergirl crossover episodes.) And by and large, it fulfilled its purpose of giving me some charming distraction. But one aspect, which isn't particular to The Flash, kept nagging at me, precisely because the more I think about it, there more it seems to be everywhere, and it's this: when exactly did it become normal that the heroes of the show - and not grimdark type of antiheroes,mind - keep various foes with supernatural abilities in tiny, tiny prison cells without any visible hygeniec facilities, and of course wiithout any preceding trial or any kind of legal justification?

I mean, there's always been Arkham Asylum (usually for villains to break out of), I know, but as far as I recall Gotham - which is meant to be a dark city - does go through the bother of legalities before sending people there. But when, on the Marvel side of the force, both in the comics and the film version of Civil War there were (still government run) prison sites for the meta humans off shore, this was meant to come across as disturbing. Otoh,Agents of SHIELDS is cool with its main characters keeping prisoners this way. (Not just if they have supernatural powers.) In Supergirl, our heroine works with a black ops organisation that imprisons various of her defeated foes this way, and in The Flash (first season), our hero puts his in the basement of his billionaire sponsor, essentially. Moving out of the franchise, the series Sanctuary has our heroine and her team offer both protection and imprisonment (depending on the supernatural being in question), and while that's at first done with some loose government connection, and later not so much, in neither case did I spot someone's lawyer ever visiting the facilities in question.

I mean, I get some of the Doylist logistics here: the creative team doesn't want to kill off every single villain (especially in canons where the main characters are supposed to be optimistic, humane heroes), and they've established that the villains in question have abilities that would allow them to break out of normal prisons easily. But even the X-Men movieverse, which isn't supposed to present a mutant-friendly environment, lets the government solve this in the case of a captured Magneto in both the original movies and the prequels by locking him up in a specially adjusted facility after a trial. (And everyone knows where he is.) Since the first round of X-Men movies predate 9/11 and the prequels are set earlier than them, I'm now wondering whether this current tendency to just accept that good guys have the right to deprive bad guys of any civil rights whatsoever - without this meaning to characterise the good guys in question as morally ambiguous, mind - is a by product of the post 9/11 development. Not that black ops sites weren't run before, in both pop culture and reality, but the people running them were usually not depicted as a bright and cheerful lot.

Yes, no one expects much realism from superhero shows. But. In season 2 of Babylon 5, one of my favourite episodes, In the Shadow of Zh'adum, has Garibaldi - who definitely sees himself as a law and order man and also is pro death penalty - quitting his job when Captain Sheridan insists on first arresting Morden and then keeping him locked up without being able to charge him with anything. Now, the audience knows that Sheridan's suspicions are indeed correct, Mr. Morden is Up To No Good, and does have information on what happened to Sheridan's wife (which is why Sheridan does this to begin with). How Sheridan acts in this episode is still depicted as wrong by the narrative, one of the few times the show does this to its leading man, and Garibaldi's reaction - the refusal to keep following an order he perceives as unlawful and unethical - as right. (That his aide Zack Allen then complies with Sheridan's order fits with Zack's development at this point of the show.) What I'm getting at here: it's entirely possible to make a sci fi show (or fantasy) and still recall, if said show isn't given an historical setting, that human rights aren't a privilege revoked when you're a villain. At least not if you simultanously want your heroes to come across as defenders of justice.

This year, Amazon Prime put up the Guy Ritchie King Arthur in my part of the world. Which is so awful that I didn’t manage more than twenty or thirty minutes before giving up. But it did inspire me to a Merlin rewatch for the first time since s5 ended. These last weeks, I managed to squeeze in the entire show, from the pilot to the finale, only skipping two or three episodes which I dimly recalled as too awful and/or boring. But I still found myself ridiculously charmed all over again.

( Spoilers for the once and future show and fanfiction plans )

Since we won't get any new Doctor Who this year (whyyyy?), I've been randomly rewatching parts of the Moffat era as well Thirteen's first season. This didn't cause me to come to any new conclusions (the Twelfth Doctor seasons are my favourite of Moffat's reign, Chibnall's first season is enjoyable without being spectacular), but it reminded me of a great many things I love about the show. (And also made me re-listen to some Big Finish stuff for good measure.)

Another old conclusion that got revived by rewatching: other than The Doctor's Wife (because Doctor/TARDIS OTP, of course) and big anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, my not so secret favourite episode of the Eleventh Doctor part of Moffat Who might be Amy's Choice, and I maintain it's one of the most underestimated ones, possibly because Simon Nye, who wrote it, was neither the show runner nor a famous guest writer like Neil Gaiman.

