Setsuled's Journal

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Attack of the Giant Space Metaphor

Series star Ben Browder takes a hand at writing a teleplay for Farscape and does a pretty good job of it. An episode following half the normal cast, now stuck on Talyn, is about a strange journey through the belly of a space beast, all while the spectre of jealousy haunts the fledgling group dynamic.

Season Three, Episode 8: Green Eyed Monster

Crichton (Ben Browder), in his new bunk aboard Talyn, finds his favourite pulse pistol, "Winona", has been stolen. He goes to the cockpit to complain but finds the door locked whilst Crais (Lani Tupu) is within, trying to woo Aeryn (Claudia Black).

We've come a long way from the days when Crais exiled Aeryn for her exposure to alien culture and hunted Crichton for killing his brother. Crais is a much calmer, more thoughtful fellow nowadays. The episode doesn't really address Aeryn's potential attraction to Crais but frames it more as an issue of her believing Talyn needs to have/be a two parent home. Arguably, they do have a lot in common, being Peacekeeper exiles, trying to figure out how to live in this new life on the run.

I love the scene where Crichton intrudes after Crais and Aeryn have been discussing the idea of getting her a neural connection to Talyn like the one Crais has. The dialogue doesn't shy away from the implications that go well beyond sexual. As Aeryn puts it, she, Crais, and Talyn would become one. To Crichton's inquiring eye, both Aeryn and Crais look flustered, sweaty, and furtive. But Crichton is surprisingly cool about it--the green eyed monster isn't him.

Is it Crais? Is it Aeryn? Oh, yeah, is it the massive animal with literal green eyes that swallows Talyn whole? Having to deal with being stuck in the belly of a space whale gives some effective context for the romantic drama.

There's also an amusing dynamic between Stark (Paul Goddard) and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy), stuck outside in a transport pod. I love the detail that Stark is the only one who knows live budongs are dangerous because the only other people who know are dead. Stark's panic plays nicely against Rygel's heartless desire to cut and run.

The episode concludes nicely as the characters reach an uneasy agreement. Aeryn's position on becoming intimately involved with Crichton starts to waver; she finds herself surprised that it matters to her that John knows she hasn't "recreated" with Crais.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me
Episode 7: Thanks for Sharing

Wednesday, October 09, 2019

A Dubious Shelter

H.P. Lovecraft wrote very beautifully about things that frightened him. One of the fundamental achievements of his work is a compelling tension between love and fear, a good example of this being his 1924 story "The Rats in the Walls". Throughout his life, Lovecraft expressed admiration and longing for the past, especially his own past, his youth in a relatively wealthy family. Yet stories like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or "The Rats in the Walls" are founded on the idea that it would be pretty horrible to come into some kind of direct contact with the past or ancestry.

The narrator of "The Rats in the Walls", an American descendant of an English family called De la Poer, returns to his family's ancient estate in England which, he informs us, hadn't been inhabited since the reign of James I, in other words the early 17th century. This follows from the death of the narrator's son, who first interested him in the estate. The son died from injuries sustained in World War I:

I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my plans of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two years that he lived I thought of nothing but his care, having even placed my business under the direction of partners. In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession.

World War I is infamously known as the first modern war, one that introduced the mass slaughter of trench warfare and chemical weapons, dehumanising and trivialising existence in hideous contrast to poetical ideas of the means and ends of human conflict, however terrible it had been in the past. In light of this, the narrator's interest in reclaiming a more beautiful and familiar past, one that interested his son, takes on a deeper significance. And so the horror, as the impression of that past is unravelled, is also deeply impressive.

The titular rats in the walls, first detected by the narrator's curiously heroic cat, are an effective precursor. Rats as plague carriers, as an impersonal, repulsive swarm, are a potent symbol of death that deprives human life of meaning. That they live in the very walls of the ancestral estate conveys the sense of a cold and mindless reality beneath the impression of a great and solid ancestry.

Much has been written lately about Lovecraft's racism but what fascinates me about the story elements pointed to as evidence of Lovecraft's feelings of repulsion for other races are often things which are ultimately connected intimately with the narrator or protagonist. This is clear in The Shadow Over Innsmouth and, to some extent, it's clear in "The Rats in the Walls". The story concludes with the erudite and cultured narrator discovering the animalistic nature of his Saxon and Roman forbearers.

