Very busy days again, but that's why the brief fics from the "Trick or Treat" exchange make for perfect readings:

Black Widow:

Several highly enjoyable takes set in the flashback to Natasha's and Yelena's childhood era, and quite different from each other:

The Monsters in the Dark

Happy Hauntings

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell:

A Paper Crown: in which Stephen makes a monarchical decision.

Twin Peaks:

People met in a diner, on a day off: Albert Rosenfield, Dale Cooper and *spoiler* post season 3. Manages that Lynchian surreality and a great Albert voice.

How other famous fictional detectives would have solved the murder of Laura Palmer All versions are witty, but the Philip Marlowe and the Phryne Fisher one cracked me up especially. Though I note with disapproval that wihile Poirot is represented, Miss Marple is not. Clearly, the Log Lady would have told her everything she needed to know on the first day. :)

Speaking of Twin Peaks, at first I had no intention of watching The Return, because I didn't feel a sequel was necessary, but then abigail_n's favorable review made me curious, so I marathoned it. And... I can see all her points, but my own impression was far more negative. Not least because there were elements in it which to me felt gratitiously spiteful, such as the fate of Audrey Horne, or disturbing in an unintended way (there's also plenty of deliberately disturbing, but that's a given with Twin Peaks), to wit, things like Janey-E blissfully declaring ( something spoilery ). But also because while the original Twin Peaks was not short of female suffering (I mean, the premise alone...), it had a lot of female pov characters as well (Donna, Audrey, Josie, Norma, Shelley). Twin Peaks: The Return, otoh, feels relentlessly male pov to me, and that in combination with the sheer number of abused female characters was very off-putting.

All this being said: Lynch's visual imagination is as good as ever, and I don't regret having watched it, not least for the incredible tenderness of the conversations between Hawke and Margaret, aka the Log Lady, which were filmed while the actress was dying. Oh, and given it's David Lynch, I should have known he'd cast Laura Dern as Diane. It's now impossible to imagine anyone else in that role, and as the recipient of all those tapes.

I've also continued my Star Trek: Enterprise watching to the point where the infamous post-9/11 narrative shift happens, and great maker, as Londo Mollari would say, is it ever immediately noticable. So that feels as good a point as any to look back at the first two seasons with a couple of observations.

1.) At its best, the show uses its early space flight/no Federation yet setting quite well, and certainly does a better job than Voyager did recalling its ship and crew don't have the Starfleet resources for repairs and restocking at their disposal whenever they need them. The episode when Enterprise has to undergo repairs at a fully automated alien station also struck a good balance between satire (for those of us in need of repairs and unable to talk to a human being, going from automated message to automated message instead) and suspense (the reveal about the extra price may have been a tad predictable, but it worked). Also, I appreciate that through the first two seasons there are repeated scenes where our heroes marvel at some space phenomenon in joy and awe - as explorers who'd never been in deep space before and had not seen pictures would.

2.) Otoh, when the show does the genre- and franchise immanent tropes, it rarely if ever rises above formula. This is where the comparison to Star Trek: Discovery is most striking to me. Discovery also does tropes, but delivers them with original twists. When Enterprise does Episode With Alien Princess And Male Starfleet Officer, it follows the same beats we've seen on TOS, on TNG. When it does "Enemy Mine" (another Trip episode), it does so by the letter. It's not that the result is objectionable (I like "Enemy Mine" stories! I do! And the alien pilot here can act better through his latex than Padma Lakshmi without any in the Princess episode), it's that there is no particular twist unique to this particular show in it. (Meanwhile, TNG gave us Darmok, which for my money is still the best ST twist on this particular tale, and not just because Patrick Stewart gets to tell the tale of Gilgamesh.) Whereas, when Discovery does a time loop episode, it does so in a way that's different from the TNG version, or for that matter the Xena and Buffy versions, furthers the relationships between regulars (Michael Burnham & Paul Stamets, Michael Burnham & Ash Tyler) and expands everyone's characterisations (plus the way our heroine forces the antagonist of the episode to reset the loop one more time is both inventive and outstandingly brave).

3.) Back when I had watched the fourth season without having watched more than the first three episodes of the first or any other season, I said that I found Malcolm Reed and Travis Mayweather bland as characters, without defining characterisation. Which I take back now; in the first two seasons, they get ample characterisation unique to them. Hoshi so far had to do more in s1 than in s2, and I do wish they'd have given her more scenes with T'Pol, because the few they get are always very interesting.

