TV from 1996: NYPD Blue

January 2, 2023January 4, 2023 / spandrella / Leave a comment

I recently re-discovered NYPD Blue, the show that got me started on my unhealthy interest in crime procedurals, thanks to finding it on Hulu (and also, according to the internet, Amazon Prime). I haven’t actually seen that much of the show in its totality, considering how long it ran for—the first episode I ever saw was the season 3 premiere, and I dropped out sometime in the sixth season after the character Bobby Simone died and I didn’t like the detective who replaced him (Danny Sorenson, played by Rick Schraeder). But when I did watch it, I would record episodes off TV on a VHS tape and watch them over and over, and as I’ve come back to these episodes over the past month, it turns out that a lot of this show’s dialogue that still lives in my brain. And I’m re-discovering a lot of cool characters that I’d basically forgotten, like Donna Abandando and John the PA. If anything, the show is better than I remember, or than I was able to appreciate when I was 13.

To be clear, there is a lot of NYPD Blue—which debuted in 1993 and ran for 12 seasons—that is dated. For instance, LGBTQ stuff: there are good moments, but there’s also a lot that is objectifying and not flattering. Even the tolerant detectives seem painfully aware that they’re interviewing one of “those people” whenever they deal with a crime that requires them to talk to queer folks. There’s tolerance, but precious little genuine acceptance, and less celebration. I wouldn’t recommend this show to another queer person without that disclaimer, even though (for me) there’s enough other awesome stuff that I focus on instead. And even though I think the show does a pretty good job with non-white characters (at least within the boundaries of its genre as a crime show, and the fact that everyone the detectives come in contact with is intersecting with the criminal justice system), it’s definitely a show written by a white guy who was writing (perhaps unconsciously) with a white audience in mind. Detective Sipowicz is racist, he’s surrounded by other cops who are racists, and even the presence of the (phenomenal) black Lieutenant Arthur Fancy or the always solid Detective Martinez, does not make up for the snide remarks and sighs and grunts that pepper the show whenever a white cop has to deal with a character with a background different than his.

I started writing this to discuss the season 3 episode “Backboard Jungle,” which directly addresses Sipowicz’s racism and its effects on those around him (and how they navigate it), because I think handles racism in a way that’s nuanced and complicated and still speaks to America today, in 2022 (though by the time I post this, it might be 2023) (update: yep, it’s 2023, happy new year). The way it slowly hems in Sipowicz, traps him in a cage of his own making, is masterful. And I was all set to laud David Milch (who I think is one of the finest writers to ever work in television) for it, and then I learned: he didn’t write it. A black man did, David Mills, who’s also written for Treme, The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street, ER, and others. Intellectually, I know that network television shows employ many writers (they have a whole room!), and that producers, showrunners, or head writers rarely if ever write an entire season’s worth of episodes, even if they’re credited in every episode. But also, duh. I really should have intuited that this episode is more nuanced than most white writers could manage. But memories are imperfect and credits are easy to misunderstand.

“Backboard Jungle” reminded me of a small-scale Do the Right Thing. Not in plot or in stance, necessarily, but because both pieces have the courage to raise questions about racism in America and then not answer them. At the end of Do The Right Thing, characters circle and snipe and attack each other, and it feels simultaneously futile and inevitable, because the real evil in that movie is something that none of the characters can ever directly address, much less defeat. The racism at evidence in that movie destroys so much, by the end. It also still exists. It hasn’t gone away, even though every character (I think) wishes that it had.

“Backboard Jungle” does a variation of the same thing: It wrestles with these problems, but does not solve them. At the end of the episode, Sipowicz is still a racist. He’s still a cop. Fancy still has to work with him, the people of color who live in his precinct still have to encounter him and tolerate his presence and power in their neighborhood. He has opened wounds with his coworker Bobby Simone and his wife Sylvia that do not close. A murderer is off the street, but the drug dealers who contributed to the initial violence in the story are all still out there. There are no winners.

How do we deal with racists in our immediate vicinity? How do we challenge them, how do we change their views, how do we move forward in spite of them? This episode poses some options, but it doesn’t present any of them as fun, or magical, or even all that helpful at all.

As the episode opens, a local black community organization has organized a basketball game to honor the memory of a young black man who died in police custody (we never know much about this man, but it’s stated several times that the cause of his death is ambiguous: the medical examiner and the police department said he had a seizure; members of the black community suspect he was murdered by police). The community organization—represented by the character Kwasi Olushola, played by Tom Wright—has convinced the police to stay away from the game. Sensing opportunity, drug dealers in the area take it over, forming their own teams. With a high gang presence and no cops, violence breaks out, at least two people are killed, and numerous other innocent bystanders injured.

Sipowicz starts out bad, frustrated at “the brass” for going along with the community org’s request for no police, and with no respect for the people who organized the basketball game, and particularly none for Kwasi, who he sees as little more than a drug dealer. He resents that the black community doesn’t just believe the police when they say that the boy in their custody died of a seizure (gee, Sipowicz, wonder why they don’t believe you or your bosses). Sipowicz is both terrible at expressing himself and terrible at hiding how he feels, so the initial interview with Kwasi, well, it devolves.

Kwasi: You people wanted this to happen. The cops resented this game from the outset because it was in memory of a young black man murdered by police.
Simone: All right, Kwasi, calm down.
Sipowicz: That kid died from some kind of seizure.
Kwasi: He was murdered, and the racist NYPD covered it up.
Simone (reaching out to take Kwasi’s arm): Let’s tell it at the station house.
Kwasi (pulling away): Am I charged with a crime?
Sipowicz: Hey. Don’t be flailing your arms.
Kwasi: I don’t have to go anywhere with you. You dealing with that one [n-word redacted] in a thousand who knows what you can and cannot do.
Sipowicz: I’m dealing with a [n-word] whose big mouth is responsible for this massacre.
Simone: Shut up, Andy.
Kwasi: (pushing) Back off!

The conversation ends with both men losing their tempers, Simone needing to separate them, and Kwasi getting arrested for “putting his hands on an officer.” The whole interaction is witnessed by a local reporter and couldn’t be swept away or denied even if Sipowicz wanted it to (spoiler alert: he doesn’t).

Note that this interaction is precisely framed for Sipowicz to give himself an out. It’s not his fault, he didn’t say the n-word first, he only said it after the other guy did. The old “It’s not a slur if I’m just quoting someone else saying it” line.

“I did not call him that. He called himself that, and I threw it back at him,” he says to his boss when recounting the incident later. “You don’t get to ‘throw that back,'” Fancy retorts. Sipowicz knows that he won’t find any sympathy from Fancy, but he doesn’t want or need that; if anything, Fancy’s reaction cements Sipowicz’s feelings that nobody is assessing the situation—or his role in it—fairly or objectively.

Bobby Simone walks a fine line in this episode, having his partner’s back in front of Kwasi and the Lieutenant, while also making clear to Sipowicz that he doesn’t support how Sipowicz is behaving. Simone has the conversation with Sipowicz that we all hope non-racist cops are having with their racist coworkers: “Partner. I was not comfortable with those words. I am not comfortable with the feelings behind them.” They don’t have time to talk about it very in-depth because Simone has to solve the case without help from his partner. The conversation doesn’t do anything to change how Sipowicz is thinking, but it does let him know that the receptive audience for his feelings on this issue is shrinking, has shrunk.

Fancy benches Sipowicz and lets him stew at his desk for most of the day. It is not until they both have their coats on to go home, and the day is done, that they have it out and Sipowicz’s cracks begin to show, that his self-justification begins to wilt. He’s always argued that even if he is racist, he has never let that get in the way of doing his job. He thinks that Fancy is keeping him back because he’s acting as a black man, and not as a lieutenant in a police force who wants to solve crime (“acting his color,” I suppose, another thing that Sipowicz said to Kwasi). Fancy points out that racism did keep Sipowicz from getting his job done, today. That even before Fancy took him off the case—even before he got into it with Kwasi—Sipowicz had not been able to conceal his contempt for the people he was interviewing, or his impatience with the whole situation. (And just, man, look at all the emotional labor Fancy has to do here, putting aside his own feelings about the n-word or the whole situation, and finding a way to approach it that Sipowicz will actually see and accept.)

Sipowicz: I’ve said that word. I’ve thought it plenty. But I never used it on the job till your hump pal put us on that road.
Fancy: This isn’t about a word, Andy. Or your impure thoughts. It’s about you making this case harder to work.
Sipowicz: Not about you being black? Not about giving some back to me?
Fancy: It’s about what I say it’s about.
Sipowicz: Then say it. Part of what it’s about is watching me sweat.
Fancy: Well, a hell of a lot went down today, so I’d have to check my notes, but I thought I spent some of that time trying to save your sorry ass.
Sipowicz: Give me a break.
Fancy: I’m not gonna take you out, Andy. I move you out, my white bosses—they send me a little message. They send me another [racist detective] just like you, but maybe that one can’t do the job like you can.
Sipowicz: Gee, thanks a lot, boss.
Fancy: …I’ve been dealing with white cops like you since the academy. I can manage you with my eyes closed. Now, maybe you can’t handle a black man being your boss.

So we’ve got two strategies going: Simone appealing to his feelings, Fancy appealing to his pragmatic side. In the final scene, Sipowicz goes home and tells his wife about his day. He repeats the same justifications to Sylvia (who is pregnant)—that it wasn’t his fault because he didn’t say the word first, that he’s never used that word on the job before, and surely all that previous good behavior counts for something. The problem is the word, surely, not the attitudes and beliefs and subsequent actions of white people using the word.

