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phantom-le6 · 3 years

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Episode Reviews - Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5 (5 of 6)

Continuing our voyages with the crew of Captain Picard’s Enterprise, here’s the penultimate round of episode reviews for season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Episode 21: The Perfect Mate

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

Kriosian ambassador Briam comes on board the Enterprise with some cargo, ready for a peace ceremony with the Valtian. As the ship heads to the rendezvous, they save two Ferengi from a failing ship. Despite security being assigned, one of the Ferengi enters the cargo bay and accidentally deactivates the stasis field on Briam's cargo, revealing a young Kriosian woman named Kamala (Famke Janssen). With the Ferengi secured, it is revealed that Kamala is an empathic metamorph who can sense what males around her desire and react appropriately. She was being brought for an arranged marriage to the Valtian representative. Kamala generates pheromones that can affect males around her, which was is partly why she was to be kept in stasis until the ceremony. The other part of the reason is that she is in the final stage of her sexual maturation and must soon permanently imprint upon the desires of one man for the rest of her life.

Briam tells Kamala to stay in her quarters, but Captain Picard allows her to travel throughout the ship, with the unaffected Lt. Commander Data as her escort. This results in a fight nearly breaking out in Ten Forward, when Kamala begins to interact with several miners the Enterprise rescued en route to pick up the Kriosians. The Ferengi seek to bribe Briam to turn Kamala over to them, but he rejects their offer. As he leaves, they attack him, causing him to fall onto a glass table which shatters and to lose consciousness. The Enterprise turns the Ferengi over to the nearest starbase to stand trial, but Briam is unable to participate in the ceremony. Kamala helps Picard to take on Briam's role, and the two become close. He seeks to resist her abilities and asks her to be herself, and she explains that the woman he wants her to be is who she actually is.

They meet with the Valtian ambassador, Chancellor Alrik, who is more interested in the trade agreement than the marriage. With the arrangements made, Picard visits Kamala to say goodbye; she tells him that she has permanently bonded with him instead of Alrik. Kamala explains that he has changed her for the better, and she will continue with the arranged marriage out of the sense of duty she has imprinted from Picard. At the wedding ceremony, Picard escorts Kamala down the aisle and watches as she marries Alrik. After the newlyweds have returned to the planet, Picard says goodbye to Briam in the transporter room. When asked how he resisted Kamala, the expression on Picard's face reveals how much of a struggle it has been and how much he feels he has lost.

Review:

This episode is something to flag up for fans of the original X-Men film trilogy, as it marks the one occasion where Patrick Stewart and Famke Jansen, who played Professor X and Jean Grey respectively in those films, worked together before those films. Now for many people who have apparently reviewed this episode before, this episode falls a long way short of the word ‘perfect’ that comes up in the title. Many apparently criticise the character Famke is given to play, namely that of a woman who is designed to be everyone’s perfect mate, and who is on the verge of an arranged marriage to end centuries of conflict between two alien cultures with a shared ancestry.

Now to some degree, I can understand that criticism, given that marriage is something I don’t feel should be forced on anyone, much less be a tool for political purposes like peace treaties. After all, the intended husband isn’t even interested in the marriage, so you have to wonder what the hell the Kriosians are even playing at putting Kamala up for such a marriage in the first place. Marriage is meant to be for those who want to formalise any form of romantic relationship they might be lucky enough to create, and that’s it. They should not be ‘arranged’ until those who would be getting married decide that is what they want, and if some people just don’t want to marry, that’s ok too. So, if the objection was to the idea of arranged marriage, or that every long-term relationship has to lead to marriage, I totally understand that.

However, the objections seem to be more around the idea that Kamala is, according to Dr Crusher, on a mission that amounts to prostitution, and she is being treated more like property than a person. Given that Kamala comes aboard the Enterprise as a piece of cargo in stasis when she could have transported to sick bay for the same effect (it wouldn’t be the first time Picard’s ship transported guests in a state of suspended animation), and is then confined to her quarters initially, I can also understand some of that objection as well. That said, the episode establishes the Kriosians also have male empathic metamorphs, but they’re very common whereas female metamorphs are only born once in seven generations. Although the episode doesn’t go beyond that, it’s reasonable to assume both sets of metamorphs have the same ability to sense and become whatever the opposite sex wants them to be. This is something I don’t think other reviewers think of, and if true, it means Kriosian women are probably never short of an ideal mating partner compared to the non-metamorph male population.

In addition, Kamala also states she takes joy in being whatever others want her to be, and does so in such a way that it appears to be almost part of her nature. There are plenty of people in real life who also take pleasure in doing good by others, and where that is someone’s own choice rather than something forced on a person, it’s no bad thing. Because of these facets of the episode, I think some reviewers judge the episode too harshly on the whole female metamorph premise. They’re essentially saying female empowerment cannot take the form of someone like Kamala, when actually female empowerment should surely come in whatever form each woman chooses for themselves, because such empowerment is not about one person setting a single standard that all must follow. It’s about giving everyone in the group that needs to be empowered the freedom to empower themselves in the way that works best for them as an individual. Please yourself, please others, do both; as long as the choice is down to the person doing the pleasing and not anyone else, that is empowerment.

All this said, the episode is actually supposed to be about showing us a chink in Picard’s customary stoicism and almost monk-like celibacy, but really, we don’t need this episode for that. We’ve seen Vash get under his skin romantically, and we’ve seen Picard blow his stack a few times with good cause. This episode is consequently quite superfluous in that respect, not to mention it works in the Ferengi to no good effect and much audience irritation. In addition, Red Dwarf’s episode “Camille” featured a guest character with similar abilities to Kamala well over a year earlier, so the episode’s premise about a ‘perfect companion who can sense someone’s desires and become them’ is actually highly unoriginal. This is the second or third time at least that Red Dwarf beat TNG to the punch on an idea, and frankly did it better. Overall and on balance, I give this episode 5 out of 10.