God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were full, and none can say how deep they had once been. Others were still bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless rats that stumbled into such traps amidst the blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?

Ultimately, this closes a circle--in an attempt to escape the cold, dehumanising impression of reality created by World War I, the narrator instead finds further confirmation of it. The ancient world was just as sinister as the modern and there is no escape, the existential horror of the revelation delivered by some beautifully terrible description.

Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area—an area so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream—we turned to that apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went, for it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind. But there was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not gone far before the searchlights shewed that accursed infinity of pits in which the rats had feasted, and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living herds of starving things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of devastation which the peasants will never forget.

Comparing the rats to an army and the fascinatingly sexualised description of their movements invokes both trench warfare and the coldly biological nature of impulses to procreation. The idea of sexual gratification being just another automatic working of the rat horde. It is what might be called anti-sublime.

Tuesday, October 08, 2019

Vague Vampiric Plans

A strange and snooty minister reopens a church near Carfax Abbey; a trio of green skinned women go about murdering people; everyone seems listless, wandering wide eyed though dark, 16 millimetre footage. It's 1970's The Body Beneath from cult horror filmmaker Andy Milligan. Dialogue and performances dip into Manos the Hands of Fate levels of stilted and unnatural but there's some genuinely effective mood in this picture conjured partly by locations, the scarce lighting, and some decent wardrobe.

There are plenty of nods to Dracula though the famous vampire himself is never mentioned. Instead, we have the story of the Fords, a peculiarly prosaic name for an ancient family of undead. I'm not completely clear on the rules for vampires in this film but the minister, Alexander Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed), says he and his consort, Alicia (Susan Heard), reappear every forty years. Now he hopes to use a young woman, Susan (Jackie Skarvellis), in the "weakened" Ford bloodline, to revivify the clan in some unspecified way.

There are a lot of unresolved plot threads in this movie. A man who seems initially set up as a hero is established with a wife who always wears a red scarf around her neck . . . and we never see her again. A wealthy, conceited redheaded woman is captured by the vampires but she bargains with the resident Renfield, Spool (Berwick Kaler), to be released. Her plan is foiled when Spoor is caught and . . . we never find out what happens to her.

Susan's boyfriend, Paul (Richmond Ross), tries to rescue her at one point with the help of a rebellious maid from the vampire household who nods understandingly when Paul informs her the minister has no reflection.

The director's own interest in S&M is apparent though he overestimates the appeal of seeing two of the leads naked and pressed against each other in some vague approximation of sex. They're both beautiful people but they're both clearly uncomfortable and seem like they must have been introduced no more than two days earlier.

The lighting is sometimes quite professional, though, and always interesting, even when it's just a floodlight aimed at whoever's speaking, because the gloom of the grainy 16mm gathers around at all time, aiding the film in achieving a dreamlike quality complemented by the peculiar dialogue. The climax of the film is a creepy feast with some really interesting costumes, especially this woman's.

I don't think I could take a screenshot of her that didn't look like the cover of The Cure's Disintegration.

The Body Beneath is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1285

In greener olives strength abides in salt.
Projected jokes became a bluer graph.
A thousand milks create the perfect malt.
We order wheat with hefty sides of chaff.
The wine remarks in taste on turning time.
A number guessed revealed the suited card.
Expressions very crude were yet sublime.
But iron echoes greet the roaming bard.
A lunar stream permits a swimming car.
A rumour printed piques the pointed ear.
Sure all the avenues were paved with tar.
And ev'ry throat was paved with rootless beer.
The grainy bats remove the foodless store.
The wineless taste rewards a careful pour.

Monday, October 07, 2019

The Treachery of Trustworthy Faces

Simply acquiring supplies is seemingly never easy for the people on Farscape. When the supplies happen to be urgently needed, getting them might involve political intrigue, violent sabotage, and wearing a lobster as a hat.