4.) At least two of the episodes are outstanding examples of HOW NOT TO WRITE MORAL DILEMMA EPISODES. Good lord, Berman & Braga. I haven't seen such tone deaf examples of "episode thinks it tells one story while actually coming across as telling something completely different" since TNG's The Outcast (aka the one where the writers' idea had been to do a sympathetic allegory about homosexuality while the result, not least due to the casting of the supposedly androgynous species by solely female actors, came across as Riker versus the planet of the intolerant lesbians). What I'm referring to: "Dear Doctor" in season 1, and "The Congenitor" in season 2. "The Congenitor" irritated me more because for the most part, I thought it worked quite well until we came to the denouement. It was a painful joy to see Andreas "G'Kar" Katsulas again, and his parts of the episode were one of those "space exploration is amazing!" scenes Enterprise, when it wants, does in a heartfelt way. I also before the denouement thought that the presentation of the aliens as both technologically advanced, friendly and, as was revealed through the episode, ( doing something spoilery that goes to the core of the ep ) But this is not what this episode does. It claims this is about cultural differences, and Trip having made the mistake of trying to impose his values on a culture he knows next to nothing about. And nobody, at any point, ( calls it the spoilerly thing it really is about. )

4a)Otoh, Stigma, aka the AIDS episode, to me was a good "sci fi take on a contemporary problem" episode, without any moral smugness and instead an earnest and intense "look in the mirror" subtext. The episode choosing to focus on medical research being slow as long as the illness is regarded as a problem for a minority the majority feels itself entitled to disdain morally, and the hypocrisy of differentiating between "good victims" and "bad victims" (depending on how they got infected) was particular on point for those of us who remember the 80s.

5.) Oh good lord, the bio gel really is as awkwardly fanservice-y as the introduction episodes made it look. I think the most awkward (and very, very American) thing about it is that T'Pol, who ends up in these scenes more often than the rest of the gang, always keeps her underwear on. Look, writers, if it's for de-contamination, you have to put the stuff on your entire skin, surely? *Note to self: don't go off on a tangent about how to do Sauna again*

Briefly, re: multifandom news:

1) New Twin Peaks: Do not want. Leave well enough alone, I say. The second season has been pretty shaky already, and although the ending was great (in a completely mean way, of course), I can't see what a follow up would achieve that would improve on it. I'd rather not know for sure one way or the ther whether SPOILER ever managed to get rid of SPOILER. Or whether SPOILER survived. And that's leaving aside that a lot of what made Twin Peaks so charming and original back in the 1990s has been copied, quoted etc. ad infinitum ever since.

...Otoh, what do I know? I'd have said "do not want" about a Shining sequel, too. And Doctor Sleep turned out to be Stephen King's best book in years (not least because he ditched the first person narration of the last few again), which I wouldn't wanted to have missed.

2.) MCU does Civil War rumor: I'll believe it if it's a bit more substantial than, well, rumor. For starters, the whole Civil War premise makes no sense in the current MCU as it is - only a few superheroes who, after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, had their identities revealed to all and sunder. And that's before we get to the part where the emotional content of Civil War depends on these people having been friends for eons, not being a couple of new aquaintances who just started to get over hostilities.

And a vid rec from the X-Men films: A beautiful portrait of Raven/Mystique!

It's not paranoia if they're really after you. Let's see:

1.) Final scene from Blink, season 3 of current Doctor Who. You know, the one with all those statues. I should add that it doesn't work that way anymore after all the subsequent overexposure of the Angels, but back then? I never felt the same way around statues of any kind again. :)

2.) The panel of a cat dream in Dream of a thousand cats, in volume 3 of The Sandman. Anyone ever owning a cat, or rather, being owned by one, knows that Gaiman reveals the truth here. This is exactly what cats dream of. And if they do accomplish the change they wish, I fear I'll be one of the first to die in the cat revolution. My mother may be spared, being a superbly trained cat servant extraordinaire, but you know, when I'm back home in Bamberg and want to write and our cat wants to sit on the chair in front of the computer? I actually claim that chair and put her down to the floor. I'm DOOMED.

3.) Any number of Twin Peaks scenes featuring BOB, especially if he shows up only at the corner of one's eye, for a moment. But if I have to narrow it down, the final one. If BOB can be in ( spoiler ), there is no hope for the rest of us.

4.) Sweeney Todd, the song Have A Little Priest. I entirely blame Stephen Sondheim for suspecting that any given fast food enterprise, either in history or now, could be a means for serial killers to dispose of bodies. He accomplished this not just by adapting that Victorian potpoiler but for making the music of the ballad when Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett first develop their fiendish scheme such a damm ear worm.

