the hypercube of happydalek

Whatever flaws the show itself may have, J.J. Abrams' "Fringe" has a great main theme, doesn't it?:



I don't know why, but it reminds me of the main theme from PBS' "Mystery!" (which is really nothing like it at all, but they both have some kind of indefinable creep factor that thrills me.)

Anyway, the only problem I have with the "Fringe" theme is that it's only 30 seconds long.  It's simply too short for the amount of awesome I hear in it.  So I did a bit of youtubing, and lo and behold, lookit what I found:
 

 

Ain't that just a lovely piano?  I admit though, that I'm not a huge fan of music that has such big breaks and pauses in it like this does.  It never feels quite complete somehow.  Still though!  Six minutes of "Fringey" goodness!  It is fairly lovely.

But this one's my favorite.  It's a 3 minute long remix (probably cribbed from a dance remix of the theme.  I'm not linking to the dance remix because I found this one far, far more aesthetically pleasing), and it is fecking beautiful.  Seriously, I could listen to this jam all day long, guys.  It just works for me.  THOSE STRINGS. GUH.

But if instrumentals aren't your thing, you're in luck (er, maybe?)!  It's also the backing track a hip-hop/rap song.  (I don't really know what they're singing about, but the rhythm is cool.  There're bad words in this one, be warned.)
And this post wouldn't be complete without the "retro" version of the opening titles that accompanied one of the recent episodes (set in 1985).  I freaking LOVE it.

People of the interwebs, I love you. 

Notice how I stopped posting reactions to the season after like, 5 episodes?  That's because I lost interest.  The show is badly written, nothing else to say about it, really.  The season finale aired last night, and so far NBC has not picked it up for another series.  You ask me, that's a good thing.  "Heroes" is a premise wasted, and this past season was lackluster at best. 

Samuel, supposedly a charismatic leader of specials i.e., Magneto, is completely inept at it.  He's not charismatic at all, unless by "charismatic," the writers actually meant "creepy, dictatorial and just plain evil."  People challenge him, he kills them.  People try to reveal his murderous activity, he flips his shit and alienates everybody else.  Hardly demonstrative of great leadership skills.  From the start, it was very obvious that Samuel was evil.  And not just evil.  He was the creepy, X-Files brand of evil that, admittedly, I've kind of missed from TV.  But for all that he didn't do anything.  I think it would have helped if he'd been a bit more sympathetic and a bit less psychotic, because as it was it made for very boring television.  At least back in Sylar's golden age he was doing questionable, gruesome things to people's brains.  Samuel just stroked his evil mustache, laughed maniacally and threw dirt clods at people.  Yawn.  (Actually, that mental image is even more entertaining than he was.)

The carnival setting was bizarre, and while a somewhat neat idea, it only made the show feel even less tethered to reality.  Consider, you make the entire season revolve around a carnival that can appear and disappear at random and is full of people with magical powers...and Samuel is the best they could do with it?  An idea that fantastic deserves an equally fantastic story behind it.  I wish it had been more like a pocket dimension outside of normal space and time (allowing Hiro's powers to actually matter again).  Once the show established that people with powers existed long before the pilot episode's eclipse (and seriously, wtf happened with that, writers?), they could have done some really wild shit with it. 

Populate the extradimensional carnival with Medieval X-men or Cavemen with powers. 

Say that every few millenia the stars align correctly, there's a power-awakening eclipse, the proliferation of Specials causes havoc, so the carnival appears to trap them all inside and isolate them from society by order of....  Aliens.  Or Teutonic Knights of Special Eclipse Power that decided to create and maintain the carnival to keep society from collapsing every time.  Tomorrow People from the future.  Space Jesus.  I don't know.  C'mon, writers!  Embrace the possiblities!

OR....