Season Three, Episode Seven: Thanks for Sharing

And there's still a leftover Crichton (Ben Browder) from the events of the previous episode. Aeryn (Claudia Black) compels one of them to wear what looks like a grey shirt to me (the Farscape wiki says it's green) so they can be told apart. Jool (Tammy MacIntosh), serving as a more ornery and selfish medical officer in Zhaan's absence, runs tests and, as far as she can tell, the two humans are perfectly identical.

That is until one of them is badly wounded by a bomb during a clandestine meeting with the impeccably dressed Sarova (Rebecca Gibney), daughter of the planet's ruler, Pralanoth (Robert Bruning). Having a bonus Crichton comes in handy when it becomes inconvenient for knowledge of the meeting to pass to the rest of the ruling family. A deadly lobster spider thing, which kills anyone for lying while it's sitting on their head, supports the other Crichton's statement that he was never at the meeting.

I love how it seems to be raining all the time on this planet. There's a vaguely Blade Runner vibe to the place (though this makes more dubious the idea that Aeryn didn't know what rain was in "A Human Reaction"). I also love that Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) is utilised for his negotiating skills again though he's undermined repeatedly, first when D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) roughs up the security chief (Sandy Winton) for trying to molest Chiana (Gigi Edgley), then later when trying to negotiate directly with Pralanoth. Crichton mostly gets things done by force, at one point pointing Talyn's cannon right at the capital building.

The clear theme for this episode is trust. Crichton can hardly believe Aeryn is starting to trust Crais (Lani Tupu); Pralanoth learns he can't trust his son when the young man gets the lobster on his head (and consequences are swift and final for that); Crichton isn't sure he can trust his other self; Aeryn's mother (Linda Cropper) is in charge of the Peacekeeper squad hunting them, assigned with the idea of dividing Aeryn's loyalties; and no-one's quite sure yet if they trust Jool with a needle. The episode ends with an impressively horrific sequence of special effects and outstanding creature shop work, all to the purpose of showing one person was a shape shifter all along and definitely not to be trusted.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Sunday, October 06, 2019

Disturbed Space Sleep

What can go wrong with being cryogenically frozen and shipped off through the vastness of space? Usually something worse and weirder than all of the many very probable accidents that may occur. In the famous 1975 Doctor Who serial, The Ark in Space, it's big alien bugs.

Having watched Robot last week, I was strongly compelled to continue with Tom Baker's first season as the Doctor. All the serials in his first season are linked so it almost feels like one big serial--you could go further and really say that there's a through-line from Three's final serial, Planet of the Spiders, to Terror of the Zygons, the first of Four's second season. One of the things I enjoyed most about watching through Doctor Who the first time was the inevitable sense of the time in which it was filmed and how the evolution of the show was subtly influenced by the changing culture. In some ways, to-day we're starting to get a reprise of some of the political and social issues of the 70s, particularly in terms of feminism and ruminations on the value of radical, orchestrated social change.

These issues are clearly present in The Ark in Space and touch the current nerve in ways it didn't when I last watched it. One of the Doctor's companions this season, Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter), is established as peculiarly old fashioned, using deliberately dated language and saying things that implied dated opinions. When a recording reveals that a woman was the leader of the human race in the future, Harry teases Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) that it must please her "female chauvinist heart".

A woman "was the leader of the human race in the future." There's a confusing sentence. On the trio's first voyage in the TARDIS together, they land in a space station thousands of years after solar flares have destroyed the Earth--or thousands of years after the stations occupants believe the Earth was destroyed, the Doctor's lines deliberately cast some ambiguity as to the state of our planet. The first human to wake up from cybersleep is a medical officer, Vira (Wendy Williams). Following her is the leader of the expedition, known by the nickname Noah (Kenton Moore). He's immediately more suspicious of the Doctor and his companions, possibly because his mind and body are being overcome by the alien menace, known as the Wiirn. He transfers command to Vira before he's completely overcome and there's a fascinating moment where everyone's listening to the recording of Earth's prime minister delivering an inspiring speech about the challenge of rebuilding civilisation that lay before them. A shot of Noah shows a look of profound anguish on his face.