5.) The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling enters what turns out to be the villain's lair, a fact she realises by a moth fluttering by. Now that movie has a great deal of scary scenes, plus I had read the novel it was based on before and actually knew what would happen. But the use of moths in it on screen somehow impacted me differently. Maybe because the night I first saw it, the summer night, I went home, took a shower, had the window open, a moth flew in while I was still in the shower... you better believe I screamed. I had no feelings about moths before. But after this film, I always get a little shudder when coming across one. Though the time in the shower was the only time I screamed. I blame you, Jonathan Demme.

You know, sometimes I wonder whether the worst thing that can happen to a morally ambiguous character is to be adopted by much of fandom as a woobie. Sure, it means there's a lot of fanfic and meta out there, but the whitewashing out of everything that made the character ambiguos to begin with is beyond belief, not to mention that it more often than not comes with a healthy dose of bashing other (in two third of all cases female) characters. I was recently reminded of this again when reading this excellent Lily defense post. (If you thought Voldemort was the Big Bad of Harry Potter fandom, you thought wrongly. Clearly, it's Lily Potter, née Evans, who managed this in her very few limited flashback appearances by virtue of having said no to the woobie.) While we're talking Harry Potter, I also stumbled across this this collection of links on how Remus Lupin is really a pedophile, cannibal and rapist. (In other quarters of fandom, Remus is actually a woobie himself, but in competition with Snape, he apparantly loses in woobiedom. I mean, I'd have thought that of all the Marauders, Remus would be the one not being blamed For Being Mean To Snape, but nooo...)

Meanwhile, crossoverman reminds us it's been twenty years since Twin Peaks was first broadcast by a lovely celebration post. (My own commemoration post from a few years back when I had just finished rewatching via dvd is here.) Twin Peaks influenced so much tv afterwards, and while not an wildly active fandom, it still inspires fannish creativity, such as the excellent Yuletide fanfics, and vids, most recently Ordinary Girl, a beautiful and disturbing vid about Laura Palmer.

Blood Ties

Liberation: plotty, UST and other -tensions soaked story around Mike, Henry and Vicki, solving a case in the aftermath of the Father Mendoza incident. Mmmmm.

Dollhouse

For Those Rebellious: futurefic, in which Priya-Sierra and Tony-Victor are trying to figure out who they are after the Dollhouse.

It starts somewhere: Topher backstory, mixing bright, cheerful and absolutely chilling, very appropriate to the character.

Iron Man

Chaos Magic: post-Secret Invasion, just pre-World's Most Wanted, this is a great Tony Stark portrait at this point.


Momo

Several Architects: lovely, lovely Michael Ende fanfic which as much of what Ende wrote is also great meta on the art of storytelling.


Oresteia

Last Days: Clytemnestra, ruling in Argos, encounters Odysseus. Sharp and memorable.

Der Ring des Nibelungen

Das Lied von der Erde: the story of Wotan and Erda, great to read even if you're not familiar with Wagner's interpretation of Norse mythology. (BTW, the story is in English, not German, non-German speakers.)


Twin Peaks

And Devil Makes Three: absolutely awesome story about the first meeting and subsequent first case Albert Rosenfield shares with Dale Cooper. The snark, the suspense and the mixture of funny and creepy rules, and the character voices are brilliant.

And a treat for friends of Doctor Who and the Latin language:

In Pompeium: given that the family from Fires of Pompeii was from the Cambridge Latin Course, this is only fair!

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

astrogirl2 gave me an L.

L is for...

LaGuerta, Maria, from the tv show Dexter. Who might just possibly be my favourite character, though I love the entire ensemble; it's only Dexter himself I have mixed feelings about after the second season (as well I should, I suppose). LaGuerta gets introduced in the most disfavourable terms in the Dexter pilot - she's described as cop eager for publicity, she is harsh to downright unfair towards Deb whom we like, and makes a barely veiled pass at Dexter, who works for her - but starts to get fleshed out with the second episode (the first one to feature a scene with her and Doakes alone together, and their former partners interaction is one of the highlights of the how), by the fourth episode is seen drawing the consequences from a terrible mistake she made and shouldering the burden from that mistake, and before the season has run its course proved her courage and abilities as a cop. While I have issues with an early s2 subplot concerning LaGuerta, this isn't because it shows her playing dirty but because the method she chooses shouldn't have worked (the fact it did is bad writing, imo); thankfully this is the exception and otherwise her s2 scenes are as good as her s1 scenes.