Sylvia: I haven’t heard you use the word, but I have seen you do this. (She gestures with her hand so it crosses her face, like she’s casting a shadow over it.)
Sipowicz: That’s not the same thing. That’s something cops do so you don’t have to mention race. ‘Hey, did you hear about the shooting at this barber shop?’ (gesture) ‘Yeah.’ So it doesn’t have to be said and nobody gets offended.
Sylvia: Andy, it’s code for the word.
Sipowicz: It’s code so you don’t have to say it.
Sylvia (after a pause): Don’t ever show that to our child.
Sipowicz: Yeah. All right.
Sylvia: Don’t teach him that. Don’t teach him to think that way.
Sipowicz: Yeah.

And Sipowicz has no response to that. And because he loves his wife, because she is one of the only people on this earth that he wants to create happiness for, he says, “Yeah, okay.”

The episode closes with Andy sitting in a chair, looking as small as it’s possible for a burly man to look. Looking angry, and trapped, and like he suspects he’s in the wrong but doesn’t know how. This has gotten through to him. Do not teach our child to think that way. (The question of whether that’s possible, of whether Sylvia is asking for something that Andy is capable of doing, is a whole other question.)

It is rare, even today, that we see racism portrayed with complexity on network television (or anywhere else in mainstream arts/entertainment). Andy Sipowicz is the protagonist, he’s the center of the show’s narrative, we’re definitely supposed to see him as a good guy, and yet he is incredibly flawed. The conversations in this episode carry forward into at least two other episodes in later on in the show—once when Kwasi’s character recurs, and once when Sipowicz is up for promotion. It feels weird to say that I wish there was more of this? (More racist characters, yay! –No wait.) If we’re going to deal with racism in our art and culture, it needs to be dealt with in a way that’s thorny, and hard, and unresolved—the same way that racism itself is thorny and hard and unresolved. I want television to reflect the society that created it. I want it acknowledged that white people are not just racist by accident or innocent participants in a larger, racist system. I want a world in which racists are not only evil, even while racism itself is acknowledged to be evil. Sometimes white people are racists, and they’re also good dads and good husbands. And usually they don’t suffer consequences for being racist in the way that we want them to.

Am I making too many excuses and justifications for a show that I like? Probably! And there’s a lot here that’s not perfect, and dynamics that (as far as I know) go unexplored in the series—Fancy and Sipowicz talk about race, true, and their relationship is explicitly colored along a racial axis. But other characters—like Detective James Martinez, and the PAA Gina Colón, both portrayed by actors of color—don’t ever talk about Sipowicz’s racism at all. The PAA present in this episode, Donna Abandando (who’s a white woman), hears basically everything that happens in the office (especially between Simone and Sipowicz, because her desk is right next to theirs), but we don’t hear what she thinks about any of it. The dynamic between Sipowicz and Fancy is defined by their power dynamic of subordinate/boss, and Fancy’s character has more power and agency to deal with Sipowicz than his coworker or the office receptionist. Do Gina and James like working with him? Is Gina afraid that if she makes a complaint about him, that she’ll be the one to lose her job, not him? The effect of the characters’ silence is to imply that since they’re not direct targets of Sipowicz’s racism, its existence doesn’t bother them; I think most POC would probably say that this is not an accurate reflection of how racism affects them in the workplace. But the show is silent about this, at least from what I can remember.

And yes. There is an argument to be made that the sympathy that we as an audience are expected to feel toward Sipowicz would be better spent at the altar of, say, Lieutenant Fancy. And that we need shows that show black joy and jobs for black actors that aren’t just as murder suspects (I think we do have more of those now, in 2023, but in 1996 when this aired, the pickings were comparatively slim). Agreed! All agreed. We need all those things in our culture too. We also need more shows about white people honestly, actively, *consciously* wrestling with their own racism. Sipowicz “wins” in this episode. He caught the murderer, Kwasi’s not going to sue him, he gets to keep his job. But the last shot of the episode shows just how much he does not feel like a winner.

It is important that this episode was written by a black man, David Mills. I think it took a white man to write Sipowicz’s racism (Milch has said that he used his own experiences when delving into this side of the character), but it takes a person of color to truly play out the consequences and especially the effects of that racism. I also think it’s important that Mills was sixteen years younger than Milch. I truly don’t remember how much Sipowicz examines and re-assesses his own racism over the course of the show and changes thanks to self-examination and personal hard work. I do think it’s crucial that in this episode, we don’t see Sipowicz changing, but we see signs that the world is changing around him. His boss is black, his partner vehemently disagrees with him, his wife will not tolerate it in their household or around their child. He can’t count on the reporter who hears the exchange with Kwasi to be pro-cop and sweep the story under the rug. Kwasi himself has access to resources and a megaphone that he can deploy against this cop if he wants to. Sipowicz hasn’t changed, but he’s realizing that the world around him has, and he can learn to navigate that world, or he can choose not to. And sometimes that’s the best you can expect.

Sources:

“The Backboard Jungle.” NYPD Blue. Written by David Mills and William L. Morris. Directed by Mark Tinker. 20th Century Fox Television, 1996.

Britt, Donna. “Giving Voice on TV to Things Unsaid.” The Washington Post, 6 September, 1996. Retrieved from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed 22 April 2022.

Elber, Lynn. “Irked Black Writer Breaks ‘Blue’ Line.” Sun Sentinel, 16 January 1996. Retrieved from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed 22 April 2022.

Millman, Joyce. “Racist — or realistic?” Salon, 27 September 1997. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20070703061913/http://www.salon.com/sept97/media/media970922.html. Accessed 6 October 2022.

Companion Who?

December 30, 2020 / spandrella / Leave a comment

Awhile ago, I started watching Doctor Who (the new series) from the beginning. Again. I do this every few years, especially when a new season starts and it’s been a minute since I’ve seen it and I worry that I’ve forgotten details. When Jodie Whitaker’s turn as the Doctor began, BBC America aired almost the entire back catalog of Doctor Who episodes from 2005-2019, and I used up most of the space on my roommate’s DVR to record them, and I’ve been working my way through them ever since.

A lot of Doctor Who fandom (me included) gets wrapped up in discourse about the Doctor. This is the obvious thing to do, it being his show and all. It’s easy to have conversations about the Doctor, away from the screen. But when I’m actually watching, I’m completely taken in by the Companions. In the original series (at least into the 1970s; I haven’t seen any stuff from the 1980s yet), the Companions were often just assistants, people for the Doctor to talk to. And they were inconsistent, changing around based on whatever the plot needed that week. But today, it may be the Doctor drives the story, but the Companions are often the heart of it. They’re our human way in. Donna, reacting to the plight of the Ood, or stopping the Doctor from killing the spider-lady thing at the beginning of the fourth season. Rose, wanting to like the new Doctor after he regenerates, but not sure she can trust him, not sure if he’s the same. Rose’s reaction to the Tenth Doctor helps us, the audience, get used to this new person too. Her journey into loving and trusting him is the same as ours.

I love Rose Tyler. People talk about “Their Doctor” (mine is Ten), but Rose is “my companion,” if one can have such a thing. I love her passion, how she jumps right into the Doctor’s mission and his lifestyle. Her smile. Billie Piper has one of the all-time great smiles. If Rose had the opportunity, she would absolutely be a superhero. Put on a cape and fight the baddies. She’s an adrenaline junkie. She loves dropping in at the last moment, saving the day, making a difference in people’s lives, and then traveling away again. The chemistry between The Doctor and Rose has led to a generally-accepted theory in fandom that they had a physical relationship (I think Steven Moffat has made clear that he’s always believed this to be true), but I don’t know that Rose finds The Doctor sexy. I think adventure is the sexiest thing in the world to her. When the Doctor sends her home at the end of the first series, stranding her, she was upset at the loss of the Doctor, but what really drove her crazy was the idea of being trapped on Earth, of having to live a “normal” life. Working at a shop and eating fish and chips forever. Knowing the whole exciting universe was out there, and she couldn’t get to any of it.

And I love how honest she is about all this. She constantly and repeatedly trashes the idea of a normal life to her mom and (ex?)boyfriend Mickey, the ones she leaves behind over and over. She disparages the lives they lead (and which they prefer compared to the dangerous nonsense that she gets up to). She leaves them behind. She asks them to do things for her, often pretty big things, but doesn’t do much for them in return. They give her these looks of loneliness and disappointment and resentment that she barely notices while she’s asking them for help, to upend and/or risk their lives, and they always come through for her, but (like The Doctor in some ways) she’s always on her way somewhere else. Rose might be the only Companion who sort of has her own set of Companions, people who always stand willing to help her.

By the second series, Rose is the Doctor’s equal in some ways. She can’t fly the TARDIS without risking her life, but they work in tandem, they’re in sync, they can work together without consulting each other. The Doctor trusts Rose. It’s the closest, most intense relationship of her life, forged in fire and gravity wells and ghostly aliens and werewolves. Rose and the Doctor are the same: they never give up. The episode “The Satan Pit” really shows this. They both have solid reasons to think the other is dead, or at least lost forever. And they can’t get to the TARDIS. But they trust each other, and keep trying, and they win (and live to fight another day). When the Doctor gets sucked into a child’s drawing, Rose keeps working, keeps going after a solution. She can’t do as much as a Time Lord, but she can do a damn sight more than an average human. She stares death in the face and says, not today.