Next to Harry's playful remark to Sarah Jane referencing Sarah Jane's ardent feminism (as seen in Robot and Monster of Peladon), Noah's despair that he's no longer able to take part in the mission, unable to fulfil his role as leader, because of his suddenly repulsive and different body evokes a poignant sense of displacement. Especially since here Noah's physical state is as dangerous as everyone supposes, placing the viewer, for a moment, firmly in Noah's point of view.

A contrast between new and old is also presented when the crew of the station, Nerva, refer to the Doctor and his companions as "Regressives". This has a particularly potent political resonance as being the opposite of "Progressives". Vira refers to Harry as a romantic when he responds to being asked whether Sarah is a person of any value by scoffing at the mere question. One would think that when the entirety of the human race has been diminished to the handfuls who escaped in spaceships that any human life would be of value. But Vira's reluctance to step outside her role as medical officer points to a society where roles are rigorously defined. So someone like Sarah, from outside the system, might indeed not seem to have any value because she has no assigned role. The bureaucratic delineation of human worth evokes Communism, particularly Communist China. Ironically, it's precisely this devotion to assigned roles that makes Vira reluctant to take command.

Vira is incredulous at first when the Doctor suggests something went wrong with the mission--the perfect cold storage of identically dressed human beings in sterile white couldn't possibly be foiled. No one expects the interstellar insect menace. Life, in the form of slimy green bubble wrap, gets in when you least expect it.

Baker here, appropriately, establishes himself further as a weirder and less predictable Doctor compared to Pertwee. His grinning glee at the thought of undertaking a dangerous project of attaching his brain to a dead Wiirn's eye in order to see things from the Wiirn's perspective suggests this Doctor's brand of dering-do will have something almost perverse about it. As such, he's a perfect foil for the people of Nerva.

Saturday, October 05, 2019

Love of the Hunt or Hunt of the Love

Knowing the object of your affections might be trying to kill you can be a potent aphrodisiac. Call that an unintended consequence of a system that legalises hunting human beings in 1965's The Tenth Victim (La decima vittima). In a future that's deadly but, more importantly, stylish, two beautiful people, Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress, stalk each other through hard edged postmodern architecture wearing creative configurations of cloth. The movie may have intended to be more profound than it is but it's certainly a lot of fun.

We begin with Andress as Caroline, a woman being hunted by an Asian man in short sleeves and neck tie. He corners her in a weird strip joint, not knowing Caroline and the masked stripper are one and the same person until he unmasks her and she guns him down with the pistols mounted on her bra.

As you can tell, this movie's pretty influential, not just on Austin Powers but also on works like The Hunger Games and Battle Royale. The reality TV element becomes important when we see sponsors fighting for the opportunity to have a glamorous hunter like Caroline pitching their products while executing an extravagant kill.

Marcello Mastroianni plays a hunter also named Marcello. He's in the middle of trying to get out of a marriage to a woman named Lidia (Luce Bonifazi) and he has a beautiful young mistress named Olga (Elsa Martinelli). He's in love with neither, he tells Caroline at one point, and he doesn't care about his parents even though he's secretly keeping them alive in spite of a law mandating that the elderly be disposed of. It makes sense that such an emotionally disconnected guy might fall in love for the first time with the woman trying to kill him. Caroline's not much better since we've seen her use her wiles to kill once already.

There are all kinds of little details about how people are more callous--like the detail with the parents or the fact that comics are treated as great literature--really, that wouldn't be so shallow except The Phantom is treated like Shakespeare. In one scene that has little relation to the rest of the film, Marcello stops at a beach to preside over a ceremony for people whose religion is organised around the sun.

He's heckled by "moon worshippers" who throw rotten fruit at him--but he has clear plastic partitions around him to shield him and he doesn't seem surprised. He calls the moon worshippers "Neo-realists" and insists to Caroline that his sun religion is an attempt to bring something sincere into society. Thematically, this fits in as a counterpoint to a cut-throat culture but it doesn't make much sense placed with everything else Marcello says and does in the movie.