Episode 22: Imaginary Friend

Plot (as given by me):

While the Enterprise begins investigating a nebula formed around a neutron star, Counsellor Troi works with a young girl named Clara Sutter, who has not long come on board the Enterprise with her father Ensign Daniel Sutter. The Sutters have moved between a lot of different postings, and as a result Clara has developed an imaginary friend called Isabella. Her father is worried that Clara is relying too much on Isabella for friendship and no longer even trying to make real friends. While Clara is planting in the ship’s arboretum later, Isabella appears as a real human girl. She encourages Clara to take her to other areas of the ship, which lands Clara in trouble as Isabella disappears around any adults and the sections they go to are off-limits to children for safety reasons. Only Lt. Worf initially sees Isabella at first because he encounters the girls when they are too distracted for Isabella to disappear in time.

Worried that Isabella is now becoming a kind of excuse for Clara to get away with misbehaviour, Troi insists Clara spend some time around real children. She convinces Clara to leave Isabella behind when going to attend a ceramics class with the other children on the Enterprise. This angers Isabella, who first spills Counsellor Troi’s hot chocolate in her quarters, then ruins a cup being made by Worf’s son Alexander so that Clara would be blamed. Fleeing to the arboretum in tears, Clara is confronted by Isabella, who threatens to kill everyone on board. Troi initially tries to convince Clara isn’t real and does a check of her room, only for Isabella to appear and attack her with some kind of energy discharge.

Meanwhile, the Enterprise has begun to get entangled in a lattice of plasma strands within the nebula that create a drag effect on the ship. Several energy beings then arrive and begin to drain the shields. Realising that the manifestation of Clara’s imaginary friend is some kind of alien life form, Captain Picard visits the arboretum along with Clara, her father and Worf. Isabella appears and declares her race wanted to try and feed off the Enterprise’s energy and determine if humanity was a threat; the crew’s treatment of Clara suggested to the aliens that humanity was cruel and mistreated their children. Picard explains that the rules Clara was subject to are a part of how humans keep their children safe until they have developed enough awareness not to know what is or isn’t dangerous, and offers energy to the aliens freely. Isabella accepts, and the alien beings within the nebula soon cease their attack. After transmitting some energy into the nebula, the Enterprise leaves, Clara and Isabella making friends with each other again as they say goodbye to each other.

Review:

Although some scenes in this episode were a bit cringe-worthy and demanded some fast-forwarding, it has a very interesting premise that I think more people, especially parents, should consider. Not only do we see a child’s imaginary friend become real, but then we get see how we might be judged if an alien opted to judge us from the perspective of a child. I think Picard sums up best how great an idea this is when he confronts the alien posing as Isabella, and I quote;

“You are seeing this ship, all of us, from a unique perspective - from a child's point of view. It must seem terribly unfair and restrictive to you. As adults, we don't always stop to consider how everything we say and do shapes the impressions of young people, but if you're judging us, as a people, by the way we treat our children - and I think there can be no better criterion - then you must understand how deeply we care for them. When our children are young, they don't understand what might be dangerous. Our rules are to keep them from harm, real or imagined, and that's part of the continuity of our Human species. When Clara grows up, she will make rules for *her* children, to protect them - as we protect her.”

Picard is totally right because if you look at how the adults deal with Clara, she gets told certain areas of off-limits, but never why, so how can she or Isabella know that what the adults are doing is for their benefit? Somehow, they’re expected to just know without being told, and in that sense it’s not unlike what dealing with the world is like for autistic people like myself. Our ability to learn the unwritten rules of society, the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’, is impaired to a point where we need things spelled out, and yet at times our non-autistic peers seem even less aware of such things than we are. All too often people like to assume others will just know what they know and never stop to think “what if they don’t?” This is a key reason why I often tend to post longer posts on social media than I necessarily need to, and why I will often try and explain something to one of my nieces or nephews in full and not just go with the truly idiotic response of ‘because I said so’. If you want anyone to learn anything, you don’t just tell them something, you teach them something.

It’s also interesting to have Guinan in the episode advocating for us not to abandon imagination as we grow up. A lot of this episode seems to be directed around the idea of getting Clara to abandon her imaginary friend, and could potentially be seen as somehow anti-imagination. However, there’s Guinan spotting cloud-shapes in the nebula and talking about her own imaginary friend, and I think it’s important that we all keep some imagination as adults. After all, imagination is part of how we find solutions to problems, and finding solutions is something the world needs to get back into the habit of doing. These days, it seems more inclined to play blame games and complain without actually trying to wipe problems out so they don’t keep plaguing us. For me, this episode earns 7 out of 10; it really needed some better scenes from some of the child actors in the middle, and frankly I think they went a bit too creepy with Isabella. The dress that character wore just screamed ‘creepy twins from the Shining’ the moment I saw it, and that’s not a great image to have while watching Trek.

Episode 23: I Borg

Plot (as adapted from Wikipedia):

The crew discover a wrecked Borg scout ship with a single survivor; an adolescent Borg drone. Dr Crusher insists on treating the surviving Borg despite the concerns of Captain Picard. On Picard's orders, the drone is confined and monitored by security forces at all times and is prevented from contacting the Borg Collective. Lt. Commander La Forge and Lt. Commander Data assist Crusher in bringing the Borg back to health. As they come to understand the workings of the Borg, La Forge and Data devise an idea of using the Borg drone as a weapon of mass destruction. By implanting an unsolvable geometric formula into his mind and returning him to the Collective, the formula should rapidly spread (similar to a computer virus) and disable the Borg. Crusher is aghast at this suggestion, considering it equivalent to genocide, while Picard and the other senior crew deliberate on the ethics of this plan.