Laura Palmer, from the tv show Twin Peaks. Like another L, Lily Kane in the first season of Veronica Mars, Laura starts the show dead, and her murder is the mystery running through the first half of the show, but like that other L, she is the antithesis of the woman in the fridge: three-dimensional, messed up and neither the madonna or the whore whom some of her circle see/saw her as. Of all David Lynch heroines, Laura seemed the most real to me, and certainly was the one I felt for most; which is one reason why I really appreciated the much maligned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me prequel. One mystery I never could figure out was how between her high school life and her double life she found the time for meals on wheels, helping the handicapped Johnny Horne and giving Josie Packard the occasional English lesson, but hey. She lives in Lynchworld. *waves hand*

Laura Roslin, from the tv show Battlestar Galactica. Laura started out as my favourite character, and when the s1 finale briefly made her unpopular in parts of fandom (as I recall, it was either because of "crazy religious fanatic" suspicions, or blame for disrupting the Starbuck-Adama Senior relationship by telling Kara about Adama's lie in order to get her on the mission Roslin wanted her to be on, or both) , I wrote a passionate post in her defense. Later on, when Laura didn't just triumph on the show but also over much of fandom, I felt myself becoming a bit distant from her, which is a perverse reflex that kicked in before with another L, Lilah Morgan (see below). But as opposed to Lilah, I never stopped loving her; she's just not my favourite anymore. If I want to convince someone to watch BSG, though, Laura Roslin is still my argument No.1: a middle-aged woman who isn't physically strong and soft spoken but just about the scariest person in the fleet if she wants to be, struggling with her inner dictator as much as she does with post apocalyptic catastrophes and her own sick body, and possibly the most complex person in the ensemble.

Lilah Morgan, from the tv show Angel. I got a kick out of Lilah as soon as she appeared, and really enjoyed each of her scenes. While in the first two seasons, Lindsey was the W&H lawyer who got the in-depth charactersation (with Lilah being more a foil) and was the most beloved in fandom, I was among the few who welcomed Lilah staying and Lindsey leaving. (I thought the show had done all with Lindsey that they could, whereas Lilah still got potential.) Lilah's characterisation throughout s3 was one of the few things I really loved about this least favourite of AtS seasons; while retaining her unrelenting pragmatic evil (as opposed to Lindsey, she never flirted with pangs of conscience), she became a player in her own right....and then Lilah/Wesley happened. And Lilah's popularity shot to the stratosphere. And I found myself torn in two, because on the one hand I enjoyed these scenes as much as the next fangirl (and -boy), but on the other when I wasn't muttering about double standards (re: the different fannish reaction to Buffy and Wesley respectively for their very similar behaviour in relationships started for pretty similar reasons), I was getting more and more irritated by Lilah becoming some sort of Cruella de Sue in much fanfic written at the time. Sadly, this caused a falling out of love. I got my Lilah fondness back in the end, I'm happy to report. Rewatching DVDs and staying the hell away from some fannish quarters helped, as did reading likeadeuce's Lilah fanfic. But it took a while, through no fault of Ms. Morgan's.

Lochley, Elizabeth, Captain, from the tv shows Babylon 5 and Crusade: I never got the fannish impulse to hate replacements of popular characters; more often than not, they make me feel protective of the replacements. In the case of Lochley, who showed up in B5's fifth season because due to reasons still argued about, Claudia Christian who played Ivanova had left the show, I found reasons to like the character beyond that. I liked her new perspective, her sparring with Garibaldi, the fact she didn't hate Bester on sight (it always irritates me when because character X is meant to be one of the heroes, he/she knows instinctively which characters to like and to dislike) but had a semi-positive backstory with him, I liked that precisely because she didn't have backstory with Garibaldi and hence had no kid gloves she was able not just to see but to do something about his falling of the wagon, I liked the backstory Neil Gaiman delivered for her in the episode Day of the Dead, which made me think of A Game of You and other of his graphic novels, and the fact she didn't everyone else's enthusiasm about Penn & Teller. Come Crusade, I really enjoyed her relationship with Gideon and the fact it wasn't played as a grand romance but as two adults who liked each other, were sexually attracted, did something about it and while having no intention of moving in together decided to keep this up. (Imagine my frustration when fanfic not only denied me Max Eilerson, who was my favourite Crusade character, but offered endless Galen romances (so not interested) and nothing about Lochley and Gideon. Bah.) Getting another glimpse at her in the recent Lost Tales was very welcome, as I remain fond of her. And speaking of fanfic frustrations, the fact that Lochley fought on Clark's side during the Earth civil war hasn't nearly been explored enough. Since I am as guilty as anyone of this lack, I might do something about it, once real life permits and a good idea strikes...

In the last month, I've been rewatching Twin Peaks in bits and pieces. (I.e. up to episode 16, after which the show takes a dive until the finale; I also watched Fire Walk With Me.) It's been a long, long while. Some things like different now, some the same. Oh, and the owls are not what they seem.

( Scattered thoughts upon rewatching )