A first conversation

This blog came about after yet another email exchange that began with a quick catch up about the latest episode of Caprica, and ended up talking about the absence of god in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This is pretty much how the conversation went:


PM: How was ep 2 caprica? He forgot to backup the Zoe file? Silly, silly Daddy. This is going to end badly.



SH: It was a slightly implausible plot point - how could he not back it up when he's a computer genius? - but obviously necessary. And I got little chills seeing the birth of the Cylons ...



PM: Poor, poor robot – that was nice work in capturing the horror and terror of Adama's girl waking up and not having a heart and knowing it was wrong, then the confusion of Zoe cylon feeling its body, flexing and testing and then looking at itself in the mirror. Explains so much about them already, they have the personality of highly pissed of teenagers who have a religious obsession .....



SH: Yes! I wouldn't have been able to articulate that but I'm glad you did :) I also think it's bold that they're addressing religious fanaticism so directly - and it's not really even under the veil of sci-fi because Caprica society is very much like modern US society, just with robots. It would seem that many Americans presume God in all sorts of media and culture, but they don't often say the word in TV shows - at least, not this way. And I'm guessing that Zoe's 'God' is a precursor to the Cylon 'God' as opposed to the 'gods' that everyone else references (both in BSG and Caprica).

Okay, now I'm sounding like a geek.



PM: No not geek - this is what I love about sci-fi and that I often think is missing in "Lit" festivals. The geeks get stuck right in to exploring the ideas and the universe and the nuances and ramifications  of the characters and their decisions. Sometimes at festivals the sessions end up being  all about the "beautiful" writing and cleverness of the author but the “thing” of the book, what it was about, who was in it, how did they make me feel, did they make me care about them, that seems to slide away in favour of a rather more detached discussion…..

Ronnie D Moore cut his teeth on Deep Space 9, which was all about the religious fanaticism of a race rather like a Tibetan/Jewish hybrid (alien of course) - who'd just been liberated from a long, vicious, deadly occupation that ravaged their planet and killed many of their people. DS9 unlike other Trek shows stayed put. They didn’t blast away at the end of every episode. They were stuck with witnessing how these people were going to establish a society, that was basically a theocracy, and how they would come to terms with dealing with their recently departed oppressors ..... and it all played out over 7 seasons. It had some restrictions on it (cos of Trek universe "laws") but it really laid the groundwork for Ronnie D's clear fascination in how all these issues play out today.

And yes - BSG is such a post 9-11 exploration of issues  like religious fanaticism, past oppression, the limits of power and authority, and torture. And now Caprica is, as you say, a really in your face “let's have a look at what makes religious fanatics tick”  and a good hard look at the societies that produce them. And with the cylons, for good measure we’re going to wrestle with that whole Dickian (Phillip K Dick) question of what does it mean to be human. Brave TV making - sadly the audience numbers aren't looking good in America for the new series ...... oh no, I feel a Firefly moment.

Buffy was brave TV making too - it's really struck me re-watching it how "absent" religion is in that world - which is startling considering it's all about good and evil and heavens and hells etc ..... I know Joss W doesn't believe in a "sky-bully" and it shows. I just wonder whether now - with Christian fundamentalism really on the march in America - if he would get away with it today?

I read something the other day that made sense too - that Buffy ended up being something of a reluctant bodhisattva - she was pulled out of a place where she felt "finished" at rest - nirvana - but the bodhisattvas decline Nirvana in order to try and ease the suffering of sentient beings ..... nice one.



SH: Buffy's statement/plea/cry to Spike about where she came from and how she felt about heaven and earth probably struck many people - like me - as being more convincing than anything religion has ever offered. Not to mention her suicide - not for 'faith', but for love. I still can't watch that episode without crying.

Joss's reach is wide - at the end of class, when students are in savasana (relaxation), I often ask them to come back from whichever dimension they're in, and that comes directly from the Whedonverse. I think he would get away with that today for the reasons that Caprica got made in the first place - while there's a lot of truly wacky stuff in the US (gun lobby, the religious right), it's also home to some amazing creative thinkers, and some of them make commissioning decisions on cable networks.

Let's start our own sci-fi real-world discussion group! Meeting once a quarter or something like that.



PM: There's a plan! Get our geek on big time.

It's true the description of "heaven"

"And I was warm. And I was loved. And I was finished."

- is truly beautiful - love to know if that was Jane Espenson's line (she's writing on Caprica!) or Joss W's.

Buffy offering herself instead of Dawn - yes, but I also think the sacrifice aspect is leavened by the theme of that series - about why slayers die - Spike telling her they all wanted it by the end. They were tired and ready to die. Buffy looked excited and almost happy when she started running. Peaceful and relieved as she fell.