The Borg drone initially calls himself "Third of Five", but ends up referring to and understanding himself as "Hugh", the name given to him by La Forge. Hugh discusses how the Borg only wish to learn about other cultures through assimilation, but La Forge counters this argument, discussing aspects of individuality that make them human and unique. In further debates, La Forge finds himself becoming a friend to Hugh, and begins to doubt his previous idea. This is further complicated when Hugh shows elements of individualism. The crew now debate whether it is appropriate to sacrifice one individual to protect the majority, though Picard is still insistent on destroying the Collective. Crusher and La Forge arrange to have Guinan, who has a similar loathing for the Borg because they destroyed her homeworld, speak to Hugh.

She finds Hugh to be not a mindless drone but a confused young man, and she agrees Hugh is no longer a Borg. Guinan convinces Picard to meet with Hugh, as well, and Picard comes to the same conclusion, in part because Hugh refers to himself as "I" instead of the Borg's collective "we" during their discussion. Picard abandons the proposed plan and instead offers Hugh asylum within the Federation. Hugh expresses enthusiasm at the prospect of remaining with La Forge but ultimately refuses, recognizing that the Borg will still come looking for him. He offers to be returned to the crash site, where he will be found and re-assimilated by the Borg. Picard hopes that, once Hugh is reconnected, the sense of individualism Hugh has learned will spread throughout the Collective. La Forge accompanies Hugh to the crash site and, from a safe distance, watches the Borg recover him. Just as the Borg transport out, Hugh turns to give La Forge a parting glance.

Review:

While many fans dislike this episode because they feel it de-fangs the Borg, I am not one of them. What this episode does with the Borg is continue what “Best of Both Worlds” started to show us, and what later Borg stories would continue to show, which is that without the hive mind, these villains are actually nothing of the kind. In essence, it’s the collective will of the Borg that drives assimilated individuals to commit horrendous acts against their will. Split the individual back off from the collective, however, and the individuality starts to creep back in. If anything, this episode helps showcase how truly horrifying the Borg are, because they turn individuals into mindless extensions of the group, and such is a fate worse than death. If I was to take a tag-line from a Warhammer 40,000 race and apply it to the Borg, it would be the one about the Dark Eldar; pray they don’t take you alive.

The episode is also interesting in that we get Picard and Guinan in the episode as people who have suffered at the hands of the Borg wanting nothing to do with this drone. Guinan wants the thing straight up off the ship or dead, and Picard is perfectly ok with the idea of using the drone to wipe the Borg out completely, and yet both ultimately realise this lone Borg is as much a victim as they are. Given how often some people in society who have been hurt come to hate anyone linked to their tormentors even when those people are innocent and may even be victims themselves, I think this is an important episode in TNG that should be viewed by as many people as possible. There’s a great lesson here about not punishing an individual for the crimes of their states and only assigning blame where it is actually due. For me, this episode racks up 9 out of 10; it loses one point for a production blunder around using the “I” pronoun too early in the guest Borg’s progression towards individuality.

Episode 24: The Next Phase

Plot (as given by me):

The Enterprise receives a distress call from a Romulan warbird and goes to their aid, finding the vessel adrift and badly damaged. Commander Riker leads an away team over to the warbird that includes Lt. Commander La Forge, Lt Worf and Ensign Ro, with Ro muttering an objection to Riker’s order that the away team goes in unarmed. When La Forge and Ro try to beam back with a damaged engine component, their patterns are lost and the pair are believed to be dead.

While Riker and Worf continue to work with the Romulans to save the stricken warbird, Captain Picard has Lt. Commander Data begin an investigation of the transporter accident, and Data also begins to try and plan a memorial service for La Forge and Ro. However, the two officers have somehow returned to the Enterprise, though neither of them can be seen by the other members of the crew, and both are able to pass through solid objects and all other people except each other. Ro, having seen Dr Crusher begin to make out death certificates, believes they are dead and begins to try and make peace with her fellow crew-members. La Forge, however, is convinced they are still alive, and convinces Ro to join him in tagging along when Data makes a shuttle trip over to the warbird.

Following Data and examining the warbird soon enables La Forge to deduce what has happened; the Romulans were testing a way to combine their cloaking device with a phase inverter. In theory, such a combination would render a ship invisible to sight and sensors while enabling it to pass through solid matter. Somehow La Forge and Ro became cloaked and phased during transport. Overhearing the Romulans plan to use an energy transfer beam from the Enterprise to rig the other ship’s engine to explode when it goes to warp, La Forge and Ro become determined to undo their condition so they can warn their crewmates. However, the pair do not realise they are being followed by a Romulan who has somehow become phased like themselves.

Back on the Enterprise, La Forge and Ro discover from Data that chroniton fields have been left everywhere they’ve been, and that these can be neutralised using anyon particles. While La Forge sticks with Data, and learns the chronitons result from a phased person passing through other objects, Ro follows the transporter chief, only to be cornered by the phased Romulan up on the Bridge. She ultimately manages to escape the Romulan, only to then be caught again after a chase through the crew quarters. La Forge stumbles upon the pair just in time to save Ro by hurling the Romulan out into space through the outer bulkhead.