Ultimately, this is a more laid back flirtation in the new James Bondian spy genre, its conceptual excesses working out to make everything feel strangely casual and groovy. And that's pretty nice--watching Mastroianni and Andress make out is certainly easy on the eyes. The Tenth Victim is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1284

The pumpkin clock alarms a seedy gourd.
The pickled three partook of salty brine.
The Chevy gangs induct the random Ford.
Our many phones connect with ether twine.
The sense of counting cats reveals apace.
In stolen trunks the paintings forged a lock.
A struggle named the heavy ham replaced.
A million eyes construct a little sock.
Prestigious forks unite the bites to tongues.
The table scraps reduced the fight to crumbs.
A title mountain filled the landed lungs.
Between the summits something ever hums.
A bowl of stars condense to heavy cake.
A moving eye traversed the picture lake.

Friday, October 04, 2019

The Thing on the iPod

I have an iPod. I've had it for at least twelve or thirteen years and I still use it constantly. It freezes up now and then but mainly it works fine, more or less permanently hooked in my car. I put a lot of audiobooks on it when I worked at J.C. Penney and, in the hours before the store opened, I'd get some mental stimulation in my earbuds thanks to John Milton, Bram Stoker, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. I left most of the audiobooks on the iPod and pieces of them come up randomly between songs while I'm driving. Lately one that seems to be coming up a lot is H.P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep", appropriately enough for Halloween. Sometimes I wonder just how random the randomise function is but the iPod predates clouds and other invasive internet spells. It's so archaic it's not even capable of receiving the internet's psychic influence.

It'd been so long since I read "The Thing on the Doorstep" I barely remembered it. The story of a young man who falls in with a mysterious Innsmouthian woman named Asenath, I was surprised to find that its Wikipedia page only has negative quotes about it--even S.T. Joshi is quoted as saying it's "one of Lovecraft's poorest stories." I don't think it's one of his very best but I don't think it's bad or poor. The perspective on gender in the story is fascinating. Like the points of view implicit in Lovecraft's other works, it's filled with intriguing contradictions that point to a larger truth that is simultaneously inscrutable and canny.

The story is told in first person by someone whom we don't get to know very well--mostly he talks about his classmate and friend, Edward Derby, described as somewhat weak-willed but a talented poet, his poems having to do with figures in Lovecraft's mythology.

Young Derby’s odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.

But this hapless fellow has the misfortune to meet Asenath, a beautiful young woman even if she has the infamous "Innsmouth look".

She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a strange element “not quite human” in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port—tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.

I'd love to overhear some of these conversations about Innsmouth.

Asenath is also a mesmerist with a peculiar skill--she can make it seem like you're looking through her eyes. That's how it seems at first but of course it turns out she can actually swap bodies with people. Lovecraft's narrator doesn't say this straight out but it's pretty clear from early on. Some might complain that the narrator doesn't catch on when Edward starts behaving like a completely different person but I think it's pretty credible. We know it's a piece of weird fiction but as far as the narrator is concerned it's real life. One of the great things about Lovecraft is he understands that people experiencing strange phenomena will go to great lengths not to see them for what they are.

By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame—or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame.

This description is wonderful and has shades of Ingmar Bergman's Persona. I love the use of the word "gazing", too, as though Lovecraft anticipates the term in academia and presents a contrary suggestion, that the power of a reader or audience exists to in fact identify intimately with disparate people through a medium.

The story has obvious potential resonance for gender dysphoria but I think it works more broadly as a story of dissatisfaction with this fallible mortal shell. Asenath's motive for switching with Edward is that she feels a woman's mind is inferior but considering she's able to use her mind to perform the extraordinary feat of switching bodies the story itself doesn't support her bias--and there are hints that Asenath might not even be possessed of her original soul at the time of her introduction. Edward's suffering while trapped in her body goes beyond any considerations of sex, the process taking a physical toll when he's forced to inhabit it.

Mostly the story seems to speak to a very personal issue for Lovecraft, his sense of valuing art and poetry and pursuits of the mind while living in a world and universe that are inherently hostile to such things. You can see it in Edward's aristocratic, impractical predilections and skills as much as in Asenath's dissatisfaction. In being told from the narrator's perspective, there's emphasis in how the social machinations that perpetuate such relationships are only partially clear to the outside observer who's likely to put them down to innocuous explanations. At the Mountains of Madness or Call of Cthulhu are effective for how dreadfully apparent the agents of horror become but stories like "The Thing on the Doorstep" or The Shadow Over Innsmouth exercise an entirely different kind of dread in showing just how bad things can be while fitting seamlessly in with normal society.