Donna runs a close second to Rose. Sometimes I love her more. She doesn’t have a specific agenda, really, as long as she can get out of her rut of a life and away from her terrible mother. When she finds her way to the TARDIS, it’s all she ever wanted, and everything else is a bonus. If Rose is attracted to the adventure part of the Doctor’s life, Donna connects to the people. She’s the most human human. Even in her very first episode, “The Runaway Bride,” where she is mostly a person that the story happens to, rather than a person making choices, she connects to the Doctor and decides that her job is to help him. After discovering that she’s been poisoned, that her fiance secretly hates her and is in league with an alien that wants to conquer Earth, after she’s been kidnapped by the TARDIS and spends most of the episode screaming at the Doctor (Donna’s tendency to get angry and snarky when she’s really terrified is one of my favorite things about her), at the very end, when the Doctor is fully prepared to drown the Racnoss as well as himself, and in spite of every mind-blowing and unbelievable thing that’s happened to her that day, Donna shouts, “Doctor! You can stop now!”…and he does. On her very first episode, Donna saves the Doctor.

In her third episode, Donna travels to Pompeii, and though she knows that there’s no stopping the volcano, she convinces the Doctor save just these ones, this one family, like a kid on the beach throwing starfish back into the ocean. In her fourth episode, she meets the Ood, and their plight–and their song–are enough to make her want to go home, back to Earth, where she can feel less horror at the way the universe hurts things. The more Rose sees of the universe, the more active and smiling she is. The more Donna sees of it, the more she learns how much it hurts, its power to make her sad. For Donna, more than for Rose and Martha, the universe is equal parts beautiful and terrible. She makes the choice to keep going out to see it, even though she knows what’s in store for her. Rose was not moved to tears by the experience of meeting of Madame de Pompadour. I think that Donna would have been. And she knew–and so did the Doctor–that her tears and her compassion were good for the Doctor. They kept him human. As human as a Time Lord could be.

Of the first three companions–Rose, Martha, and Donna–Martha’s probably my least favorite. Which is not her fault. It’s clear that she’s crushing on the Doctor, and I love how determined she is, ultimately, to save the Doctor and save the Earth. But she’s in love with the Doctor, and I’m profoundly uninterested in any Doctor-involved love stories. (I also really don’t like that they eventually made her a soldier in U.N.I.T. She was studying to be a doctor. Let her go on and be that doctor. She’d be a good one.)

The first three primary companions of the reboot–Rose, Martha, and Donna–all have their own reasons for following The Doctor onto the TARDIS. Rose loves the adventure. Martha loves The Doctor. Donna understands that The Doctor needs her (or needs someone, at any rate) to remind him of his own humanity. (And then there’s Wilf. Lovely Wilf. And Jack Harkness.) Each Companion has her own internal hole she’s trying to fill (and, thanks to Murray Gold, also her own music theme). They all bring out different qualities in The Doctor. They’re not just there to hang around next to him. They have their own skills, talents, choices to make. They don’t follow him onto the TARDIS just because it’s fun and exciting, or because the Doctor needs somebody to talk to to keep the show from being boring. They have an independence and a completeness that later Companions (coughcoughAmy and Claracough) don’t have.

Other thing I love about the first three Companions: they’re not jealous. Rose is, a little bit, when she first meets Sarah Jane, and I don’t think Martha ever gets into a situation where she has to think about anyone as being in competition with her for the Doctor (well, there was the episodes where the Doctor hid himself inside a human life), but when Donna meets Martha, she just…she’s so warm. And open. And making fun of the Doctor. She likes Martha the minute she meets her. And Rose. They can all relate to each other in a way that nobody else on the planet can. They gang up (in a good natured way) against the Doctor, instead of competing for the Doctor’s attention or affection. And that’s not something that you see among female characters very often. (One of the reasons why I hate the “TARDIS is actually the Doctor’s wife/sentient space ship” story is because then there’s this whole rigamarole with the TARDIS deciding it doesn’t like Clara and causing trouble until they eventually make friends and I hate it because the TARDIS isn’t like that, and there’s no reason for women/apparently woman-identified disembodied spaceships to compete over the attention of a Time Lord like they’re fucking toddlers or puppies and argh either the TARDIS is fine with human women, it’s not like Clara is the first one she’s met, or there’s something wrong with Clara, and since there’s nothing wrong with Clara I just assume this is another one of those times where Steven Moffat doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing with his women characters and throw the whole thing out the window) (and yes I know there’s the whole “she’s a temporal anomaly” thing but don’t get me fucking started on the whole reason why Clara is a temporal anomaly in the first fucking place).

The loyalty that the Companions show to the Doctor, their willingness to help him, their reasons for traveling with him, their joy at discovering this whole entire universe–it’s one of the things that makes their various endings–especially Rose, stuck in the alternate Earth, and Donna, with her memory erased–especially sad. Not just they can’t travel with (or remember) the Doctor, but that they can’t talk to anyone else about it either. I used to have a whole story worked out for how the Doctor could go back and get Donna and reunite with her and her head wouldn’t explode, though unfortunately I don’t remember how I worked out the kinks anymore. Rose at least got a Doctor Clone, but Donna? Donna had to go back to Chiswick, be a temp. She didn’t even know that all her dreams had come true. And I find that just so unbearably sad.

Pithy conclusion? I’m not sure if I have one. If you write “assistant” characters, make sure to give them their own heft and weight and choices in the story. Also, as you walk through life, if you do it with the adventurousness of Rose Tyler, and the loyalty and faith of Martha Jones, and the compassion of Donna Noble…well. You won’t be doing half bad for a human who can’t regenerate.

West Wing Weekly, the Ladies, and Stories

November 8, 2016November 10, 2016 / spandrella / Leave a comment

“You have to know what the stereotypes are in order to avoid those stereotypes.” –Jonathan Green, Visual Director for 2016 Porgy and Bess revival

I’ve been listening to The West Wing Weekly, a podcast in which the two hosts watch one episode of the West Wing each week and discuss it. (Side note: If you like political drama at all, The West Wing is totally worth your time.) The hosts are Josh Malina (who also starred in the show starting in the…fourth season?) and Hrishikesh Hirway, who also hosts the podcast Song Exploder, and they regularly bring in former castmates and writers to talk about their experiences on the show. One of the people they talked to during the first season was Janel Moloney, who played Donatella Moss, Josh Lyman’s secretary. And she said something that got me thinking.

Basically, from day one, one of the things that Janel put into Donna’s character as a primary motivating factor was the idea that Donna was in love with Josh. Episode directors independently came to the same conclusion early on and planted the seeds of Josh’s love for Donna, but for most of the series, these feelings were only ever implied, not acted upon. And Janel noted (almost casually) that even though she knew that Donna was in love with Josh, she was not eager to have that story play out, because as soon as it did, Donna would lose a lot of avenues for where her character could go. If Donna and Josh started dating, that would be the end of Donna’s story, because she would have to quit her job, and of course Janel would lose her job too. Later (after Janel became a cast member, instead of just a recurring character), the character of Donna got new arcs and grew a lot as a person. But early on? Dating Josh (the most obvious storyline that basically everyone wanted) was the worst possible thing that could happen to Donna.

Sharon Lawrence, who played ADA Sylvia Costas on the 1990s police drama NYPD Blue (which is also totally worth your time), said something similar. She was cast in the pilot, in what was not supposed to be a recurring role (kind of like Janel Moloney, now that I think about it), but was brought back as a recurring character and potential love interest for Detective Andy Sipowicz, and eventually became a cast member. And I love Sylvia Costas the character. She’s smart, she’s outspoken, she doesn’t let anyone push her around. She faces her fears and doesn’t let them rule her life. She’s one of the few female characters in a male-dominated show (and a female professional in a male-dominated profession), and she’s this wonderful shining light of femininity and strength. But once she married Andy Sipowicz–and especially after they had a baby–she faded away. As Ms. Lawrence put it, the mystery of her character was basically solved by her marriage to Sipowicz, and there wasn’t much place else for her to go, so she was written out. (I hope I’m remembering what she said correctly, it was an interview that she did for a DVD extra for one of the NYPD Blue DVD sets, which doesn’t seem to have made it to YouTube). Her femininity, her female-ness as a character, worked against her, even though they told a story for her that millions of women have experienced: Sylvia had a baby and then went back to work, and then wrestled with her desire to stay home with her kid instead, and eventually decided to do that, before going back to work as an ADA much later. And that’s something that a lot of parents (moms and dads) struggle with, and it was nice to see it depicted on screen. But it was also a shame to lose such a wonderful character.

By contrast, Jill Kirkendole, a female detective on NYPD Blue, was a mom from the beginning, and a love interest to basically no one (she dated a male ADA character for awhile but I don’t remember that being a primary arc of the show, just something that was sort of happening in the background). From her very first case in the squad, her experience as a mother was something that informed her work as a detective, gave her an ability to read people and understand them. Gave them a way to understand her, too, when she was trying to get information out of somebody. Her experience as a mom informed her work as a detective in a way that Greg Medavoy’s status as a dad never seemed to inform his. She also made friends with another female member on the squad (Diane Russell) and that allowed for some female energy and Bechdel-passing episodes.

It’s one of the things you don’t think about in stories until you’ve seen and read a lot of stories: The bones of so many stories are the same, and the beauty shows up in the way that they’re told. And sometimes it’s just the nature of the stories, the nature of narrative. Joseph Campbell has examined this to an extensive degree in books like The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I remember learning in high school about the seven different types of stories (man vs man, man vs world, man vs self…I forget the other types). There’s a certain amount of same-ness, or of parallel-ness, that’s unavoidable. But then there’s the same-ness that’s bad and unhelpful. Why are so many brown-skinned characters terrorists? Why are so many black male characters drug dealers? Why are so many white women mothers? Why do so many fantasy books take place in a feudal English Tolkien-esque landscape?