La Forge’s time with Data has also revealed anyon particles can de-phase and uncloak himself and Ro, and the pair promptly head to Ten-Forward where much of the crew has gathered for their memorial service. After several attempts, La Forge and Ro manage to make themselves briefly visible to Picard and Data, the latter swiftly realising what has happened and ordering a maximum-level anyon flood of Ten-Forward to aid their friends. Once unphased and decloaked, La Forge orders the Enterprise’s engines taken off-line so he can reverse the Romulan sabotage. The pair then join the party-style memorial, and later discuss their experience with each other.

Review:

There’s not a huge amount to say about this episode because it’s one of those rare occasions where a Trek episode has no real depth or substance, which is ironic considering it deals with a main character and a recurring character being made into pseudo-ghosts. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun episode to watch, especially for the somewhat New Orleans-style funeral in Ten-Forward (Ro firing the phased Romulan disruptor through Riker while he’s playing the tuba is especially funny), but there’s no real issue exploration going on much. We just get a scene here or there that suggests Ro trying to wrestle with her Bajoran spiritual beliefs, but we don’t get enough of that for the episode to be about that. Really, it’s just using technobabble to stick two characters in a jam, then seeing them piece together a technobabble solution that saves the day.

Apparently, the episode also gets criticised for the phasing concept not resulting in all the affected characters going through the floor. Clearly, those critics have never read a bloody X-Men comic. In 1980, Chris Claremont and John Byrne first introduced Marvel readers to one Kitty Pryde, who would eventually develop the code-name of Shadowcat and whose power was the ability to phase through solid matter. However, there were a lot of rules around how that power got used; going through the ground was like going through water and Kitty would have to hold her breath. If she phased through anything electrical, it got shorted out, and with training Kitty could phase part of herself while keeping the rest solid. Likewise, DC Comics’ speedsters like the Flash have the ability to phase using their speed powers, and again that phasing doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing application.

Basically, when you apply the power of phasing to a living being, it’s not going to be total and absolute intangibility that the being has zero control over. Some element of conscious or sub-conscious control to prevent phasing into the Earth’s core or flying off into space must apply as a necessary in-built safety characteristic, or else it wouldn’t be worth having that power. By the same token, it follows that a phased person on a starship won’t automatically phase through the floor; some part of their mind would resist that and the phasing ability would follow suit, and the only reason this didn’t save the Romulan when La Forge pushes him is that getting pushed in such a manner interfered with that mental process somehow. The bottom line is the episode makes sense in that regard; what doesn’t make sense is making a Trek episode that’s all technobabble and no substance. As such, I’m only inclined to give this one 7 out of 10.

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phoorn · 3 years

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SWORD

I'm a writer, a cliche. When I was young writing was easy. Now it's hard. How?

Well, you get scared, don't you? And too ambitious. Your mouth's bigger than your stomach, your arms are puny.

And you're not at school any more. That's the tricky part. There's no Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. You need one, or you sit around wasting your one and only life. It's insane, but that's how it is.

So let me organise one. I, **** ***** do pledge to have written this new story I've come up with before seven days have passed. It's 10 Dec right now, so let's say I get it done by the end of 17 Dec, next Thursday.

I'll say a bit more about my situation. I've been published -- a small publisher, the book sank. I mean, I think people bought it. But I never saw any of the money. I'm not sure to this day if I got scammed.

That was quite some time ago. I was contracted to write a follow-up, but terrible things happened, I went mad, I had no idea what I was doing, I slinked away into the shadows. As I say, I'm not sure to this day if I got scammed. I'm also not sure if scammed my publisher. I've kept my head down since.

It's been quite some time since then. What have I done? Well, not much, right? I did nothing for many years. In the past couple of years I've done some writing, finished one story, nearly finished a bunch of others. I mean, I've always got to the end of the first draft. I've retired from the race every time somewhere about the middle of the second.

Some of these stories are ... not bad. The truth is, though, they're not amazing. They're not what someone of my ego would expect from someone who was published for the first time as early as I was.

I HAVE BEEN HUMBLED. God knows I needed it. You're not as good as you think you are. Someone on Youtube a while ago said something like the tricky thing is we think we're great because we know we have great taste. We read books and go, "I'd do that part better." "I hate how she does this. God, is she stupid?"

It's like watching streamers on Twitch. They are in fact better than their audience, but their audience goes, "Why did he get supply-blocked there?" It's cause he was doing a bunch of things you don't have the eye to notice, and he's 2000 MMR higher than you, shut up.

But I am getting better. I can see improvement in all these stories. Each one is mostly better than the last. Sometimes the ideas are worse, but they're still better-executed.

I just need to do more. I'm not young. It's a bit scary, to have considered yourself a writer all your life but not to have really practiced.

So that's that; there's my pledge. I'm gonna post a diary entry every day, too. Short. I won't go on and on. I like talking, you know. I like writing. But I have no writer friends to talk to. I don't think you need them. Talking does help, though. Some of my best story ideas come from my talking to myself, explaining to imaginary journalists how I made my millions.

I'm putting the source on Gitlab. If you know about Git, you'll know you'll be able to go look at all of the different revisions. You might find it fun. I've thought about streaming on Twitch, too, so you can watch every word, every hesitaiton. But thinking about it today made me nervous, so, no, I won't bother.

This secret blog is about enough for me. It's public, but not really, cause it's unknown. Pretty perfect.

Here follows the first day of notes. They actually written in my diary. I won't post notes like this again. It'll all be in the repo.

I should also say I don't plan to be very comprehensible here. I don't plan to be a blogger, though right now in the throws of enthusiasm it seems to me doing this (pledge, blog) for every story is a very intelligent thing to do. But it's a means to an end. The end, by the way, is riches, fame, an editor. I'd give my right arm for an editor.

