Between blotch and blok

Seem to have watched more TV than usual the last couple of weeks--a product of feeling lousy and attempting to get a lot of knitting done.

Last week's viewing included Reign of Fire.

Pretty dragons, pretty drooling, bat-winged dragons. We particularly liked the lacy tracery of holes in the gigantic male's wings. Devastated England looked OK too and the rag tag survivalist costumes. The snippets from media coverage elucidating the back plot were good looking too. There ought to have been something--pathos, tragedy, tension, anything--in the notion of men jumping out of planes with nets to bring marauding dragons down. But the plot (we were entirely unconvinced by the idea that one male fertilised the eggs of all the females, thereby allowing the complete defeat of dragon-kind through the killing of just that one beast), the characters, the conflicts between the protagonists, were not worth the effort. If that's what's left of humanity, we'd rather leave the earth to the dragons.

We also watched the second half of the SG-1 two-parter, Heroes, twice, and considered a third viewing.

We're not quite certain why we stopped watching SG-1 sometime early in its seven (good grief!) series. A move of channel, a clash with something more interesting, a change of time/day for showing. Whatever the reason, we stopped, and neither missed it greatly nor felt that we were spending our time better through not watching. We caught the odd five minutes as the intervening series wound their ways across the various terrestrial and non-terrestrial channels. Feeling awful for several weeks, and having knitting to do, we've been watching more TV, including over the last couple of weeks during the day. So, in a confusing way, we're catching up with a prior series on Sky (or is it Sky Mix?) during the day, and the new episodes in the evening--plus the odd episode on Channel 4 (so our fix on the chronology of what's going on is shot to hell: but we've read most sf/fantasy trilogies starting with book 2 and then going back to book 1). It's still good, we still like the characters, the story still has many possibilities (like the TARDIS for Dr Who, the stargate method of getting across the stars keeps the horizons endless). We watched the first part of "Heroes" and thought it was interesting, but not quite as gripping as some. The TV producer depicted in the episode was a tad too irritating: we entirely sympathised with the characters' annoyance. Then we hit the second part and all the set up was worth it. Hidden in a genre TV series was some of the most clever debate about representing the truth, about manipulating the truth, about secrecy and accountability we've seen in a long time. We watched twice, and will watch again.

So, seeking the truth. There were two seekers after "the truth" in Heroes: the documentary film maker in the apparently impossible position of shooting a top secret project with a host of unwilling participants and the government investigator (played by the nice doctor off ST: Voyager) also encountering unwilling subjects. They both had their reasons for doing their damndest to get their results, whether film or report, and these reasons where ones which we could sympathise with. The discussion the film maker has with Daniel about the war photographer is crucial to Daniel's co-operation and seems genuine (I was waiting for a final shot to be that this was a fiction the film maker had invented to win Daniel over, but that card wasn't played, and the film maker was allowed to remain a character with apparent integrity, unlike the govt. investigator whose suspect motives were revealed). The investigator's arguments that the truth was necessary because of the need for accountability to the tax payers for all the expenditure on the project was really quite reasonable (his tainted motives don't change the validity of that argument). All those comments about the value of a man's life at a time when deaths in Iraq are undoubtedly being costed in similar ways.

Manipulating the truth. We see lots of shots of the film maker editing his footage (how accurate this was, I don't know, I could ask my film editor brother; I'm sure the very strange cutting between interrogations with the investigator were a deliberate visual comment on how editing can be used), trying to make it interesting. It was possible to see how he might take things and "twist" them: all through his interview with Carter you worried just how he could edit her partial admissions of her feelings for O'Neill. I guess he didn't do what I feared. (An interesting contrast to the film maker's method, which seemed predicable and sometimes crass, but was at least partially successful is the bluster and threat that gets the govt. investigator much less cooperation.) At the same time, however, we are ourselves being manipulated by the makers of the episode (nothing new there, but the context and the events make it more relevant). Through most of the second part of the episode we know a major character has died and by what we are shown, and by two characters being offstage for that time, we are allowed to believe that it's one character (O'Neill) and not another (Fraiser). Normally I'd cry foul at such manipulation, but in this context it's all part of the game that's being played. You can't, I know, believe what you see: even ultrasounds "lie" about the sex of unborn offspring. It's going to be a boy, no it's not it's a girl: a small reversal that mirrors in a positive way the reversal of our expectations about the identity of the dead character.

Reversals are, in fact, a major part of the episode too: from the final climbdown of O'Neill when he finally gives his interview to the moving reversal of the roll of honour at Fraiser's funeral, not a roll call of the dead, but a celebratory listing of those who survived due to one person's contribution.

I'm sure there's more: my unfamiliarity with much back plot inevitably means I must be missing things or misinterpreting. But it was a truly great piece of TV.