Representation matters, as I’ve heard over and over on the internet. And it does. There are so many different stories being lived right now, so many people having so many different lives. They all deserve to be a story, to tell their story, to see their story (in one way or another) represented in popular media, whether that’s a television show or a comic or a novel or a video game or a history book. Our capacity to speak for ourselves is enhanced when we see characters who go first, who speak our stories for us, who validate our existence and experience. But in the obverse, our capacity to empathize is enhanced by knowing another person’s story. This is to say, diverse stories don’t just matter to marginalized people who need more stories like theirs. Speaking as a white person, reading stories about and essays by and tweets of people of color has helped me alter my perspective enormously when it comes to the question of racism and race in the United States. Were those stories written for me? No, not always. Maybe almost never. But art and stories make eavesdroppers of all of us, and Junot Diaz and NK Jemisin have taught me things that I never would have had occasion to know otherwise.

The thing about representation is, for me at least, it’s almost never an obvious thing. Maybe this is because I can find stories that are close enough to me to get by; maybe it’s because I tend to be a little oblivious to subtleties. But you go through life, not necessarily cognizant of what you’re missing, until someone smarter than you comes along and shows you this character, and you didn’t realize how badly you needed to see this thing that you didn’t know existed. Who knew I needed somebody like Amy Farrah-Fowler on The Big Bang Theory? (At least up until she started falling in love with Sheldon, at which point I lost interest in the entire series.) Who knew how badly I wanted to meet Jessica Jones, before she arrived? Certainly not me. Why have I been so fixated on needing a Black Widow movie? I’m not even entirely sure, but apparently there’s a gap in my life that only Scarlett Johansson can fill.

I’m tired of female characters who stop being on television the minute they become mothers. I’m tired of female characters whose primary story arc is falling in love with the leading dude. One of the reasons why I love The West Wing is the fact that it largely resisted those tropes for most of its run, and as a result, many of the female characters from the first season survived all the way to the last. As I try to get back into writing my own fiction, I don’t know how much I’ll fall into these tropes myself because of failures of imagination and empathy, or how much I’ll be able to dodge them just because I’m a different person writing different stuff. Nobody wants to think that they’re writing stereotypes, and yet somehow our collective artistic unconscious ends up full of stereotypes. Sometimes we don’t even know they’re stereotypes until someone cracks them open, like an egg, and reveals they’re hollow.

A Mutant Origin Story

February 1, 2016September 18, 2018 / spandrella / Leave a comment

mutie I’m near the younger end of my cousins. I have four cousins younger than me, and twelve that are older, so when I was a kid and we went back to Louisiana to visit them, I was almost always one of the youngest ones there. So sometimes, while my parents talked with their siblings, I ended up doing not-entirely-age-appropriate stuff to entertain myself. Like when I was seven or eight and ended up in my cousin Daniel’s bedroom digging through his X-Men and Spider-Man comics and reading them. I didn’t know anything about the X-Men canon. It was in the middle of Chris Claremont’s epic run on the series, and a lot of it went over my head, but a lot of it settled in my subconscious, and planted seeds in my memory. I certainly learned the names of Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and Jean Grey. When Fox started airing the X-Men animated show in 1992, I was all over that shit like white on rice. The universe became clearer, and I started reading X-Men comics more regularly (but still pretty piecemeal, since I didn’t have access to a comic book shop) and assembling the universe in my head. The X-Men and the Evil Brotherhood of Mutants. Sentinels. Senator Kelly. William Stryker.

(Note: It was a mystery to me what X-Men story I had read first, because all I had was a memory of a single panel: of Nightcrawler lying unconscious and bleeding from his ears while the other X-Men stand over him in concern and a vague understanding of mutants as an oppressed minority rather than a crew of superheroes. It wasn’t until recently that I read God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont and realized that that was the comic I had read decades earlier at my cousin’s).

Early on in the Fox series, there’s a plotline in which two scientists discover a “cure” for mutantism. I forget how the X-Men find out about it, but they do, and their reactions all fit their personalities and personal histories. Wolverine immediately sees it as a tool to eliminate mutants’ powers and neutralize the perceived threat of mutantkind; Rogue, not so much. As one of the mutants whose powers are both an ability and a curse, Rogue (as well as Beast) tend to be the most ambivalent about their mutations, and tempted by the idea of a cure. Peaceful, optimistic Charles Xavier disagrees with the very premise. “Don’t say ‘cure,’ Moira. Being a mutant isn’t a disease. It’s something you’re born with,” he tells Moira McTaggert, one of the scientists. (This is the same plot line that Joss Whedon would handle for his run writing the Astonishing X-Men comics in 2005). It is, basically, the neurodiversity argument, only written in 1992 for a grade school-level audience.

I think it’s this storyline (and others like it), rather the ones that deal with a planet in danger or intergalactic space war, that drew me to the X-Men. Pretty early on, I picked up on threads that I translated into the X-Men being code for people with disabilities. One of the earliest questions that I remember being asked about my sister (besides “What’s wrong with her?” and “What’s it like having a sister with Down’s?”) had to do with whether I would change her if I could. Magically suck the extra chromosome out of every single one of her body’s cells. I don’t remember how young I was when I first heard about the high abortion rates for fetuses with Down’s, but it’s been in my head since at least middle school. And even though I never witnessed people being cruel to my sister, I did witness neurotypical classmates of mine being cruel to disabled kids at my school, and being mocking in general of anyone in special ed or remedial classes. It became really easy, in my head, to equate “Do mutants have the right to exist?” and “Do people with disabilities have the right to exist?” To see “retard” and “mutie” as linguistic cousins. The fear and hostility that mutants experience when they interact with regular Homo sapiens sometimes feels familiar when I hear people talk about people with disabilities. The parallel ran so deep in my head that I was honestly surprised when I got to high school and college and started talking about the X-Men with other people and realized that for them, the parallel was between straight people and queer people, or white people and people of color. That there might be many parallels had honestly never occurred to me, so deep and solid was my understanding that “mutant” was code for “disabled.” (This was before I read Chris Claremont’s statement that for him, mutants could stand in for any outsider population. In the introduction to the trade paperback version of God Loves, Man Kills, Claremont says, “Mutants in the Marvel Universe have always stood as a metaphor for the underclass, the outsiders; they represent the ultimate minority.”)

It crystallized slowly for me, over the course of years. Not all–or even most–storylines have to do with mutaphobia, after all. The X-Men fight against Magneto and fight against the Shi’ar (and fight with the Shi’ar), and there’s the Phoenix Saga and numerous interpersonal dramas and secondary mutations and all that. To read the X-Men is to get to know them from the inside first, their individual histories, their powers, how they feel about those powers, their flaws and foibles, their courage and tenacity, their creativity at solving (or blasting through) problems. You know the X-Men as individuals, make friends with them, and as the stories pile up it slips your mind that the rest of the comic universe world doesn’t see them as individuals, but as a blanket population. You don’t always have to be aware of the fact that a small but significant percentage of the non-mutant population hates mutants, fears them, and wants them dead.

I came to knowledge of my sister’s disability in much the same way. I was three–almost four–when she was born, so I didn’t have any concept of what Down syndrome was. She was just an eating, pooping, crying (and eventually giggling) machine. Your basic human baby. By the end of elementary school (when she would’ve been around seven and me around eleven), I had a pretty good handle on the definition of Down syndrome, but I had an even better knowledge of my sister. I knew how much she loved Barbie and Full House and that cheese was a fundamental dietary building block. I knew her love and her smiles and her stubbornness. I knew how much she was distressed by bees (and flies that might be bees) and automatic garage doors and anybody crying. I knew her. It’s hard to put all that aside and look at my sister from an outsider’s point of view and remember that there’s people who think that my sister is a waste of space. That she’s stupid. That she’s a burden on society and/or my family and that she shouldn’t exist. And there’s people out there who don’t think those things, but who are happy to tell me such things over the Internet because they know it’ll get to me.

I truly believe my sister is a gifted person, though not in the academic way that most people think of when they label kids “gifted.” Her gifts are of a more abstract sort: a deep and instinctive knowledge of chesed, of loving-kindness, of human joy. But the same genetic error that gave her those gifts also gets in the way, too. Gets in the way of her desire to live independently and have more friends. Gets in the way of my family’s desire that she live with economic stability and a reasonable amount of personal safety. Would she welcome the chance for a cure? I honestly don’t know. Like Rogue, her extra chromosome is both a gift and a curse. She can do many amazing things, but also misses out on a lot of opportunities that are easily available to “normals.”

It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized the other parallel. The angry one.

Because people with disabilities get abused at disturbingly, shockingly, unacceptably high rates in modern America. And every time I see it, in the news or wherever, it makes the muscles in my arms harden, and I stop breathing, and start looking for something to hit. Of course there’s never anything to hit. In those moments, though, I wish I was the mutant Pyro, so I could literally set the world on fire. In Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, when Dr. Rao announces a cure for the “mutant disease” on television, Wolverine’s claws come out and he can’t retract them. “She called us a disease. Do you know how that feels?” he says.

Yeah, Logan. I think I do, at least a little bit.

I would set the whole world on fire. I understand Magneto’s fury in the face of human intolerance and bigotry, and why he’s given up on humans and on Charles Xavier’s idealism. Xavier wants to teach people tolerance and compassion, but that is the long fucking way around the problem, and in the meantime people are straight up fucking dying and why do I have to talk to you about not calling people retards when those same people are getting murdered? I don’t have time for that bullshit. It would be so much easier, so much more satisfying, to just throw cars at people and silence them.

When it was my own sister that got hurt, it didn’t feel like enough. Her getting hurt by somebody else felt like the end point of a long chain of dealing with the stupidity and apathy of “normals” and the inevitable vulnerability and invisibility that disabled people experience because of it. There had been decades of people asking, in so many words, “Why does your sister exist?” And then someone came along and decided that she existed to be his victim. He picked a vulnerable, invisible person, and he did it on purpose, because he knew he could get away with it. He thought she wouldn’t fight back. And he was largely right, because how do you teach somebody to defend herself when her default setting is that everyone is her friend?