Screw the fantastic stupidness of magical carnivals and government conspiracies and instead focus on real people drama, on the more mundane/fantastic possibilities of people in the real world having powers.  The Petrelli family, for all it's messed-upness, could have served as a very rough draft/template for that kind of story.  Think about it.  Peter is the lame outcast in a family full of high-achievers.  He finds out that part of the reason his family members have had so much success is because they have sekrit magical powers.  Then he discovers he can borrow those powers for his own use to level the playing field for himself.  Or be a hero.  Which path will he choose?  Couched in a typical family drama, the powers angle could be really interesting.  The closest they ever got to this was the Bennett family, and notably, that was just about the only part of the show that didn't get completely effed up.  The show derailed when it tried to come up with a big huge mythos that dominated the stories.

The sad thing here is that I know I'm not coming up with anything that other, louder fans and critics haven't been saying for a couple years.  What astounds me is how uniform the criticisms have been, and yet how they all were completely disregarded by the creative team behind the show.  It seems there was almost total dissonance between what the people behind "Heroes" thought they were giving their audience, and what their audience actually wanted.  It's a real shame, because the format of "Heroes" was one that could more easily change cast and setting and story than others, and could probably have done so with minimal complaints from the audience.  The "Heroes" audience was intelligent, and they wanted intelligence from their show.  Why didn't they get it?  What went wrong?  

Not much fandomish going on in my life right now.  Working full time (ish...two part time jobs) has kild my muse ded for the tiem being, it seems.  Still watching Heroes but haven't made time for a proper reaction post because, frankly, most of the episodes have left me feeling rather "meh."  Not much to report.  Still trying to attempt a MMSR sequel.  Hard to feel motivated when nothing about it surprises or excites me.  Have to figure something out.  Still churning away at the Doctor Who fic I came up with a little while ago involving the Master that my brain is convinced will be awesome. (Long sentence is long.)  It's now going to include extra Doctor.  As is, I felt I had a bit too much OC happenings, and I know that can get horribly boring when you click on something hoping to read about what the canon peeps are up to.  Trouble with the Who fic is, I have a lot of research I should probably do, and it's pretty glacially paced right now.  It may turn out to be zippy when I actually write it do the long portions of "...and time passed" montages my brain is filling it with.  So, it's not quite 'there' yet.  And probably won't ever be, based on what usually happens to these great ideas I leave gestating on the back burner.  *eye roll* 

My day job is awesome for brainstorming.  I can sit and clean stuff for five hours and chew on plot points at the same time.  Trouble is, my night work does a fantastic job of making me completely forget and lose interest in what I was working on.  Retail is bad for the brain that way.  It eats up all my creative energies.  Hopefully I'll be able to think more productively after the holidays.  Christmas is a horrible time of year.  I really hate it when I have to work in retail.  Underscores all the things that I dislike about it.  

But before I go all tangenty about it, yay for Christmas Doctor Who!  David Tennant is this close to being GONE and I'm so excited about it.  Not that I'm a Tennant hater or anything.  He's a very good actor.  I just can't stand 10.  I tried to like him, really I did.  And it took me his entire tenure to figure out that the reason it wasn't working is because 10 is designed to be unlikeable.  Looking back, it's so blindingly obvious I feel like an idiot.  Christmas Invasion, he's wondering what sort of man he is.  "Am I rude now?"  Yes, you are.  You're a power-tripping jerk.  I guess I kept thinking he'd get over it, or I was imagining it.  I kept trying to look past it, but Rusty, in his authorial brilliance, wouldn't let me, because he's been steadily emphasizing it.  So instead of mourning a character-gone-wrong and going all, "oh WHY wasn't 10 written better?!" I can feel secure in my jubilation at his imminent departure, because I'm supposed to.  Thank Rassilon, my world makes sense again.

On a slightly different note, I'm combing the "Other Doctors" section of Teaspoon looking for creative, unique takes on Doctor Who.  I want to read experimental stuff that really takes advantage of the enormous potential that's there.  Heck, I want to write some of dat sheit.  (Now that I've finally stopped trying to put fictionalized versions of Michael Jackson into everything.  That was a strange couple of months.)  Recs?