FIRST DAY

2020-12-10T06:26:36+00:00

I'm not going back to mogen. No. One day I will. Let's do something new. Yes. 5,000 words for real. I've had plenty of ideas. As usual I'm influenced by things I've been reading.

Something I've always loved is spies. Really I mean "darkfriends". In the Wheel of Time, there's darkfriends -- they follow Shai'tan. Anyone could be one. It was the thing that made WoT really good. A Song of Ice and Fire has the same thing -- people aren't "darkfriends", but they can betray you. There's always danger.

Though in a short story I don't think I can do that. I could write a story about a guy who's found a spy. Or a guy who's a spy himself. Though that would involve coming up with a palace/court. But I wouldn't have to go into detail. Do I have one already? Not really.

There's also the shogun's wife idea. A story about a shogun's wife trying to keep him occupied, save him / the country in some way.

Since it's a short story it could be about her trying to get his mistress back. She's leaving because he's unstable. But the wife needs her back because she keeps him stable.

A story about a spy who needs to get some papers for his country. That'd need a few more thousand words to be worth it.

A dangerous world. That's another idea I've been having. I've written it down. Worlds with danger -- monsters, weather -- in them are the best. Middle Earth is dangerous. Randland (WoT's world) is dangerous (because of darkfriends). The Shadow of the Echo of All That is Lost's (James Islington's trilogy, not its real name) world is dangerous -- it's full of ancient, dangerous powers.

Another idea I've been having is about a magic that's only "items". Only objects of power, no power that a person can themselves wield. But I've always liked that, fuck knows why.

A story about a magic artefact. That sums up 90% of fantasy.

A fun story about a fun girl.

Which of these do I want to write? I'll look briefly through my story ideas first.

OK, something important: I've made a note to write a story about a character that wants something, needs something else and cant have either. This is how Brandon Sanderson writes. I will make sure to do that.

Another pertinent note: it says to think of the "perfect" world, thinking of all the books, games and films I've read/played/watched.

Middle Earth: loneliness, emptiness. Xenoblade Chronicles: a world on a God's body. Final Fantasy VII: Midgar, black pipes. Final Fantasy VI: cold waste, mechs. The Shadow of the Whatever: an ancient place filled with dormant, dangerous things. WoT: the atmosphere of the first and second novels. The world isn't amazing, come to think about it.

CJ Cherryh's Alliance Universe: it's sci-fi, but there's a lovely tenuous feel. Everyone's vulnerable going through space, everyone's weak.

OK, let's think about that. There's a new season of Attack of Titan. That's got an incredible premise. I could do something similar.

Rather than huge monsters, let's have small beautiful people. Who are kind and intelligent. That's scary because you're the bad guy.

You're an ancient monster. You're perverted, you love fear and pain. Or maybe you're a human. And perverted -- actually perverted but also basically normal. But the "monsters" are these beautiful creatures. They're elven. And they have no respect for you. They'll lock you up or kill you if they find you.

You WANT: To be accepted You want to be one of them You've found a magic spell that can make you into one of them To escape To kill them all, start the human rebellion To escape with A magic artifact Something that could kill them all A weapon that could be used to wage war A portal or ship that could take you to the moon Your mother sister girlfriend father The monsters are: Humans that changed themselves Using a spell They gave themselves magic powers They look just like you, so you can't tell who's who at a glance You can tell pretty quickly, though

It seems ... OK. What the opposite of perfect monsters? Imperfect humans. Maybe it's our guy who is perfect. No, I wouldn't know how to write that.

Let's just try out a lot of these wants and needs.

He WANTS: To be accepted. He NEEDS: To live happily, discrimination-free?

So, he wants to be one of them, but needs to just be accepted. That's fine.

How does he go about getting what he wants? How do you become someone else? He could use the same magic spell they did. He could use a different one. They somehow do it the real way, he the fake way. A bit like Gattaca.

Let's make the community small. It's not a world, just a village. An interesting village, and this will have something to do with what changed the rest of them.

Well, first, how about people start disappearing and appearing outside? It's a bit Attack on Titan. And not that original. Really cool, though.

But that wouldn't come into it. That would have already happened. And maybe wouldn't be explained. So, they became the superior humans by this mysterious mechanism. He's trying to fake it.

They all left and seemed to become really happy/intelligent/healthy. But they won't come back into the city.

They keep disappearing. Are they being taken? I think yes. Finally our guy is the only one left in the town. And he leaves, tries to become one of them.

They look different. They're covered in hair. So he shaves all the dogs and cats in the city, covers himself in their hair and leaves.

He finds a small camp of them. They don't accept him.

Or they do, though they know he's not one of them. I mean, they don't care. Or maybe they do. Maybe whenever he gets close they leave. Or maybe they just accept him. Do what you want, they say. They don't run away. But they don't really talk to him.

If they run away, that'd be cool. Nasty. Lonely for him. If not, you'd be able to see what they say. Maybe it's only when he covers himself in fur they let him stay. But they know he's not one of them.

He'd need to figure out what happened to them. In the end he doesn't do it in time and they all leave.

Or maybe he does figure it out and they leave. He just doesn't get something.

So what is it?

A drug A book A religion A small sphere They keep going to the sphere, standing around, then leaving When he finds it, he stands around He doesn't feel anything, but he changes to look like them The next time he sees them, they're walking -- not as a group He follows, tries to talk to them and they don't say anything. A minstrel

That's a nice mystery. It's got a nice feel to it. Btw I just took a small detour -- 2020-12-10T08:17:37+00:00 -- to make rsn's random number not be based on the time.