And that is when I understand the anger that allows Magneto to channel enough power to lift an entire football stadium into the air.

That is when I understand the Scarlet Witch’s anger and desperation when she says, “No more mutants.”

That is when I understand Pyro throwing fireballs, because that’s what I would do, that’s what I wanted to do, to set the whole fucking world on fire for leaving my sister helpless and invisible and vulnerable to somebody who decided to hurt her.

I want to incinerate the world. I want claws like Wolverine’s. Because that’s the biggest thing that X-Men in the Marvel Universe have going for them, that’s their trump card. They can do astonishing things. Uncanny things. Amazing things. They can save the world when no one else can. And that’s a really good argument in favor of their right to exist. When all else fails, when morals and ethics and human compassion fails, mutant usefulness is still there. My sister, and people like her, aren’t stupendous. They aren’t awe-inspiring. They do not astonish, unless you’re willing to examine something quieter and more subtle than telekinesis. Given the chance, much as I like to imagine myself as one of Xavier’s noble X-Men, I’m probably closer to one of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. More interested in defending, in fighting, than explaining. At least where my sister is concerned. Because it makes me so, so angry, the way this world treats the most vulnerable people in it.

But there’s this: I think Magneto feels very alone. At least, on days when I want to blow up the world, that’s how I feel: like nobody cares about this–either not enough or not at all–except me. And if their apathy was neutral, it wouldn’t matter. But apathy isn’t neutral. In the vacuum of apathy, people like my sister get hurt. They die. They’re left all alone. And that is when I have to go for a walk and calm down until I can hear the Charles Xavier voice in my head again. The one that insists that normal humans are worth teaching. The one that believes that humans and mutants can co-exist. The one who would never commit genocide, even though he has the mental power to make everyone’s brains ooze out of their earholes. I remind myself that I’m not alone. That there’s a lot of people–and not just in my family, either–who love my sister, who want to help her, and who are helping her.

My sister loves me. And I love her. She never gives up trying to do anything you ask her to do. There is nothing on this earth that could shake her faith in me. And maybe that makes me selfish, to want to keep that. Almost certainly it is. No more selfish than keeping her around because she’s the only one powerful enough to fight the Brood, but hey. We haven’t had much luck with convincing the world that the ability to love is enough of a utility to exist in a capitalistic society.

Sometimes I think about Ian McKellan (who is, as far as I’m concerned, Magneto’s alter ego) and the fact that, despite dealing with homophobia on a personal and professional level his whole life, he has not himself turned into a supervillian. The fact that, in spite of all they’ve been put through, oppressed minorities in this country (whether it’s disabled folks, LGBTQ folks, mentally ill folks, people of color, etc etc) have, without exception, never turned into evil supervillians. (I know I’m generalizing here, but keep in mind that this is what I tell myself in order to not let my heart get eaten by a murderous rage that burns with the heat of a thousand suns and cut me some slack.) Sure, there’s warlords in Africa and drug cartels in Mexico and Kim Jung-un in North Korea, and they cause enormous amounts of heartache and human damage, but they’re not exactly on the world-endangering level of Dr. Doom or the Red Skull. From a power and world domination standpoint, Barack Obama is the closest thing we have to a supervillain. Maybe Donald Trump. From the oppressed minority contingent, we don’t get Magneto. We get Martin Luther King, Jr.; a human of intelligence and courage that we certainly did not ask for, let alone deserve, but are so fortunate to have had in our midst. We get Helen Keller and Harvey Milk and Nelson Mandela. Bayard Rustin and Vincent Harding and Temple Grandin. Artists like Toni Morrison, Leslie Feinberg, Maya Angelou, Jeremy Brett. We get the beautiful people that I know from the progressive/leftist/anarchist organizing community in Denver, who have taught me about putting love into action and validating and standing up for yourself and others. We get community groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement and the AIDS Quilt and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. And that’s just in this past century. The world is full of thousands and thousands of heroes that we don’t deserve, and often don’t recognize while we have them among us. And that is the truly amazing, awe-inspiring, human superpower: The fact that, in the face of oppression and systematic violence and apathy, more often than not, humans choose to love and hope. They default to trying to teach other humans to be better. The fact that we have as many heroes as we do should send us all to our knees.

Thousands of Charles Xaviers walking among us, disguised as regular people. I like that.

Arrow Episode 4: In Which Not-Chris-O’Donnell is Really Bad at Being a Masked Vigilante

January 23, 2016April 8, 2016 / spandrella / Leave a comment

Episode Four: Not-Chris-O’Donnell’s cover is blown! Oh noes! His life mission to anonymously bring Justice(!) to Starling City lasted like a month. Peter Parker is making Judgment Face at you, not-Chris-O’Donnell. Be ashamed.

Okay, so actually, not-Chris-O’Donnell’s bodyguard got shot, and so not-Chris-O’Donnell brought him to his Secret Justice Lair to fix him (because Starling City doesn’t have hospitals?), and the bodyguard’s immediate reaction (even though he’s been shot and poisoned and is still metabolizing an antidote) is to try and hit Ollie. Because everyone in this universe is pissed off at Ollie.

I must also point out this excellent dialogue without comment:
Not-Chris-O’Donnell: I found a couple things along the way.
Mr. Diggle: Like what, archery classes?
Not-Chris-O’Donnell: Clarity. Starling City is dying.

Mr. Diggle (I’m just going to call him by his actual name because it’s amazing) calls not-Chris-O’Donnell a criminal and a murderer and leaves him. All alone. So. Very. Alone. So not-Chris-O’Donnell goes back to his big empty house and puts on a suit, and after some unknown period of time Laurel comes to “check on him,” because she has excellent boundaries and is totally on top of all of her shit.

Apparently Laurel has decided to be not-Chris-O’Donnell’s mommy since his actual mom is kind of an emotionally absent sociopath. She guilts him into not telling his family that he was okay after getting shot at, which is totally legit, but she also calls him selfish (and other synonyms) to make him feel guilty. Because guilt is the best way to encourage people to change their behavior. At this point, Laurel is just lashing out, and should probably move on, but she won’t, because…something.

Oh, and the sister saw it all! Lucky not-Chris-O’Donnell isn’t wearing his Arrow hoodie or he would’ve been outed twice tonight. She seems understanding and calm…she’s probably stoned. She dispenses with advice like a reasonable person.

Okay, next morning, Mr. Diggle has phoned in his resignation, apparently effective immediately. I hope he sells his story to the tabloids, because it’s a good one. Also I hope he got medical attention because he got shot. So not-Chris-O’Donnell’s mom called Bodyguards R Us and had them send over another one. Not-Chris-O’Donnell immediately ditches him.

Not-Chris-O’Donnell is investigating his own Making A Murderer-esque miscarriage of justice into a convicted murderer. The convicted murderer is not on Oliver’s list of people who are murdering Starling City, but the name of his employer is, so not-Chris-O’Donnell concludes is that the convicted murderer was framed. Obviously. So not-Chris-O’Donnell goes and talks to Laurel (who is a lawyer, remember) about proving his innocence. Can I just point out again here that a hoodie is actually a terrible disguise? And he walks right up to Laurel like she can’t see his face and recognize him. (Also, you can tell that his Batman voice was done in the studio post-production and it’s very annoying.)

Laurel is now investigating the murder, because apparently there is still a hope to get a new trial declared? Stay of execution? Commuted sentence? I’m totally unclear on the legal process here. Is she even his lawyer?

Okay. I got distracted. Not-Chris-O’Donnell went to talk to Mr. Diggle to try and enlist him, again, into joining Team Vigilante For Justice. Roommate wants me to point out how creepy not-Chris-O’Donnell is when talking to the waitress who is also Mr. Diggle’s family member (which not-Chris-O’Donnell knows, I’m assuming, because he went snooping through Mr. Diggle’s personal life. You know, like friends do). Mr Diggle is not amused, and does not want to join Team Vigilante for Justice, and so Oliver uses emotional blackmail by telling him that the assassin that he “stopped” the other night had murdered Mr. Diggle’s brother. This is a compelling argument because…reasons? I feel like people who are against vigilante justice feel that way because they believe in the legal process, and justice, and staying within the law. Not because they have a stake (personal or otherwise) in deciding whether the vigilante’s victims deserve to be targeted or not. But that’s just me. Maybe there’s people out there who think that vigilantes only kill innocent people and are fine when they find out that vigilantes only kill people who deserve it?

Not-Chris-O’Donnell seems to rely on force of will and non-sequiters to persuade people to his arguments. Mr. Diggle says he doesn’t respect him, and not-Chris-O’Donnell responds by pulling his dad’s journal out of his pocket and shows it to him because…I don’t even know. Not-Chris-O’Donnell makes a lot of anti-capitalist arguments, and portrays the plight of the underprivileged in shockingly bad Batman voice, and argues that the plight of the underprivileged can only be avenged by murder. (Also if, as Roommate argues, Starling City’s manifestation of a capitalist system is not unusual–that is, that exploitative capitalism is a feature and not a bug–not-Chris-O’Donnell is really just getting started at just getting started. I look forward to the Starling City/Gotham crossover, and after that…the world!) “People like my father, they see nothing wrong with raising themselves up while stepping on other people’s throats.” Was this kid reading Trotsky on his desert island?