To re-capitulate: Amy's Choice has a deceptively simple premise: seemigly two realities with our heroes having to figure out which one is the true one. Since one of them has Amy and Rory living in their hometown years post Doctor, and Amy's pregnant, and the other has Amy and Rory plus the Doctor in the TARDIS where last we saw them, this at first seems very obvious. But wait! There are increasing hints that the "meanwhile, on the TARDIS" reality is not quite right, either. Also, there's an entity calling himself the Dreamlord around, viciously played by Toby Jones, goading our heroes in both realiities, with special venom reserved for the Doctor. (Who figures out who the Dreamlord must be quite early on, not least because "there's no one else who hates me that much".) (No, not the Master or Davros.)

The episode works for me on various levels; on a technical level - both realities are increasingly weirder, and the stakes feel ever more threatening, plus the only way out is a threat in itself - dying in one reality, which, if it is the "false" one, means you wake up in the real one, but if you choose wrongly, you're dead . But even more so on a content level, and as a character piece. This was the first episode where I felt I had a grip on who Amy was as a character, and to me, it's hands down one of the best investigations into the darker, murkier sides of the Doctor's personality and consciousness the show ever did. This despite the fact this isn't one of those episodes where we get presented with an "evil" Doctor a la the Valyard in Old Who or "Mr. Clever" in the New Who episode Nightmare in Silver, or an opponent designed to mirror the Doctor's darker impulses without the positive ones (with the orignal conception of the Master but the the most prominent but by no means the only one of such examples), or even the Doctor in a mixture of hubris and nervous breakdown (The Waters of Mars comes to mind). No, in Amy's Choice, the Doctor tries to save the day, as he always does (and eventually succeeds in that), and doesn't commit any ethical violatations while doing so, and no one but our three main characters is threatened, the stakes aren't a planet, let alone the universe.

And we're still treated to that ruthless look at his subconcious for the entire episode. That it's not the Doctor in extremis but the Doctor on a regular day is fundamental to its success as such a look, imo. And now I have to get spoilery. ( Hell aren't always other people. )

That this particular episode is such a favourite for me probably also explains why I didn't fall in love with the Moffat era until Capaldi's Doctor came along, because in general it's rather atypical for the Eleventh Doctor seasons. These were themselves a counterpoint to the previous melodrama-heavy end of the RTD years, and thus the Eleventh Doctor in general definitely counts as one of the "lighter" Doctors. (I don't mean that as a criticism; it really was necessary at the time.) But while I don't want grimdark Who, I do like a certain sharpness in my Doctor characterisation along with the whimsy, some capacity for disturbing mixed in with the capacity for kindness. And Capaldi's Doctor was ideal for in this regard. He wasn't one note about it and developed in his three seasons; the Twelfth Doctor as he was with Bill in his last season was a great deal kinder to most people he encountered than the Twelfth Doctor in his first season with Clara, when she as well as he were wondering whether or not he was a good man, for example. But both Twelve in his early episodes and in his last ones just before regenerating felt like a version of the Doctor capable of being both, the "idiot in the box" and the "oncoming storm". Which is what makes the character so interesting to me.

Since I need fannish joy in my life and since apparently February is the month for ship posts: my recent return to Middle Earth has also reassured me regarding my inner slasher. More recently, there has been many a ship, both m/m and f/f, which I either couldn’t see or which didn’t appeal to me. But say what you want about the Tolkien & Jackson cinematic combination, they bring on the homoeroticism. (Also unexpected het couples, see Gandalf/Galadriel. Plus I’m fascinated by Tauriel & Thranduil both as an ampersand and a /, the later if it’s a slow burn.) When I was a young reader, I loved various of the friendships and was fine with, say, Eowyn/Faramir (yes, it happened fast, but he was Worthy), but it wouldn’t have occured to me to ship in the sense of seeking out fanfic, or wanting the characters to have more romance in between the platonic handholding. Fast forward a few decades, and not only did Sean Bean as Boromir plus the Philippa Boyens/Fran Walsh scriptwriting suddenly make me love a character whom I had been indifferent to, but I suddenly shipped him in every sense of the word with Aragon. (Whom I also felt much stronger about on screen than I had on the page.) The hobbits I loved in either incarnation, though I thought that maybe they were too, hm, cute for jaded old me to ship them?

The Hobbit movies a decade later proved me wrong in this regard. (And I’m even older now!) I fell for Thorin/Bilbo, hard, and, going by my Middle Earthian expeditions in recent weeks, am staying smitten. This, mind you, is a movieverse only thing, since both Thorin in general and the relationship Bilbo has with him have been significantly altered from the novel.

Again, part of it is certainly the actor: as with Sean Bean, so with Richard Armitage. But it’s also the writing. Overall, if a relationship appeals to me so strongly I need to see both parties getting something from it that is unique in their lives. Doesn’t mean they don’t care for other people and/or causes, strongly, too, but for me to root for a pairing, they more often than not need to challenge each other in a particular way.


( Cut for length of ramblings about a hobbit and a dwarf )