Randomness in programs. You start by "seeding" a random number generator. The classic way to do this is "srand (time (NULL))". srand takes an integer. time (NULL) returns the current second (since the start of Unix time).

The problem with with this approach is if you run the program more than once in a second you get the same result. Because the seed is the same.

Now I'm reading from /dev/random:

int fd = open ("/dev/random", 0); int seed; if (fd != -1) { ssize_t ret = read (fd, &seed, sizeof seed); if (ret != sizeof seed) { /* warn ("Couldn't read from /dev/random: using time (NULL) instead"); */ seed = time (NULL); } } else seed = time (NULL); srandom (seed); if (fd != -1 && close (fd)) err (1, "Couldn't close /dev/random");

You will see it defaults to time (NULL) if for some reason /dev/random can't be opened.

/dev/random is a psuedo device. Linux "collects" entropy over time and sticks it in a kind of pool. I have no idea how that works. But you can read random numbers from /dev/random.

Back to the story. It's a nice mystery, one of those what's-going-on stories. Do I explain what's going on? Stephen King says that stories that don't show the monster are cheating. But when you do show the monster you lose something.

Let's just come up with a half-explanation. Like a book, drug or sphere. But say nothing else.

Maybe instead of them leaving they go back to the village and don't let him back in. "Get the fuck out! And stay out!" Or they just acts as if nothing's happened.

Maybe it's him that's put them out there. Magic.

How could he be responsible? It'd be hard for it to be him, if they're supposed to be content.

Maybe they're experiencing something more. They're actually logged into the magical multiverse net.

Maybe he spoils it in some way. And they don't get to ascend.

The important thing is what's the thing that's brought them out there.

It's got to be something weird or incredible. Let's favour weird. Let's get some random sentences:

Its a garbed jollified Its a refractable corrugate Its a remindful hiccupping Its a backboneless chum Its a upland erase Its a cacuminal compart Its a accented bishoping Its a emendatory deceive Its a isoperimetrical reground Its a agrostological appear Its a urticant hinnied Its a reunionistic presses Its a homodont barber Its a unscrupulous cellars Its a psychic harp Its a Laodicean prevaricate Its a clipped hurries Its a quartic worst Its a stimulant eulogised Its a tangiest processes Its a numerable dosing Its a cornered totalizes Its a raggle-taggle focussed Its a sacrificial dissuade Its a synoicous enable Its a kingly recapped Its a unconscionable woofs Its a silver depone Its a self-confessed heathenized Its a led flocks Its a microseismical cons Its a hypodermal rehangs Its a fogless trephined Its a urbanized mutating Its a bewitching trauchling Its a boozy untruss Its a unanxious blow-dries Its a elenctic platinise Its a usurpative alleviates Its a unsatisfiable overbids Its a Jugoslav embedded Its a redder booby-trap Its a torn rinsing Its a intelligible fans Its a decorative restrict Its a annalistic bandying Its a oral shikars Its a sejant outlast Its a sapindaceous mussitate Its a evoked antiquates Its a secular impaled

Of those I like:

Its a psychic harp Its a accented bishoping Its a silver depone Its a backboneless chum Its a refractable corrugate Its a secular impaled

A psychic harp. That's straightforward. It'd be just sitting out there, playing itself sometimes. Or is someone playing it? Our guy thinks about going up there, touching the empty space. That's scary.

The accented bishoping -- an accented bishop. Just a bishop, sitting out there on the hills. Not that great.

Its a silver depone. I'm not sure what a depone is. But it doesn't matter. I've settled on the psychic harp.

It's psychic. That means it can hear your thoughts. It can communicate, though, but only in music. Is it communicating, our guy thinks?

It could play folk songs. Our guy would know the words. But he'd know various words and wouldn't get far.

Maybe the crux of the story is the meaning of the tune it's playing. Is it "My Johnny Went off to War" or "The Silver Plate", which is about a woman who kills herself because her Johnny cheats on her?

Or maybe the songs are about the town, or God. Let's just say he listens and changes. He thinks about marching to war. And then everyone leaves.

Probably best to not bother with the words stuff. Won't be able to make it work. It's just a mesmerising tune, and it changes him.

And then people leave. This is fine. Will people think it's just weird / feel unsatisfied? I can't know.

I'm feeling a little self-conscious now because I'm thinking I'll go post this on my blog, announce that I'm going to finish this story in a week, put the repo on Gitlab, stream this on Twitch. I like the idea of it. Probably best not to bother with Twitch.

Alright, let's plan that. Where to post? I can stick it on my Tumblr. Toks has made a website, apparently. I could do the same. I won't, though.

Today Make repo, stick it on Gitlab. Write post for Tumblr, include these notes. Write All characters, names, etc -- temp names -- wants, needs Synopsis Clean kitchen Call Mother Put money on phone Read

#pledge #sword #damocles #writing #story

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chiseler · 4 years

Text

The Chiseler Interviews Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito discusses pre-Code talkies, noir and leftist politics with one of America’s leading film critics.

DR: We share a common enthusiasm for early talkies. Do you have any favorite actors, writers or storylines relating to the period’s ethnic, often radically left-wing, politics? I'm thinking of the way that, say, The Mayor of Hell suddenly busts into a long Yiddish monologue. Or movies like Counsellor at Law and Street Scene present hard Left ideas through characters with Jewish, Eastern European backgrounds.