This one concerns Volume 4, "Fugitives."  If I was feeling more organized, I would have listed everything by episode, but I'm not, so I didn't.  After expressing all this, I went hunting to see what the general fan reaction to "Fugitives" was, and it seems my impressions are pretty much in line with everyone else's.  Kinda surprising.  All the same, I will most definitely be tuning in to Volume 5 when it airs.  Like I mentioned in my last Heroes reaction post, I will be watching for probably all the wrong reasons.  It's really like train wreck, this show.  Horrible, and even more horrible when you investigate it and discover all those little mistakes that added up to the crashing and burning, but you're just too fascinated to not gawk.  I seem to be drawn to flawed things.  Perhaps out of boredom, I seek out the imperfect so I can engage my brain in analyzing and "fixing" all the stoopid.  (Muse, I will NOT write Heroes fanfiction.  I WILL NOT.  No matter how shiny and alluring the plot bunny may be.)

( Long post is long. )

Neither of these seem terribly original to me, but the ideas amused me nonetheless:

1. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul are recruited by the White Guardian to fetch the 18 pieces of the Key to Space.  (If he's got one for time, it just figures he'd have one for space, y'know?)  
2. Jar Jar Binks is the Chosen One of the Jedi and falls to the Dark Side.  Provisional title: "Qui-Gon got it a bit wrong." 

(Actually, I'm half-tempted to make this fanon: Jar Jar Binks has Super Duper Force Potential.  (Click the link and read how this is not such a crazy idea.  Go on, you know you want to.)  He can't control it, and causes accidents that get him banished from Gungan society.  He runs into Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, owes Qui-Gon a life debt, goes along on their adventure.  For the purposes of this nutty theory, Qui-Gon has a weakness in that he's not all that great at sensing untapped Force potential.  When they land on Tatooine and run into Anakin who also has Force potential, the combined aura of Jar Jar and Anakin is enough to trigger Qui-Gon's spidey sense, so he mistakenly assumes that Anakin must have Super-Duper Force Potential. 
( Cut for midichlorian fanon and a total reinterpretation of the Star Wars Saga as a giant case of Mistaken Identity. )

You know those books you read occasionally as a kid that were usually written in second-person and at the end of each chapter you had a choice of what direction to take the plot?  I called them "pick-a-path" or "choose-your-own-adventure" books.  Turns out, the technical name for them is a "gamebook."  I've been thinking for a few months now that it would be a really ambitious, interesting project to attempt to write one, what with my fondness for plot twists and alternate endings.  I feel like Doctor Who is a blatantly, screamingly obvious choice for a project of this type.  Talk about timey-wimey!  I'd love to twist it so that various plots and storylines would double-back on each other in interesting ways and have a really cool influence on established history and Who canon, and posting such a story online would make the whole thing easier to do.

The problem is...where to start?  And why am I even considering this when I have tons of half-developed projects already screaming for attention?  I could also see a project like this being open to multiple authors, to tackle all the branching plot points and different endings.  it could be epic.   

1. Spiderman is real! At least, he is to an autistic Thai boy who crawled out on a ledge because he was scared of starting school.

2. Saturday morning Watchmen! Behold:
( Report from the Job Hunt Front )

According to the Homepage of the Dead, George Romero is currently making another zombie movie!  It hasn't got an official title yet (though you can be 99% sure it'll be something "of the dead."), but it's evidently going to have some kind of western theme in it (which initially seemed like a completely loony concept until I thought about it for a bit, and now I can totally get how that would work), and be kind of a "happy medium" between the last two of his films, the big-budget Land of the Dead, and the documentary-style Diary of the Dead.  

Why do I even bother trying to listen to audios anymore?  It figures that as soon as I put one on, I'll end up with three errands that need doing and two phone calls I can't ignore, regardless of how busy or boring the day has otherwise been.  [sigh]  I'm never going to finish Master at this rate!