junekey

A most excellent fangirl Saturday night: Sherlock Holmes (damn, Jude Law, you nearly out-hotted RDJ! How did that happen?) and The Cherryh Odyssey. SH '09 is definitely not your mother's Holmes, but it entertained me for two hours, and I would not be adverse to watching a sequel

A disappointing discovery in the new year: Star Trek: First Contact was much cooler when I was 13. Maybe it's because the Borg are as close to horror as I like to get, but the film doesn't really work for me. Picard and his Borg PTSD? Manful Moby Dick angst remains bizarrely compelling. Zephram Cochrane plot? Still smack in the "meh" zone. Data and the Borg queen? OMG hives. Why, Trek screenwriters, why did you mess with success? The entire creeptifying Borg thing is the way they erase identity. So however deliciously evil Alice Krige is, it doesn't really work.

So I watched all three parts of the SGU premier of my own free will. I have to say, I would totally write the fic where they get back to Earth and Chloe uses her parent's political connections to engineer an inquiry into Dr. Rush's security clearance. Needless to say, this turns into an extralegal loyalty board and witch-hunt for Rush's head. The archival footage from the kinos and Icarus Base, as well as testimony from the Destiny - one can hardly call them crew - would destroy Rush in cross-examination.

Wow. When you're stealing plots from Lewis Strauss, maybe it's time to quietly drop this show.

If I were writing SGU, I'd tell a story about 70-odd people, thrown together by circumstance, on a translight ship they don't really control, whose only connection to Earth (communication stones) only works a couple of times before the hardware clunks out. Rush? Evil. Or maybe an alien using the Destiny to get home. The ship? Broken. The entire season would be A-plots where the Earthies have to McGuyver a fix for whatever is breaking this week (life support, power plant, food supply, clothes, medical reserves, people, relationships: the possibilities are limited only by your imagination!) with character development B-plots and the occasional run-in with an advanced alien civilization that might like a crack at Destiny themselves. Think Farscape, with less Scorpius and more Mr. Wizard. (Putting the "science" back in S.F.!) A group of people that eventually becomes a community, educates itself until everyone can read Ancient, knows five ways to duct-tape Ancient equipment into not killing them slowly, and has a very clannish ethical code as Destiny's FTL rips them in and out of local Stargate networks. A series with tons of bottle episodes, at least in S1.

This is almost certainly not the show Mallozzi et al are writing. So far, we have: weepy women, stoic white guys, crazy black men, some backstory I don't find all that interesting and people waving guns and handing Eli a gun with no safety training. Not even, "only point this at people you intend to kill." It would be so cool if they did the show I want, but I don't think it's in the cards. John Rogers, Leverage writer and blogger, scored mega points with me when he said, "Spec-monkeys: Research is fun and people want to tell you all about the fiddly bits of their profession. Don't skimp. I don't feel that the SGU producers and writers take that attitude, and that's a shame. My TV fun is make or broken on the fiddly details. And SGU is going in the "skip" pile because it'll break my heart with its careless attitude toward the fiddly and not-so-fiddly bits.

So obviously I must use my Farscape icon. I mean - that Lt. Scott fellow, a baby John Crichton. Think about it.

I got home at 8:30 last night and at 8:40 my seriously unfannish roommate said, "do you want to go see the new Harry Potter movie?" So we went to a 10-ish showing. Somewhere in there she confessed she really had to see it tonight because her long distance romantic interest was seeing it Friday night and wanted to synch up. (I say "boyfriend", and she says, "he's not my boyfriend" while fondling his dog tags, which she hasn't taken off since he gave them to her. It's kind of adorable.)

She liked it, more than I did: I still think the HP6 climax makes no sense, and the answer to evil, superpowered wizards is more wizards, not drinking killer potions, but then, I was shipping Snape/Lily (in a totally "he was crushing on liek whoa, Y/N?" way) from about 2002. So I am not the target audience. As a movie adaptation, it did okay, but I still think the entire lake-dying-HORRIBLE AVADA KEDAVRA DEATH... thing... was really inexplicable and not particularly well plotted. But it was very pretty on the big screen.

The important part, for me, were the many, many trailers, including a Sherlock Holmes trailer I hadn't seen yet. I had not planned to see SH in theaters until I saw the first trailer and said, "wait, isn't that RDJr?" and upgraded my plans from redbox to matinee showing. Apparently I subscribe to the "crazy = hot" school? This doesn't bode well for my dating future.

I think I have found my metric for fannish interest: can I storyboard a vid to The Road to Mandalay in that fandom? In that case, I'm there.

I can now state from personal experience that the new ST movie (whatever we're calling it), is in fact totally worth a second viewing. It's no less problematic, on so many levels (Vulcan, Uhura, James T. Kirk, the focus on blowing stuff up), but it's also equally awesome. (Hi, space diving. Hi, old school shoutouts! Hi Uhura! I could go on.) And also cheesy (red matter, jeez) but this is Trek, so that is okay. The one with the whales still holds a dear place in my heart.