JR: Both Counsellor at Law and Street Scene are plays by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that Rice himself adapted, and both are terrific films with very good directors (William Wyler and King Vidor, respectively). It's too bad that Rice's plays aren't revived more often today, although a few years ago, the TimeLine theater company in Chicago put on a fantastic, neo-Wellesian production of The Adding Machine. I also had the privilege of knowing Rice's two children with actress Betty Field, John and Judy, who attended the same boarding school in Vermont, both of whom I remember quite fondly.

Although it isn't as politically subversive as the Rice plays, the delightful Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932) is still a more radical comedy in its treatment of class and sex — specifically, the sexual lure of being robbed as another way of being sexually possessed and enjoyed — than Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, released a little later the same year. There's also something prophetic about the use of charm, good manners, and marihuana joints to lure the cops away from crime and criminals — another form of sensual appeal, in contrast to the more ethereal romanticism preached by the Lubitsch film, which might be said to value style over content and suggestion over spelling things out. For that matter, even a conservative director like Cecil B. De Mille does amazing things with class and sexual tensions in his melodrama Dynamite (1929) — which deserves to be cherished today at least as much as his subsequent Madame Satan — undoubtedly assisted by at least one Communist (John Howard Lawson) among his screenwriters. Especially in Dynamite, proletarian interests and biases are honored and rewarded at least as much as luxuries and privileges. The convoluted plot may be absurdly contrived, but by getting an heiress (Kay Johnson) married to a coal miner (Charles Bickford) awaiting execution for a crime he didn't commit, the movie gives us archetypes so dialectically opposed that any sexual congress between them virtually guarantees an explosive climax as promised by the title, and De Mille in fact delivers several.

DR: I once compared Elmer Rice's words in the play Counsellor at Law to the final screenplay. There were very definite cuts to his radical (colloquial) language. Bebe Daniels’ character would have put her heart into a (sadly) excised line about police brutality. Rice demonstrated enormous sensitivity to the way everyday people felt and spoke. Do you have a favorite writer — especially where sassy dialogue is concerned?

JR: I wish I did, but that's beyond my range of expertise. However, one name that sparkles for me is Donald Ogden Stewart. He's only one of the four credited screenwriters on Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast's exquisite Laughter (1930) — for me the only early talkie that measures up to F. Scott Fitzgerald in sophistication — along with Herman Mankiewicz and d'Arrast himself, but I like to think that he's the crucial figure.

Donald Ogden Stewart

DR: Oh, I love Laughter! You're making me want to see everything Donald Ogden Stewart ever wrote. You mentioned Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast and Herman Mankiewicz. Could you expand on your interest in either or both of them? Your answer needn't focus on any particular period.

JR: I've been trying for some time to investigate d'Arrast's work, but it's been almost impossible because of all the lost films (apparently Service for Ladies, Serenade, The Magnificent Flirt, and Dry Martini) and/or unavailable films (It Happened in Spain and The Three Cornered Hat). Pierre Rissient, who knew him, denied the rumors about him being antisemitic and argued that he had a lot to do with Hallelujah, I'm a Bum because of all the work he did on preproduction. The other films that he worked on which I've seen —Wings, A Gentleman of Paris, Raffles, and Topaz--all testify to his special qualities.

DR: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum makes me think of Ben Hecht, naturally, but also of Hecht's friend and sometimes co-writer Maxwell Bodenheim who wrote Naked on Roller Skates, one of my favorite books, loaded with 1930s slang. A weird mix of pulp fiction and experimentalism. We touched on radical leftism and ethnicity earlier... How do you account for full-on communist films like Our Daily Bread getting made in Hollywood? Or what about the social justice films out of Warner Bros., like Wild Boys of the Road, which features little Sidney Miller hurling "Chazzer!" at a cop. I'm sometimes astounded by the open radicalism one finds in early Sound-era films. I even went digging through the Warner archives hoping to find evidence that senior execs might have harbored radical left dreams and discovered an early script of Heroes for Sale, which compared Richard Barthelmess' character to Jesus Christ — after making him a brick-throwing, cop-fighting member of the I.W.W.!

JR: We have to remember that Communist values were very close to being a mainstream position during much of the 30s. I've long maintained, for instance, that Faulkner's Light in August is a Communist novel, simply because Faulkner, for all his eccentricity and conservatism, was part of the mainstream during the Depression. Our national amnesia tends to factor this out of our history, just as (to cite a more trivial but more recent example) America's love for Jerry Lewis throughout most of the 50s, which enabled him to make two or three pictures a year, is not only forgotten but illogically replaced by the so-called (and mostly imaginary) love of the French, as if this were the reason why Lewis could make so many movies in the U.S. and why Sailor Beware made a lot more money than either Singin' in the Rain or On the Waterfront.

I'm a novice when it comes to Ben Hecht — apart from having read Adina Hoffman's excellent recent critical biography of him — because both his cynicism and his contempt for Hollywood are automatic turn-offs for me. But Bodenheim is clearly, at least for me, a Topic For Further Research.

DR: Speaking of leftism in 1930s Hollywood, what connections do you draw between that period and the emergence of noir, in which the old ebullience of the radical left seems to have soured into (a more realistic?) nihilism and anger. Maybe I'm projecting there. In any event, do you find it useful, or perhaps even inevitable, to make connections between pre-Code and noir? I can't help noticing how many forties and fifties films wind up in sewers, industrial parks and abandoned factories, which all feel like inhuman representations of capitalism. Try and Get Me AKA The Sound of Fury is famously based on Jo Pagano's The Condemned, a book coming out of a hard-left perspective. Or do you find other, less political connections between these periods interesting?