OKAY NEW THEORY: The show so far hasn’t actually done a fantastic job of showing us the human cost of living under the heel of the evil Starling City capitalists/evil doers. Like, watching any number of Batman movies or reading Batman comics, I totally understand, really quickly, why Gotham is not a great city to live in. I totally understand the human cost that the corrupt police department and rampant crime has cost that city. I don’t have that sense with Arrow, so far, which leads me to the entirely reasonable conclusion that Ollie actually went mad on the island and is enacting some kind of insane murderous delusion that he thinks is saving the city. We only have his word and his dad’s that the city is being poisoned from the inside out, after all. (Also, poison? Has it gotten into the water supply?).

Okay. We need to pause and talk about torture…
….
…..
…
…
……So. Who wants to start?

Skipping over a couple of scenes of the B plot that don’t matter, Arrow has gotten information from Laurel about the murder victim’s boss, who testified at the husband’s trial that the victim had never reported fraud to him (or whatever she reported) (the husband was convicted of his wife’s murder; Arrow is attempting to prove that the murderer was actually the wife’s employer. Arrow says that they have to get him to testify (again, AT WHAT? The trial is done, the execution is scheduled, there are no more hearings to testify at.) Not-Chris-O’Donnell basically says that he’ll do whatever it takes to get the boss to confess to perjury, and then channels his inner Spider-Man and sort of…grapple-arrows his way across the downtown Starling City skyline.

Not-Chris-O’Donnell then kidnaps the boss and chains him to a train track and threatens to put Boss on the 10:15 to “Bloodhaven” (is that an actual city that exists in comics or was not-Chris-O’Donnell making a funny?). Boss confesses to keeping evidence of corporate wrongdoing and murder in his desk. At work. His corporate bosses, who had his subordinate murdered, are working in the same building where he keeps evidence of her murder and their corporate wrongdoing. Also this evidence is three years old, and just hanging out in his desk.

Oh, and torture. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from the last 15 years of the existence of Guantanamo Bay, it’s that torture works. As not-Chris-O’Donnell is demonstrating here with his murder train.

We detour to a bad wig flashback. A random man is rescuing not-Chris-O’Donnell, sort of, except his method of rescue is to give not-Chris-O’Donnell a caged live bird for him to kill and eat himself. Not-Chris-O’Donnell does not want to kill the bird, and it’s the saddest thing in the world. Poor sad, uncorrupted, innocent not-Chris-O’Donnell. Also the kid who is shipwrecked on a desert island has his shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck and it’s making me really uncomfortable.

Roommate wants to talk about the awesomely-written dialogue for a moment. Specifically the line, when Arrow hands her evidence that he stole after committing a violent felony that nearly ended in train murder, that, “as a lawyer, [she] never would have gotten a file like this.” Minds are changing as we watch, guys. You can see her opinions changing right in front of her eyes and it’s clearly a confusing experience for her. Like, of course you never would have gotten a file like this as a lawyer. Know why? Because it’s ILLEGAL AS FUCK AND NOT ADMISSABLE IN COURT. Laurel. Come on. You’re supposed to be the smart, down-to-earth one here.

I’m derailing talk of the amazing dialogue to talk about the legal system: We have illegally obtained files that are about corporate wrongdoing (not murder!) that Laurel can apparently use in the execution hearing that doesn’t exist to get a convicted murderer freed. Also she’s not even his lawyer. Also the files were stolen! From a guy who almost got murdered by a train! What is this justice system that exists!

You guys there’s still 17 minutes left in the episode and I’m getting really exhausted by this whole thing. Things are happening and half an hour ago I would’ve told you about them but I just can’t. Not-Chris-O’Donnell has frolicked off to torture a confession out of a corporate magnate and I just don’t care. Torture. Meh.

Final fight scene is the worst ever. I can’t even. There’s still ten minutes left in the episode but I’m done. Guy in prison gets magically released. Laurel is falling in love with the masked vigilante. The end.

Roommate says: “If I could fart right now, I would.”

And Yet We Are Still Not Moving To Starling City (Episode Three)

April 23, 2015February 27, 2016 / spandrella / Leave a comment

This episode is called, “Emo and Dramatic.” I’m pretty sure that’s the official title.

So now, in episode three, I’m starting to become suspicious of not-Chris-O’Donnell’s methods. Maybe because we open with a super dark monologue/intro about how Starling City is controlled by corrupt bureaucrats who kill people with bureaucracy and who infect Starling City like a cancer. There’s lots of talk about cancer. Maybe this monologue would work if it wasn’t VO’d over shots of not-Chris-O’Donnell readying his arrows, because all I can think about is how you don’t shoot cancer with arrows, and that if the cancer is as entrenched and pervasive as not-Chris-O’Donnell says that it is, then killing individual people who perpetuate it will do nothing to eradicate the actual system that exists. To do that I think you need to avail yourself of the police, district attorney, and media outlets in your town (all of whom, so far at least, appear to be relatively non-corrupt). Corruption, at its core, is a social and systemic issue. I googled, and none of the typical methods of fighting corruption in business and government use arrows. (A casual perusal of a couple years of data also seems to suggest that global governmental corruption is increasing, though, so who am I to cast aspersions on new strategies?)

Oh Jesus. Know what I just realized? I just realized what Oliver’s doing. He’s murdering the competition. I know he says he doesn’t want to be part of the Queen Corporation, but that’s only because he hasn’t gotten to that part of his plan yet. He’s killing all of his rival manor lords, and protecting the little people of the city, and when all of the rival nobles are destroyed he will take his place on the throne of the Queen Corp and rule like a king in a castle. And all the serfs in the Glades will give him a measure of their bread every year and everything will be happy. He’s assembling a serfdom, you guys. Feudalism lives!

While I’m thinking about that, not-Chris-O’Donnell goes to shake down a rival nobleman, but before he can finish with his shakedown speech a sniper shoots the evil gangster capitalist. Oliver also takes a bullet to the arm before he escapes to his lair, the bullet turns out to be poisoned, Oliver takes an antidote just in time to not die but still spends most of the night unconscious.

Not-Chris-O’Donnell wakes up and rushes home to find his mother talking to cops, and immediately somehow intuits that the cops aren’t there to find him (son who’s been shipwrecked for five years and already kidnapped once and who has been missing all night and shown a tendency to slip his security detail, who is in fact here in the room with mom, and who also hasn’t seen not-Chris-O’Donnell all night).

“You look like crap,” says Lil Sis to not-Chris-O’Donnell. No he doesn’t! He looks chiseled and hot and impassive LIKE IN EVERY SCENE EVER. “He actually seems to have more color than usual,” says my roommate. Lil Sis leaves the room and Oliver steps up to give his mom parenting advice, which is another thing he picked up on the island (a list that so far includes: ninja fighting, archery, computer hacking, and a master’s in business administration).

And here we find out that Oliver speaks Russian. Something else he learned on the island, I suppose. He passes himself off as a member of the Russian mafia, or something, to get the other mafia guy to find the guy who shot the Lord of the Rival Manor. Mafia guy threatens to kill not-Chris-O’Donnell and his entire family. I think not-Chris-O’Donnell might be getting to the point where that’d be okay with him. His sister is now openly abusing drugs and alcohol and mocking anyone who says offensive things like, “Hey, stop getting drunk and go to school, you’re seventeen.”

We are also discovering through flashbacks that not-Chris-O’Donnell wasn’t alone on his desert island. Instead he was captured by a sadistic madman and tortured into what I can only assume, at this point, is some kind of epic-level Stockholm syndrome madness. Maybe he’s a sleeper agent. Maybe he’s a brainwashed automaton who’s been programmed to destroy Starling City. ANYTHING COULD BE GOING ON AT THIS POINT, GUYS.

Also in this episode we are introduced to a murderous psychopath sniper who tattoos the names of his victims on his own body, but who otherwise leaves no trace of evidence against himself. Not-Chris-O’Donnell brings an arrow to a gunfight and, unsurprisingly, fails to murder. He does steal the assassin’s computer, though. So maybe that’ll give him the information he needs until he can get a look at the dude’s body and take notes from his tattoos. He takes the computer to an IT worker at the Queen Corporation who looks like ADA Alex Cabot from Law & Order: SVU and who I will be referring to as not-Alex-Cabot if she becomes a regular cast member.

Lil Sis has really good grammar when she’s mouthing off to her mother. “Important to whom?!”

Not-Chris-O’Donnell figures out that the reason why the Manor Lord was murdered was actually just a ploy to be able to murder all the other Starling City Manor Lords, who are all showing up at an auction to buy Manor Lord’s assets. Not-Chris-O’Donnell also realizes that there’s no way he can protect 50+ capitalist gangsters who are all trying to buy stuff, so instead of calling Starling Police Department’s anonymous tip line or some such, he slams Detective Dad into a parked car and tells him he needs to provide security for the auction. Detective Dad does what he’s told, since this is concerned citizenry’s usual method for reporting planned crimes.

Also Murderous Tattoo Assassin Dude has a gun mounted on his wrist like a Transformer or something. This does not actually seem like the best idea (Assassin Dude is undoubtedly more coordinated than me. I would shoot off my own hand). It does him no good, though, because not-Chris-O’Donnell shoots him in the face with an arrow because nobody gets to kill corrupt manor lords except himself. Not-Chris-O’Donnell’s security guard is unexpectedly let in on not-Chris-O’Donnell secret identity, because he gets shot with a poisoned bullet and not-Chris-O’Donnell can’t let him die. (I really should learn security guy’s name, he’s definitely one of the least obnoxious characters so far.)

End scene.

More Reasons to Not Move to Starling City (Episode Two)

April 17, 2015February 27, 2016 / spandrella / Leave a comment

In case you missed the first post, me and Roommate are watching the WB series Arrow and I’m blogging about it until it gets good. Well, and potentially after it gets good, if I’m going to spend internet space making fun of it, I should, in fairness, also devote internet space when it gets awesome. If it gets awesome. In the last episode, a character who looks suspiciously like Chris O’Donnell got rescued from a tropical island, was reunited with his family, everyone got mad at him, he DIY’ed a secret lair from which to dispense JUSTICE(!), attempted to blackmail a nefarious businessman but ended up shooting him with arrows instead, and dispersed said stolen millions to the masses. Let us continue with our (anti) hero’s adventures in this, episode two.