Thursday, October 03, 2019

Two, or More, of Each

One of the fundamental horrors of existence is there are always people, just like you, suffering terribly. A jarring episode of Farscape gives some idea of what it's like when our mental safeguards against consciousness of this are stripped away.

Season Three, Episode Six: Eat Me

Zombies usually seem to me to be a metaphor for the homeless nowadays, or how people see the homeless--a mass of hungry humanity, the threat of their violence working as a transmutation of the vague feelings of guilt and anxiety the haves have regarding the have-nots. If that's so, the zombies in this episode of Farscape, the ravenous and dishevelled Sebacean cannibals aboard a wrecked Leviathan, are particularly effective for how they remove a layer of cognitive insulation.

But even before we get to them, there's already a forced identification with the less fortunate when Crichton (Ben Browder), D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), Chiana (Gigi Edgley), and Jool (Tammy MacIntosh), travelling in a badly damaged transport pod, mistake another Leviathan class ship for Moya.

Or at least Crichton mistakes it for Moya. D'Argo spots the control collar and warns Crichton that this signifies Peacekeeper control of the vessel, and being imprisoned by the Peacekeepers may be worse than dying in space. But Crichton lands anyway and soon things appear to be even worse than D'Argo feared. The interior is wrecked and decayed and D'Argo is immediately attacked by a filthy, incoherent Sebacean who tries to bite his neck.

The disquieting sight of a living ship just like Moya in a state of decay is followed by an encounter with people reduced to behaving like rabid animals. Jool, the sheltered school girl, continues to freak out in Kate Capshaw fashion, and helpfully screams at Crichton that he needs to fix the transport pod so they can leave. Chiana's at her wit's end with the new girl and resorts to hitting her at one point. After everything everyone's been through, Jool's spoiled behaviour is naturally abrasive but Chiana soon finds herself confronting things outside her own comfort zone in some of the episode's most memorable scenes.

The episode's villain, Kaarvok, played by Shane Briant as an excellently eerie junkyard gentleman, lives by "twinning" people--turning them into two perfect copies, and eating one of them. He explains several times that one twin isn't just a copy of the other--both resulting beings are essentially the original. We see this power demonstrated when he encounters Chiana, twins her, and then devours one Chiana while the other watches and, after a moment's hesitation, runs despite her twin's pleas for help.

It's particularly hard for Chiana to convince herself the twin is illegitimate because she'd just cried and held a little funereal for D'Argo's twin. Edgley's performance at the end of the episode is vulnerable and chilling as Chiana dismisses D'Argo's description of how exact his twin was.

Crichton, who's been made more callous by his experiences (Chiana, as experienced as she is, is comparatively a child) brushes things off a little easier. He's even a little mean when he tries to get this Leviathan's Pilot (Sean Masterson) to cooperate in repairing the ship. So it's fitting that the episode ends with Crichton being twinned and his twin being the only one of the twins who survives. He's a manifestation of Crichton's unresolved internal issues as well as an interesting point for other issues throughout the season as it develops.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Wednesday, October 02, 2019

Back to the Old House

Halloween month has officially begun so it's time I started watching more horror movies. I got started this month where Mario Bava finished, his final film, 1977's Shock. It's gory and stylish, as you might expect from Bava, but with a kind of nastiness unlike Bava's earlier work, a nihilistic plot about murder and revenge with heavy tones of incest. The movie's excesses become so absurd as the film progesses, though, I found myself enjoying it more. It's rigorously illogical but star Daria Nicolodi gives such a committed performance that the film comes off like a decadent nightmare.

The movie begins with Dora (Nicolodi) moving into a house where she'd previously lived with her now deceased husband. She has a seven year-old son from that marriage, Marco (David Colin Jr.), and a new husband, an airline pilot called Bruno (John Steiner). Bruno's at work for much of the movie, mostly he shows up to tell Dora to pull herself together after she's seen a floating x-acto knife or a zombie hand has sprung from the ground to grab her ankle.