JR: I don't find noir more "realistic" than 30s leftism. Au contraire, I find its defeatism and expressionism far more comforting. Closure, no matter how grim or grimy, is always more comforting than ellipsis and suspension — trajectories into possible futures. I think the popularity of noir today has a lot to do with a doom-laden death wish, a desire to escape any sense of responsibility for a future that seems helpfully hopeless — an attitude that "blossoms," decadently, into the Godfather trilogy, where corruption is seen as "tragically" (that is to say, satisfyingly) inevitable. Once the future becomes foreclosed, we're all left off the hook, n'est pas?

DR: Well said, Jonathan. I hereby spare you my own personal dialectic, which ricochets between radical left politics (love, solidarity, hope) and totalizing disgust with human kind. In fact, I only mention that particular tension as a way of pointing out that my last question spoke to broad tendencies. Ever see Chicago Calling? One of Dan Duryea's finest moments! It seems to me that the film, along with the best "dark" post-WWII cinema, not all of it "noir" per se, manages to ricochet that way. Do you have any favorites from the period? If so, what draws you there?

JR: I haven't yet seen either Chicago Calling or Guilty Bystander (another early and obscure noir I just heard about), both of which I'm currently downloading. (Stay tuned...)

Otherwise, noir is too vast a subject for me to comment on at any length just now, except to recommend James Naremore's (for me) definitive book on the subject, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.

DR: What do you think of Felix Feist’s work?

JR: Based on what I've seen, I'm not a fan.

(Here, we break so that Jonathan Rosenbaum can watch Chicago Calling)

JR: Now that I've watched Chicago Calling, I can't help but reflect that noir and neorealism, contemporary film movements, may actually be opposite sides of the same coin. (Isn't Open City a noir, and The Sound of Fury an alternate version of The Bicycle Thief?) The key traits that they have in common are "postwar" and "originating in Europe," but the key difference that should be acknowledged at the outset is that "noir" in this country wasn't perceived as such when the films that we now identify as "noir" first appeared. Even in France it had a literary connotation because it was a name derived from a book publisher. So it's a way of reinventing and reinterpreting the past, whereas Italian neorealism was perceived as such from the get-go. It also was fundamentally humanist whereas noir was closer to nihilism and cynicism, and its tendency towards political defeatism obviously has a lot to do with its contemporary appeal — absolving us of any responsibility for the messes we live in.

Chicago Calling is closer to neorealism than it is to noir because of its exciting use of natural locations and its focus on working-class characters. Yet as a hard luck story it seems so overdetermined that at times it becomes metaphysical, which places it closer to noir. Dan Duryea is an actor that we mostly associate with noir and metaphysics, so it's refreshing to find him for once in a neorealistic and physical landscape.

DR: I'm interested in your idea that noir veers into the metaphysical realm. Since we started our conversation in the 1930s, which seem grounded in physical reality, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the evolution of noir, its underlying and perhaps unconscious motives. I vaguely recall a film critic whose name escapes me saying "After the war we needed shadows to hide in."

JR: I'd like to ask that film critic why we need to hide. In my experience, some of the same people who love noir also supported and even celebrated both of the Gulf wars and didn't mind at all if the U.S. was torturing a lot of innocent people as long as the innocent people wasn't them — all of which suggests to me a pretty good reason for wanting to hide. But surely defeating the Nazis — unlike some of the brutalities that arise from capitalism-- isn't a very plausible reason for hiding.

DR: I think it was a Hiroshima reference, not sure.

JR: That makes sense. Even though Truman gave no indication of wanting to hide.

DR: Has the Chicago film scene had any influence on you?

JR: For starters, I perceive New York as a separate country — Manhattan as an island — and Chicago as part of the U.S. I also consider New York and Los Angeles (a company town) as provincial in much the same way that my home town in Alabama is provincial: i.e., if something hasn't happened there, it hasn't happened. Whereas Chicago knows that it isn't the center of the universe. And its film scene is decidedly less competitive and turf-conscious, which I find refreshing. There isn't the same cut-throat atmosphere here nor any of the New York or Hollywood arrogance and rudeness.

DR: I've asked you questions that assume connections between aesthetics and politics. I get the sense that you lean "left". But given that political shorthand can be confusing, I'll try being as concrete as possible: your analysis of fascist aesthetics in Star Wars moved me as a critique cutting across the grain of America's image of itself as a liberating force in the world. What are your politics?

JR: Star Wars fosters the idea of a bloodless genocidal massacre, which is part of what made both Gulf wars so popular in this country — seeing war as a video game.

I'm basically a Bernie Sanders socialist who would be happy with an Elizabeth Warren presidency, and I'm also a pacifist. DR: Do your politics relate in substantive ways to your early movie-going experiences? I heard that your father owned a movie theater. I'm also thinking of the distinctions you draw among the various American movie scenes. Was the physical landscape you grew up in an influence on your aesthetic and political values?

JR: My politics were probably affected more by my almost eight years of living in Europe (Paris and London) than by my first sixteen years of living in Alabama. My paternal grandfather owned a small chain of movie theaters, and my father worked for him until the chain was sold in 1960, at which point he became an English professor. He was never a cinephile, but the fact that he'd wanted to be a writer clearly influenced my becoming one.

Growing up in a house designed for my parents by Frank Lloyd Wright also undoubtedly affected my aesthetics, but not my politics, which were formed in part by my 60s involvements in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

As for my view of America's role in the world, I think we tend to be handicapped in our good intentions by the delusion that only three kinds of people exist —Americans, anti-Americans, and prospective Americans — which means that we tend to exclude most of humanity from the playing field.

This interview was conducted via email.

#Jonathan Rosenbaum #The Chiseler #noir #talkies #Dieterle #Chicago Calling #Daniel. Riccuito #Maxwell Bodenheim #Dan Duryea

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