SH: I know - that look on her face when she turns towards the platform. I guess it was all those things - relief that she got to die for the best of reasons, not just because a vampire got the better of her; peace at the end of a job well done. And then in season seven she admits that if she had to do it all over again, she wouldn't.

So I know one person who for sure would be interested in a discussion group. Should we confine it to friends or put it out there on Twitter and Facebook? And this is a question for you because you have a few non-friends following you on both.

OR here's another idea - we do a blog together writing about this stuff, and see if a group arises from it. Clearly we both like to write about it ... Maybe it would be blog posts in the form of discussion between us. Or something.



PM: Oh getting misty thinking about it - the beautiful music helped too .... just hearing it playing behind the selection titles on the DVDs gets me all sad. It was really picking up in that season her fears she was becoming hardened to all the killing - I loved that after all the slaying they dealt with the impact of it, she was a killer, she killed, that has to damage you.

This has potential I think. Live is always fun - because then of course there are drinks!

A blog would work as well - or actually in addition. Maybe pre-meeting postings to generate ideas for discussion plus a regular update of stuff as it happens? Caprica season etc .....

Oh - fun!!!





And so it came to pass that Nathan Fillion is My Imaginary Best Friend was born out of the unanswered question: Buffy in The Gift – sacrifice or suicide?



Feel free to join in the conversation because, that’s the thing about Sci-Fi, about writers like Joss Whedon, Ronald D Moore, Russell T Davies. They write genre. They make it entertaining. They take it seriously. If in any doubt about how seriously, then check out “The Body” from Buffy or  “Flesh and Bone” from BSG or “To the Last Man” from Torchwood. Stories that move you, that are packed with ideas, with ambiguity, with shades that reveal themselves on re-watching, It has been said that what makes a book “Literature” is its re-readability. The re-watchability of much Sci-Fi genre television then begs the question – is this the literature of moving images?

And now, a word from our sponsor

The other half of the blog clocking in here - Pema.

Despite the popularity of Sci-Fi more than once I've been with a group of friends of the writerly persuasion and had conversations that go like this:

Me: "Oh, are you watching Being Human? It's marvellous. Funny, sad, and really touching, all about the struggle to be human, to remain human, about what it takes to live in this world."

Enthusiastic Reply: "No, sounds great, what's it about?"

Me: "Well, it's about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost. And they live together in this house in Bristol and ..."

And I've lost them .... for some people the leap into the form is just a bridge, a gulf, a valley, a galaxy too far.

Which is such a shame, because there are worlds, universes, dimensions filled with stories that resonate with the human experience, with characters who are as complex, ambiguous and tragic as any you may find in Tolstoy, and with ideas that provoke and challenge, that reflect society today and foreshadow societies that are yet to come.

Thing is, of course, that once you do connect with people who are out and proud about their passion for storytelling in alternate spaces, you discover a conversation that feels like it's been going on since we bipedal-ugly-bags-of-mostly-water first hunkered down around a campfire in a dark cave and listened to someone tells us a great yarn.

Pema

Why name this blog after Nathan Fillion?

Originally this blog was going to be called 'How cute is Katee Sackhoff?' after Pema and I exchanged emails upon seeing this photo. As we're both Battlestar Galactica (2000s version) geeks, our fondness for Starbuck and the woman who plays her is boundless. (Simply put, Katee rocks.) Many is the discussion we've had about BSG, about Starbuck, about, about, about ...

We're also both very fond of Nathan Fillion because - you guessed it - we love the Joss Whedonverse even more than we love BSG. As the inhabitor of Mal Reynolds and Captain Hammer - not to mention a very entertaining Tweeter - Nathan has his own pedestal. He's also very entertaining in Castle. In the end, that's what did it: we wanted to be able to discuss mainly sci-fi TV shows but also branch out into other things. Nathan's 'crossover' into mainstream TV made him the perfect candidate to have this blog named after him, even if it's his Tweeting and general Nathan-ness that makes him our Imaginary Best Friend.

So on this blog we plan to not discuss the minutiae of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Dollhouse, Battlestar Galactica or any of the Star Trek franchise. There will be no talk about that-line-Andrew-said-in-season-seven-ep-whatever. But there may be an analysis of whether or not Cordelia Chase exists in a moral vacuum. We plan to talk about the themes, the storytelling and what it means to us, on trivial and not-trivial levels. Because stories are what drive both of us in our work and non-work lives. Talking about story makes us go misty-eyed and weak-kneed and all that good stuff.

As Spike said to Buffy in the season six episode After Life: 'Every night I save you.' Story saves me every night and day. And I'll always want Joss Whedon's girls with superpowers to rescue me too. So that's it for now. No doubt Pema will have something to say too.

- Sophie