Some early scenes feature Marco looking on wrathfully while Dora and Bruno have sex and we learn that his father, Dora's first husband, had committed suicide. One might easily imagine, maybe accurately, the screenplay was written by a vindictive misogynist. There are some similarities to American horror fiction of the 1970s, particularly works by Stephen King, that focused on horror based on domestic issues but Bava's instincts lead him to much more operatic places. So the process of punishing Dora with supernatural manifestations becomes much more about jump scares and weird sounds--pretty good jump scares and weird sounds, mind you.

The camera's focus on Nicolodi, though, and her persistent portrayal of raw terror anchor the film more in her perspective and it feels less like an exercise of bashing a woman as conveying the experience of being caught in a world of inescapable pain and shifting metrics of guilt. Dora's responsibility in her first husband's death is never entirely clear to us or to herself.

There are lot of impressive dream ideas and creative shots. I love a vision Dora has of an off-key piano being played that precedes her attempting to play piano but being cut by a razor between two keys. There's also a really neat shot that appears to have been accomplished by strapping Nicolodi to a bed and then slowly rotating the bed but keeping the camera fixed on her face. This seems to have been done entirely for the purpose of making her hair seem to wave about in an unnatural manner.

Shock is available on Amazon Prime in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1283

To choose a car above a boat's for land.
To fly a plane beyond a desk is real.
To sail a ship beside a fish is bland.
To catch a trout inside the net's a meal.
An extra sock encased the travelled foot.
A welcome chill accords a pleasant class.
Remember where the granite marker's put.
Between the licking rocks some dragons pass.
Between the roads a lake condemns a dam.
The mountainsides endorse the running car.
In awe the walking boat ingests a dram.
A week of bottles broke the lucky bar.
A steady house'd shake the tenant's feet.
Between the choppy waves the horses meet.

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

Peacekeepers Keeping Peace

After Farscape used its Peacekeepers to criticise imperialism in its second season, an episode in its third season comes off as almost pro-colonialist. Paying homage to classic Westerns and perhaps Seven Samurai, we find a story that shows sometimes the cavalry is indeed a very welcome sight.

Season Three, Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations

I'm not sure why there's an ellipses in the title. Maybe it's the end of a quote I don't recognise.

The episode opens with much of the crew visiting a temple set up basically like a tourist attraction, complete with goggles that actually allow the visitor to glimpse the past.

Here we find Aeryn (Claudia Black) is not completely divested of her Peacekeeper sympathies after all. She becomes irritated when the others question the story presented by the temple of a Peacekeeper soldier (Dan Spielman) who died protecting nuns from alien barbarians. It's been painful enough for Aeryn to completely change and adapt her worldview, naturally she's not inclined to think absolutely everything she'd been taught is a lie.

Of course, this isn't the story of a nice afternoon at a tourist venue. When Stark (Paul Goddard) puts on the goggles it causes a rift in time, sending him and the rest of the crew back to the point in time memorialised by the monument. Crichton (Ben Browder), having seen plenty of time travel movies, immediately warns everyone against disrupting the timeline, even if it means letting some people die.

Jool (Tammy MacIntosh) kind of becomes the show's resident Willie Scott (of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) in this episode. First she's disgusted to find she's been drinking animal urine--the nuns used this to treat her injury--and then she becomes comically drunk on it. When Stark manages to get the time rift back open for a moment, D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) accidentally shoves her into a wall before shoving her in the right direction at which point she lands on her ass in the mud, back in the present, discovering the disrupted timeline in the process.

Of course, her outfit makes it all seem sexual, which retroactively makes me want to re-evaluate Kate Capshaw's performance.

Unsurprisingly, Aeryn finds the legendary Peacekeeper soldier isn't quite as awesome as he was supposed to be but it's only because he's an inexperienced kid. There's no revelation that the Peacekeepers were actually the villains and while among the leonine attackers there are some wise generals disinclined to slaughter nuns there are many more who are just as bloodthirsty as the stories claimed. This leads to an effectively tragic conclusion to the episode as Crichton places too much faith in his knowledge of how the timeline works to disastrous results. It's a good ending for an episode that nicely evokes memories of Fort Apache or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. And Harvey (Wayne Pygram) continues to establish his personality in Crichton's head.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel