I am in a pretty good mood! It's been a long day and a weird week, but I'm feeling quite engaged and interested and mentally present in an enjoyable way. This is definitely a liminal time--an inflection time, from one season to another, back to school, changes to work, etc. But that's okay!
I went to work and did basically what I had intended to do. I'm about halfway through my last transcription possibly of the whole season and then I will gain huge chunks of day back to do other things. I am optimistic about this. Then I left early to catch the train. I was very sleepy and I ended up sleeping for the first half of the trip. We stopped for nearly an hour because of...something? the tracks were shut down? and in that time I woke back up, got out my laptop, and did some editing work. I finished my first pass of chapter 3 and am about halfway through my first pass of chapter 4. It's better than I remembered, I think! There are maybe some rough patches (that will remain rough) but I'm enjoying rereading it.
I've started reading Clown in a Cornfield, which is already a fun, light read. I'm only one chapter in but I'm enjoying it a lot. I think I'll like the atmosphere of the town in the book as much as in the movie and I'm enjoying Quinn and her third person narration a lot. And I love her dorky-ass relatable Dad. I too would look at all my stuff on the lawn of my new house in nowhere Missouri and want to cry. I think it'll be a good pre-game into fall.
I just feel... full of thoughts, in a good way. Engaged, thoughtful, curious. I don't know. It's almost like engaging with culture and books and writing and creativity feels good or something.
While on the topic of Spock & Chekov friendship, may I also point out the scene on 2x05 "The Apple" when Jim tells them to create a diversion and they just instantly start to kind of cuss each other out a little 😭😭
So much would be written about that grim night in New Orleans,
but not a single mention of our last night at Latrobe's,
as if the only crime unfit to print took place on that dance floor.
The New Characters: So what about the present? There is a stuffed-full quality to Lestat’s life and story that is definitely, and probably purposefully, in opposition to the simple elegance of Louis’s story. I suspect this was always going to be something I found more appealing in theory than in practice: when your goal is to create a chaotic and messy story, it’s going to appear chaotic and messy. That’s less my aesthetic but I can respect it. I am trying, in my reactions, to separate ‘this isn’t for me but the messiness is the point’ from ‘I think this was badly conceived, actually.’
So, I’m trying to be conscious that the chaotic muchness of the narrative and style is purposeful: in the costumes, the set, the narration, at least. And I suspect this desire for everything to be a lot all the time is also why we have about 100 new characters introduced this season.
However, when you have a lot of new characters, and you also have a significant number of old characters, and you have flashbacks, and you have multiple story lines going on in different places, and all of those new characters have names and are at least hinted to have personalities—as in, they are not literally extras—those new characters are going to end up either taking space from other characters/stories or becoming so minimal that they might as well not even exist. Characters aren’t set dressing, or at least they shouldn’t be. Having all of these PEOPLE contributes to what I call the disproportion of this season.
The minor characters introduced this season are: the 4 band members of TVL; Dee; Jarda; Christine; Baby Jenks; and Lemuel.
I think the band were well-used, personally, an example of the right way to introduce new characters, give them personalities and/or arcs, and yet not have them overshadow anyone else. Plus, their presence absolutely makes sense: Lestat is fronting a band, so, he needs band members.
I thought Dee was going to be a character of some significance, given she featured fairly heavily in promotional materials. Those promos made it seem like she was important to Lestat, but didn't make it clear how. But it turns out she only seemed important because the promos pulled heavily from 3x01, the only episode where she has anything like a significant role. For the next 3 episodes she’s essentially an extra—does she even have lines?—and after that, she’s packed off with the rest of the entourage and never seen or heard from again. I STILL have no idea who she was even supposed to BE. I liked Dee in 3x01 and was primed for more of her, but if she was going to fall so entirely to the wayside, she should have been cut. (Also, knowing the actor has previously played Hamlet makes me so mad—you’re sleeping on them!!!)
I feel the opposite about Christine, to be honest: character I didn’t like but can justify versus Dee's character I did like but can’t justify. Christine did have a clear role and someone like her—manager/fixer—probably is essential to keep the plot going. I mean, without her, I don’t think we could reasonably even believe that this tour is a functional enterprise. I didn’t personally like her, but I can’t objectively say she was around too much or otherwise distracting.
And Jarda. I have become annoyed with Jarda, as a concept, to be honest. I think he exists for four reasons: (1) to answer a practical question about how Lestat can be a vampire on a concert tour; (2) as a joke; (3) for that Gabriella sex scene; and (4) to be seeded for future use.
Well, I don’t think anyone was actually going to ask the practical question Jarda answers. I mean, it’s the campy vampire show—I think we are all just ready to suspend disbelief and say, the vampire can tour as a musician if he wants to lol. We don’t need to look too deeply at it. YMMV on point two, but I didn’t find him funny. He’s a silly enough visual joke when he’s first introduced—that’s Sam Reid in a bad wig and false teeth lol—and I could maybe forgive him appearing once for that joke and never again. Even that joke, though, gets staler every time I think about it or see it. I also suspect there’s supposed to be some ‘haha Eastern Europeans are stupid’ humor going on here, and maybe I’m paranoid/sensitive to that, but I don’t love that implication. The humor of him does not age well, I would say.
The sex scene with Gabriella one might possibly call necessary because it leads Lestat to blow her off, leading her to leave him as punishment. I feel like those beats could have been accomplished some other way. I happened to find that scene really gross and I wish it wasn’t there. I know drawing lines of grossness on the vampire show of sex and violence and abuse and horror is a bit of a fruitless exercise, but that’s my line. And as I mentioned before, when the horny vampire show cuts down on most of its physicality and even a lot of its sensuality, and one of the most central sex scenes is this mess—compounded by Jarda being played by the same actor who plays Gabriella’s son, which, you know, is kind of unignorable since it’s the point of the scene—it just leaves a bad taste for me. Personally.
And finally, I added part 4 given SR’s comments about ‘he’s not dead so we might use him again.’ I hope he was just talking out of his ass because the world needs less of this character, not more. Anyway, in a situation of decreased creator trust, ‘just hold on, it’ll be relevant later’ is not a satisfying answer to me.
Re-iterating my point about Dee but on a larger scale: the season is 7 eps long and after ep 4, everyone in this entourage other than the band is jettisoned. On the one hand, I get it: we’re paring down, and having dead weight characters you can just shove off to the side is one way of showing that Lestat’s world is getting smaller, the coffin of his recording studio with just his band and his mother and his muses and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. And yet… your season has only 7 episodes and is very low on not only the real estate of budget but also simply the real estate of time. You can afford these glorified extras if everything else is fully shown and explained, if essential stories get the space they need. If you have a season that constantly leaves viewers asking ‘where was the rest of that’ or ‘why didn’t we see this’ or ‘why was that rushed,’ wasting time on these half-assed characters becomes less justifiable. Is their only purpose, truly, just to provide MUCHness?
I would straight up cut Dee and Jarda. I would cut Fareed as well (not listed before because he’s not technically new). The only thing we needed him for was 3x07, an episode I think should not have existed in that form at all. We might not be saving a lot of time with these cuts, but it would still be better, I think. It would be less frustrating.
I mentioned two characters not in the entourage: Baby Jenks and Lemuel.
Baby Jenks had a certain amount of fandom excitement around her because she’s from the book but as far as I can tell they mostly just used her name? She was in the show for a specific plot purpose and that was it. Reasonable enough. She only appears in two episodes and actually does plot-relevant things.
And Lemuel. I will talk about him more later when I think about Louis, but this character was odd to me. He certainly wasn’t sucking up time, appearing only in one scene, and one could argue that his role was actually quite proportional. We see who he is and after that we understand the references to him, and the idea of him is more important than the actuality of him. I… think that’s right with Louis’s story being what it is. I have some mixed feelings about that story, which, again, more on later. I do think Lemuel is a character, in the context of the character-overstuffed season, comes across a little bit like yet another half-baked element shoved into a messy and over-ambitious 7-ep arc.
The old characters: The real reason I’m so frustrated by all these sparsely-developed newcomers is that we have a very rich collection of established characters (and dynamics) to draw from and my expectations for almost none of them were really met. One of the biggest things I was looking forward to from this season was getting to see more of the characters I’d already gotten attached to. And there definitely was… some of that. But it didn’t feel like enough.
Of course—disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. I’m going to go through them character-by-character and I think my reviews will be, at most, mixed from that perspective. I also had decently tempered expectations going into the season because I knew what the source material was, generally speaking, and I knew there would inevitably be a divergence between that and what I would ideally like to see. And finally, the harshness of my disappointment that we didn’t get more of My Faves stems from my personal dissatisfaction with the main story we got instead. I suspect that someone who loves Gabriella and finds Lestat’s storyline with her particularly interesting would probably be more forgiving of what was cut to make room for it. In other words, looking at the season as a whole, I can’t help thinking ‘we had time for THAT but we didn’t have time for [established character of the first two seasons to have more to do]?’
The most objective thing I can say about this as a pacing/proportion issue is that, putting the six of one, half dozen of the other marketing aside—it’s both season 3 and it’s a show of a new name, etc.—at its core, this is one show telling one story, and thus it brings expectations of the form with it. I do like experimentation with form, the boundary pushing of it. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say ‘you got me invested in Louis, Armand, Daniel, I expect to see more of them.’ And the show doesn’t think it’s unreasonable either, or else it would have all but cut Louis and Daniel, like Anne Rice did.
Louis’s story I actually do think was probably proportional, or at least what I was expecting. He’s in every episode and has a role probably larger than Lestat’s in S2, both in terms of minutes on screen and in terms of independent story. This was about what I was expecting. Could I always have more Louis on my screen? Yeah, but I have to be reasonable. The content of Louis’s story is one I take some issue with, but that’s another post.
Armand as a character is in a tricky position because, as I said before, he has to be operating in the shadows for his later dramatic reveal. Plus, Lestat probably only knows so much about his doings. But it’s mostly the first, since we’ve already established that Lestat has no problem with just making up things about encounters at which he was not present. And that’s fine, I guess—again, I don’t like Armand’s story as it was eventually revealed in 3x07, so this opens the question of could we have done something better with him that was ALSO more?
But at the very least, as I said with regard to the flashbacks, we should have seen WAAAAAY more of him in Paris, even if his role in the present day has to remain muted. I feel like conventional wisdom among Armand stans is there wasn’t enough of him/he was dearly underutilized and I can’t blame them for this take.
And Daniel. Look, again, we’re talking about quality not quantity, I think. Or rather, it’s hard to separate the two. My gut instinct is I didn’t like Daniel’s storyline or characterization but I feel like I haven’t thought about it enough in detail to really explain why. I don’t like that he was dropped from Lestat’s entourage as of 3x05. I kind of get why… but it makes his presence there before seem more shoe-horned, like he was another one of the glorified extras. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he didn’t have his own story. But it was… very much more there in the interstices, implied, than a full proper story, like, say, Louis’s.
And this happens again and again. Daniel. Devil’s Minion. Lestat/Armand. Even Louis/Armand, a storyline I think could conceivably be over, but apparently it’s not, but at what cost.
I just keep coming back again and again to: what was this season about? Well, more than one thing certainly. But mostly Gabriella, and Lestat’s history of abuse. This story took almost all of the air from the room. When you add in the much-ness of Lestat’s entourage and other rando-characters, and all of the digressions and long-ways-around, there’s not much time to be spent on either flashbacks or legacy characters. So the first is rushed and the second, shunted off to the side, for the most part, with a variety of excuses.
To be honest, I have no idea if anything I’ve said is analysis or if it’s just an excuse to ramble off some thoughts and opinions. I know there are people who are engaging with the season in a good faith and also complex way on its own terms, and these analyses make me feel simultaneously like I’m just fundamentally missing the point and my complaints read like those of a fool, on the one hand, and on the other hand like I’m being gaslit about the Emperor’s clothes. I suppose both are true, in a way. As I said, I think there are many individual scenes that are interesting, layered, and complex, and there probably is much to say about the details, connections, references, etc. At the same time, the big picture of this season just isn’t good, in my opinion, even outside of whatever was going on in 3x07.
Of course Daria, Jane, and Tom start their senior year in an awkward situation. That's inevitable, after the events of junior year and last summer. Daria had started dating Jane's boyfriend after they broke up. And when that relationship didn't work out either, she started dating Jane.
And now she is dating them both.
The complication that might make it all easier--or infinitely harder--is that Daria suspects Jane and Tom still have feelings for each other, too.
Written for Polyship Week 2024. Chapter One's prompt: "Is that my hoodie?"
Chapter One excerpt:
Running into her ex outside of the art supply store on the first chill afternoon of fall was not among Jane's expectations for the day. But Lawndale is small, and coincidence can be cruel.
“Oh! Sorry!” he says, in a tone of surprise and apology that tells her he hasn't yet figured out who she is. And then, when he pulls back, rubbing his head where it had banged into hers, he adds, “Jane,” with considerably more surprise and a little regret.
Clipper ships were the among the fastest sailing vessels built before the 20th century (the other contender for the fastest being the flying proa). They used large, full rigs with more canvas for their displacement than other ships of their era atop a slender hull. They were used for transporting goods at high seeds, frequently tea, silk, spices, and opium.
The Champion of the Seas was one such clipper ship which set the monohull speed record in 1854, which stood for all sailing craft until 1984, when the Formule Tag surpassed it, and for monohulls until 2002 when the Illbruck did as well. At present multihull 24 hour distance records stand at twice that of the Champion of the Seas.
They were initially constructed out of wood, though as steel became more available composite construction was used. A wood skin was placed on top of a steel latticework to form the hull, then clad with copper. The wood served both as a cheap and lightweight hull material and to electrically insulate the steel from the copper, preventing galvanic corrosion.
As steam engines developed clippers began to integrate steam engines into their systems, allowing them to pass through the doldrums without long periods waiting for the winds to shift. This created the auxiliary steamship.
It was only with the development of the triple expansion steam engine and deployment on ships with the SS Aberdeen in 1881 that would ultimately make motor vessels viable for most trade, and it was not until the early 1900's that motor vessels would no longer depend upon sailing vessels to deliver their fuel. At present only one original clipper ship (that is not essentially a hulk) remains, the Cutty Sark.
Modern vessels based on clipper ships such as the Dutch passenger vessel Stad Amsterdam (lit. City of Amsterdam) and Brazilian navy's Cisne Branco (lit. White Swan) have been built, both sister ships.