We start this episode with not-Chris-O’Donnell violently avenging/blackmailing a rich corrupt person who I’m sure has been economically abusing the helpless. (How did we get the rich corrupt person on top of a rooftop? Not important.) “My family’s wealth is built on the suffering of others” Oliver tells us via voiceover. I know you’re referring to general abuse and corruption, not-Chris-O’Donnell, but this just makes me think that you don’t know how capitalism works.

We then cut to not-Chris-O’Donnell getting declared un-dead (zombie-not-Chris-O’Donnell?), which I thought was only a thing you could do in India, and involves a lot of flashbacks of Oliver’s dad shooting himself and seeing the island for the first time and a terrible castaway wig that I’m sure we’ll get to see again. And probably again. Laurel is at the courthouse, because she’s a lawyer, and she’s mad at Oliver again, which I totally support. You enforce those boundaries, girlfriend.

We see enough of a courtroom scene to see that Laurel is also fighting for justice (JUSTICE!), and then we cut to a sexy exercising montage with voiceover from Oliver about justice and carrying out his father’s dying wish. Apparently his father gave him a list of all the people in Starling City who deserve to die. How convenient. Also, excellent parenting, Dad. Most excellent.

Of course, in order to get to sexy exercising montage, not-Chris-O’Donnell had to slip away from his bodyguard again, which is starting to annoy his mother. She tells him she’s afraid he’s going to get kidnapped (which is either totally justified, because he already got kidnapped once, or totally baseless, because he’s already been kidnapped so it would seem that particular danger is past), which I think we all agree would be completely terrible because she might have to hug her son a second time or something. That would just be awkward. We must be really careful to stay away from creating situations that might make people feel things. Or have to pretend to feel things.

Lil Sis is still mad at Oliver (sorry, I mean not-Chris-O’Donnell. The actor’s actual name is Stephen Amell. The character’s name is Oliver), because he’s been home a week and all he’s done is avoid the family. He’s been home a week and all you’ve done is go to parties and be mad at him, so um, I’m not really feeling you on the “my older brother doesn’t want to hang out with me while I drink and do drugs” poutyness.

Detective Dad (that is, Laurel’s dad, who is a member of the Starling City Police) is meeting with Guy Who Owns the Port, who is the guy that was getting shot at in the opening scene. They argue about whether the police have the right to enforce laws, or if Detective Dad is just acting out of some kind of personal agenda. “I’m pretty good at keeping my emotions in check.” No, you’re not, Detective Dad. You’re really, really not.

Mom wants not-Chris-O’Donnell to take a leadership role in the company that the family owns. Not-Chris-O’Donnell, shockingly, doesn’t want to. Mom is disappointed. Very disappointed. I think she’s re-thinking being happy about having her son home. Maybe you should’ve just stayed on that island until you were ready to take over a multi-billion dollar company, not-Chris-O’Donnell. You mastered archery, computer hacking, and ninja fighting skills on the island. I’m sure the MBA was just about to come to you (Oliver actually makes a joke about getting an MBA while being stuck on the island. I might start to like this show).

The members of the press in this town apparently have nothing to do besides mob not-Chris-O’Donnell every time he steps outside. Is this what life was like for Andrew Carnegie? Bill Gates? Because it’s pretty intense. So far no members of the media seem to be investigating why Starling City’s most prominent and wealthy citizens are getting attacked with arrows, but maybe the police are keeping a lid on it.

Nineteen minutes into the episode and we discover what it’s about: Guy Who Owns The Port has been allowing a drug smuggler to use his port. Oliver is shooting arrows at GWOTP to get him to stop. Drug Smuggler’s Henchmen killed Blonde Girl’s Dad, who worked at the port and found out about the drug smuggling. Lawyer Laurel is prosecuting the Drug Smuggling Henchmen for murder but you know how hard it is with murderous conspiracy gangs. Drug Smuggler Supreme (a blonde Asian lady who is called China White because this is comics) obviously doesn’t want her henchmen convicted, and proposes killing the blonde girl who just lost her dad, because in this city it is apparently the victim’s family who controls the district attorney’s office. GWOTP says that that will bring down the formidable wrath of Laurel, so China White logically proposes that they just kill Laurel. The solution to problems with murder….is more murder! Yay.

See? Everything is totally simple and straightforward, guys.

Back in the house of awkward, Thea (that is, Lil Sis) has decided that the best way to express her pain to her brother about what she went through while he was gone is to bring him to the tombstones that his mom had erected out on the grounds that have his and his dad’s names on them. Holy shit, guys. That’s a selfish and kind of mindfucky thing to do to someone. He told you he was traumatized and not ready to talk about what happened on the island, and your response is to take him to his own memorial site and say, “I know it was hell there, but it was hell here too.” I know you’re a selfish 17-year-old, Thea, but your brother isn’t actually obligated to…I don’t even know what you want him to do. I guess he’s not shouldering his near-death experience in a way that is acceptable to you? Apologize for the absolute lack of control he was able to exert over his situation and subsequent stressing you out? How do you expect him to be all open and confiding when you act pissed off at him all the time?

Ollie feels super stressed out and guilty, so he takes his sadness to…Laurel. Who doesn’t want to let him into her apartment. I wholeheartedly support this decision. And she…oh, not-Chris-O’Donnell is acting sad, so we’re letting him in. No, this is a bad plan, Laurel, no, Laurel, don’t you remember your boundaries?

Cut to Laurel and Oliver sitting in her apartment and eating ice cream. No boundaries, then. Okay. Laurel tells Ollie to act like an adult to his mommy. This actually kind of reasonable discussion is interrupted by intruders with guns, and China White, who apparently carries out her own hits. That’s my kind of gangster kingpin. Not-Chris-O’Donnell and his bodyguard work together and foil the attack. They call the police (as you do), and Detective Dad is angry because the attack happened in Laurel’s apartment. Detective Dad wants to lock Laurel up rather than have her be in danger because of either not-Chris-O’Donnell or the drug mafia she’s prosecuting, even though….he’s a cop who’s in danger pretty much all the time. So it’s okay for her to fear for her dad’s life every day he’s at work, but he can’t handle it in reverse. Also, literally locking your daughter up is a healthy and productive way to deal with parental fear for one’s offspring. Okay.

In the meantime, Robin Hood(/Oliver/Arrow) is busy breaking up criminal gangs all by himself. My roommate points out that he’s been home a week and has already broken up like three crime rings, which makes me wonder exactly how the police force has been spending their time while he’s been away. China White and not-Chris-O’Donnell get in a fight, which is interrupted by the cops, so they break off and run away, and not-Chris-O’Donnell is stopped by Detective Dad, and he gives Dad an arrow that is also a digital recorder that recorded GWOTP’s confession to ordering the murder of Whistleblowing Stevedore Man/Blonde Girl’s Dad.

We end with not-Chris-O’Donnell interrupting a ground-breaking ceremony to tell people to stop expecting him to be his dad, which confuses me because I don’t think anyone was forcing him to say anything at this ceremony, or expecting him to be his dad at all. But he had to re-establish his reputation as a drunk, shallow playboy, I suppose. We also end with dark emo not-Chris-O’Donnell eyes and a flashback of bad-castaway-wig-Oliver burying his dad on the deserted island, and the revelation that Mom is part of the criminal conspiracy that apparently murdered her husband and son (not-Chris-O’Donnell doesn’t know this, only us). Oh, and then we end again with Oliver removing his and his dad’s tombstones from the ground. And then we end again (really this time) with another flashback to the island and Oliver getting shot with an arrow. ARROWS! I bet that ends up being significant somehow.

Reasons To Not Move to Starling City (Episode One)

April 16, 2015February 27, 2016 / spandrella / Leave a comment

People keep telling me and my friend (henceforth referred to as Roommate) that the WB* show Arrow gets good. People whose tastes I want to respect tell me this. I got about eight episodes through season one and couldn’t take the emo angsty-ness anymore, and quit apparently “just before it gets good.”

So. I’m trying to suffer through season one and to make it to season two (which is good?). TRYING SO HARD, INTERNET. (Except now the people who tell me that season two is really good are telling me that season three is not so much. Dammit.) Blogging makes suffering bearable.

Also I want to say this disclaimer at the outset: If you like Arrow (even from the very first episode), that is all well and good and fine. I do not judge people who like the things they like. I want to say this now, and directly, because I know that when somebody is insulting and laughing at a show that you like, it’s easy to take that personally. Hell, I like Supernatural. We all like shows that other people think are dumb. I (so far at least) don’t like this show, and I’m not hiding that I don’t like the show; that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t deserve to be liked by other people. Okay? Okay.

Episode One: The Mighty Ragamuffin.

We open with Oliver Queen, who looks suspiciously like Chris O’Donnell, getting rescued from a desert island that he’s been stranded on. The mighty ragamuffin’s body is very (20%!) scarred, but otherwise not-Chris-O’Donnell is totally healthy and well-toned and not malnourished at all. He’s taken to a hospital somewhere, and his family is flown in, and his mom has a weird lack of urgency about needing to greet or hug her son, instead spending the bulk of the scene talking to the doctor in the hallway and not to her long-lost, presumed-dead son. There’s also a younger sister who I’m sure will become annoying in true WB fashion in short order.

New scene! We meet Laurel, an assistant district attorney (?) who is working in the law firm that Matthew Murdock probably should have joined rather than starting his own law firm in Hell’s Kitchen. She’s upset that not-Chris-O’Donnell has been found. Why? I’m sure it will be explained. At length. In greater depth than necessary.

Also, I will spend at least the next four episodes confusing Laurel and the sister, because we can only cast willowy female brunettes in this show and all white people look the same.

“After five years, everything that was once familiar is now unrecognizable.” That is some brilliant fucking voiceover script right there. Well done, writing staff. Not-Chris-O’Donnell is checking out his awesome hot body that is covered in scars. Awesome hotness that is covered in scars? POOR WOUNDED BOY. ME AND MY INNER EMO TEENAGE GIRL WILL FIX YOU.

Awkward family dinner time! The sister (or maybe Laurel, though I think Laurel doesn’t talk to anyone from the Queen family) asks what it was like on the island, which is apparently an inappropriate question and leads to awkward silence. Not-Chris-O’Donnell guesses that Walter is sleeping with his mom, at which point she tells him that she married Walter, and HOW IS THIS NOT THE FIRST THING YOU TELL YOUR SON WHEN YOU SAW HIM IN THE HOSPITAL THREE SCENES AGO. He found out about the past five years of Superbowl winners before he found out his mom remarried. That’s fucked up.

Not-Chris-O’Donnell’s friend wants to plan a party. Instead (in addition?) not-Chris-O’Donnell visits Laurel, who it turns out is upset because not-Chris-O’Donnell was her boyfriend until he took her sister on a yacht to screw her and then the yacht crash and her sister died and so did not-Chris-O’Donnell (except he didn’t). Okay. That’s actually a totally solid reason to not want to see a person ever again. I’m sure she will remain in this state of totally understandable aversion to his existence for at least three episodes.

Kidnapping! Guns! Guys in scary masks! Not-Chris-O’Donnell kicks their asses all on his own, then tells the detective (who is being all kinds of victim-blamey to a guy who just got kidnapped. But it’s fine because not-Chris-O’Donnell’s pre-desert island self was apparently a jerk, and the detective is just being a professional. Also this town only has twelve people in it) that a man in a hood rescued him. Sneaky devil. I assume his mom called the cops but that isn’t really explained. Also how long was he gone for? Did they realize he’d been kidnapped before he got back to his house? Maybe his friend (who also got kidnapped) insisted on calling the cops?

Best not to think about it. Not-Chris-O’Donnell is unfazed by being kidnapped, and so are we. He ducks away from the personal security his mom has hired and escapes to an abandoned factory that belongs to his family and builds himself a secret lair/personal home gym in the space of two hours and with only a band saw to assist him. I admit to being totally jealous of the pull-up ladder thing he can do. Also, building your secret lair in your family’s abandoned factory is the best idea that can have no potential for unforeseen consequences and will definitely never be discovered. We also learn that not-Chris-O’Donnell is really good with arrows, and has a green hoodie that totally disguises his identity. And that he is after justice. JUSTICE.

Onward to the welcome home party for not-Chris-O’Donnell. He is trying to be the sexy playboy when people are looking at him and dark and emo when people look away. Good luck with that. He spots his sister (at least I’m pretty sure it’s his sister and not Laurel) and OH NO DRAMA. She’s angry. Angry at him for being dead? But he’s not dead. She’s angry that he’s still alive? She’s angry that he left her all alone, like he had some choice in the matter? Also she’s accusing him of “acting like the last five years didn’t happen,” or that everything’s hunky-dory now. Girl, I know you don’t know this, but your brother spent most of the day getting kidnapped and then building himself a secret lair to capture criminals with. Your brother is not fine. He thinks he’s the goddamn Batman. Are you mad that he’s acting like a protective older brother? Is that not what older brothers do? Did you expect him to hand you some Grey Goose and a gram of coke and tell you to have fun?

Oh good, Laurel’s at the party too. This is the best party, you guys.

Laurel offers to be a sympathetic ear if he needs to talk about what he’s been through. Well, I’m glad somebody has offered to be this person, because damn does this guy need some therapy, but Laurel, you should not be that person. You should be mad at him forever, or at least for like a week. You know what’s great, Laurel? Boundaries. I advise you to get you some.

Climactic fight scene. The corrupt business owner that not-Chris-O’Donnell was trying to blackmail (because JUSTICE) refuses to send the money to the place, so not-Chris-O’Donnell arrives to beat it out of him with arrows. A fight scene ensues, with lots of machine guns and breaking glass and not-Chris-O’Donnell hitting people and stuff, and it’s actually going pretty well (in terms of being just absolutely fun to watch, well-choreographed and well-edited) until not-Chris-O’Donnell throws an arrow into the barrel of the bad guy’s gun and makes it misfire while simultaneously leaping backwards over a couch. Roommate and I watched it twice to revel in the breaking of reality–both of the laws of physics allowing this farce and of the terrible CGI special effects that are supposed to lead us to believe that such a thing happened. This is no Legolas-surfing-down-the-stairs-on-a-shield-while-slaying-orcs, guys. This is just plain ridiculous.

Also, I gotta say, having a hood pulled down over your eyes while you’re trying to fight crime seems like putting yourself at a disadvantage. Maybe it’s okay though because he’s impervious to bullets. It’s his superpower.

Turns out that not-Chris-O’Donnell did somehow get the money he was after (“via an arrow” is the explanation that Roommate offers) and Robin Hoods it to the people who deserve it, because while stuck on the desert island becoming an expert in archery and hand-to-hand fighting he also learned all about hacking secure banking systems.

…Does anyone ever realize that the arrival of the vigilante in the hood on the scene exactly coincides with not-Chris-O’Donnell’s return to Starling City? I mean, seriously.

*I know it’s been the CW for like 20 years now. I don’t care. It’ll always be the Dawson’s Creek network to me.

Reasons Why Not To Move To Sunnydale (Season One)

October 21, 2013January 2, 2016 / spandrella / Leave a comment

1. Boys turn really ugly right when you go to kiss them.
2. Cordelia.
3. You’re sitting on top of the Hellmouth. Go sit on some other mouth.
4. The town’s plumbing situation seems prone to emanating menstrual cycles.
5. Murderous invisible girls.
6. Questionable fashion choices.
7. The school administration seems either unwilling or unable to deal with the abnormally high rate of students and faculty who meet gruesome deaths while on school property.
8. The student population also appears to be eternally replaceable.
9. There’s only one nightclub in the whole town, and they allow minors inside, which means they can’t serve alcohol.
10. Demonic children. Seriously. I’m not sure if they start out deranged, or if the trauma of living in this town destroys their innocent little souls, but something is up with the kids ’round here.
11. Remember how Voldemort disappeared from history for like fifteen years after leaving Hogwarts? I’m pretty sure he went to Sunnydale.

12. The principal of Sunnydale High is really bad at his job. For example, a girl who confessed to stabbing a teacher with pruning sheers has been called to the principal’s office. Not to the local police station. And she is then given the job (along with Buffy, whom the principal says is “one of the worst students in the school”) of decorating the school cafeteria for Parent Day. Let me reiterate: the two worst students in the school, one of whom is a violent felon, has been tasked with impressing all of the parents of the school’s students.

Reasons to move to Sunnydale:
1. Invisible girls are hot.
2. The library has an armory.
3. Hot computer science teacher.
4. The internet is totally fine now.
5. Witty Slayer repartee.
6. People doing high kicks in very short skirts.

What Sherlock Gave Me (Part 2)

July 21, 2013August 17, 2013 / spandrella / Leave a comment

At the curvy road sign, I’m told, I’ll see a driveway, and I should turn left there. When I climb out of the car, I’m greeted with cool mountain smells, cricket chirps, and hugs. I’m handed a hamburger with swiss cheese melted on it, held between two English muffins, and pointed toward avocado, homemade basil pesto, and roasted onions to dress it up with. Still munching, I’m shuffled back into my shoes and taken for a stroll down near the river, handed St John’s Wort and tangy, minty weeds to taste. We go by a homemade trebuchet, but don’t fire it. I go across a pond on a log, stiff and cautious, and I have to crouch halfway across and take deep, relaxing breaths. My friend waits patiently on the other side, saying nothing, but waiting to make sure I get across okay.

Back at the house–safe and dry, and really, if I’d fallen, it would’ve been my own stiff clumsy fault, and not the log’s–I’m given another burger, this one lamb, and a beer, and a piece of yucca, which tastes kind of like dehydrated cucumber. Like if NASA wanted to make cucumber-flavored astronaut ice cream. The house is big, I suppose, but it’s hard to tell, because the floor plan is defined by the hill on which the house sits, so everything is around corners and up steps and through Jack-and-Jill bathrooms. There’s no cell service.

We dish up bowls of ice cream and go downstairs in stocking feet, spreading out on a couch and a bed. Sherlock, the BBC version, is projected onto a blank wall. There’s an electrical outlet on the wall that keeps wandering across my attention at odd moments.

I’ve seen “The Hounds of Baskerville,” but never watched it with people, and the funny moments are funnier, the startling moments are more startling because the person next to me is jumping in surprise. There’s conversation afterward. Explanation. Discussion of this episode vs Doyle’s originals. Plans for next time.

Outside afterward, on my way to my car, it’s gotten a bit cooler but not as much as you’d think, really. The canyon had already started to cool off when I arrived. I look up at the stars running riot across the sky, unobscured by city lights.

So this is one of the things that Sherlock–the stories in their entirety, not just the BBC version–has given me. Besides the amusement and the reassurance. It gives me moments like these. Hamburgers and hugs and good conversation. Comfortable faces. Moments away from life. This lonely man, Sherlock, who doesn’t have friends. Just one. Gives me nights like this.