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theres-no-protocol-for-this · 4 years ago

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Apologies & Logistics

This is the end of the “Humans Adopt a Combat SecUnit” story, or at least this part of it.

Jae

I had expected the governor to fry my organic neural tissue for disobeying a direct order, but it had merely immobilized and disabled me. I couldn’t move or see, but my hearing continued to function normally. It was a non-optimal outcome but still significantly better than my initial predictions.

In my ear, Serenity provided a running commentary of ongoing events. I felt like an oddly captive audience to a ship that suddenly eager for conversation, no matter how one-sided. And it had a variety of opinions on topics ranging from the Corporation Rim to cargo haulers, handlers, and the intricacies of wormhole travel. I wasn’t bored.

Meanwhile, external voices came and went.

I heard Cass leave the control room moments later with a squeaky gurney that could have used some grease in her wake. Kris’s booming voice echoed on the bridge while he negotiated docking procedures with one of the incoming rescue vessels. He notified them about the rescued corporate higher-up but failed to mention my existence. I suspected either they would dispose of me or steal me. My risk assessment module deemed the former option unlikely, given my handler’s determination in reversing the governor’s freeze command.

Presumably, I was still on the inventory lists of the security and tactical support company that owned me, and the humans would need to make me disappear in order to leave the sector.

“I’m not sure you can hear me.” Kris’s voice was suddenly close enough that I thought he might be sitting on the floor next to me. “And I’m not sure which option is better, honestly. I hope you’re not just trapped in there until Cass figures out how to fix this. But if you can hear me, I want you to know that I’m grateful. You protected my best friend when I couldn’t, and that means a lot to me.”

The human’s voice trailed off for a moment before picking up again. “Anyway, we’re going to finish this cargo run, but before we do, we’ll meet with a friend of mine who, uh, locates documents that don’t strictly exist and formally assign your ownership to Cass. Just in case.”

More silence. Human processing time is slow, but this was different. “Deity, it hurts to even say that. I really hope you’re not hearing this.”

Meanwhile, Serenity explained, “What Kris is referring to is a forger or a fixer. Probably one of Kris’ friends from his university days.”

The human kept talking. “I’m sorry about calling you a bot. You’re obviously not, and right now, I’m fucking hating the rules that say otherwise.”

I didn’t understand the human’s concerns; to me, the facts remained immutable. I was property, and if I belonged to this crew in a legal sense, they wouldn’t be stopped by Port Authority wherever they went next. If I could speak, I would’ve recommended that exact course of action.

A moment later, Cass returned from the medical room. I could hear her light footsteps as she moved around the bridge, and Serenity gave me an excellent overview of what the human was doing. My handler’s voice was gentle when she said, “All right, let’s take care of Jae. How’re you holding up, SecUnit?” I could hear someone unspooling a cable. “Ready, Sere?”

“Of course,” the ship answered in its mechanical tone.

I recorded a brief but frantic burst of activity between myself, my handler, and the ship that was mediating between us. Cass wanted to disable my governor permanently, but there was no practical way to do so without access to a Combat SecUnit manual, which we didn’t have. She implemented perhaps the next best thing — the module would no longer react or take action without my handler’s explicit permission.

Then Cass overrode my governor’s freeze command, and I could move again.

I opened my eyes to find Cass staring at me with a worried expression on her tired face. Serenity reconnected me to the feed, so I reached up and removed the feed interface from my ear. Now the ship could bother me anytime it wanted.

“How are you feeling?” my human asked nervously.

Better than initially anticipated. I’d added the sentence to my buffer once I’d understood what Cass was asking. It was becoming easier to modify the buffer with each attempt.

“You weren’t expecting to survive that, were you?” The human sounded suspicious.

I shrugged.

“Don’t ever do anything that stupid again! That’s not an order, Jae. This is me telling you that we like you alive and safe, and I want you to consider your own well-being when deciding how to best handle a situation.”

Understood, Cass.

I sat up, and the woman hugged me with probably all the force she could muster. I… I didn’t mind it. At all

***

Kris

The rescue ship that finally docked with Serenity was a small patrol vessel that belonged to the station's towing company. I was pretty confident that the warship would not need a tow at this point — there wasn't enough of it left out there to warrant cleanup operations. Since I had performed the rescue spacewalk and had gotten injured, a company representative took my statement first. Te pulled out a display surface and took down notes, presumably so ter corporation could figure out who to bill for the unnecessary services.

While Cass and I dealt with the tercera and the legal bullshit in this sector, Serenity edited the video and audio of my spacewalk to make it look like Jae had been destroyed by one of the weapon-wielding bots. In my report, I noted that we had a Combat SecUnit on board at one time, but it had suffered catastrophic damage during the rescue operations. When prompted, I mentioned that we'd put what remained into the recycler.

It was a bald-faced lie, but the bored and cranky representative seemed entirely disinterested. Te didn't even review the video before signing off on the documents, didn't ask for any logs, and performed only a cursory examination of the unconscious corporate employee still in our medical suite. For a small fee, te even offered to take the woman back to the station so we could be on our way quicker. Frankly, I wanted nothing more than to be rid of the human.

Cass had other ideas.

She and I huddled in the mess while the representative returned to ter ship to finish scanning the debris field. Te grumbled that billing back damages on an infiltration attempt would be a nightmarish hell of solicitors from the owner company and wasn't motivated to make anything easy for them.

"What if she tells someone?" Cass demanded after the tercera had departed.

I sipped my coffee and shrugged. "It's going to be a he-said-she-said between the corporate and the station."

"No, I mean later, when Tatiana returns to work minus a construct."

"They'll probably deduct its cost from her salary and demote her. The company cares about profit margins. And she won't be able to prove anything anyway since I destroyed her interface."

The captain looked unconvinced. She paced the room, running a hand through her shoulder-length hair in a nervous gesture. "I don't know…"

"Cass, we are literally stealing one of the most dangerous weapons in the Rim. I think we have bigger problems than one pissed corporate." I tried not to sound patronizing, but it was a struggle. "We absolutely can't take her with us."

"What if we could change her mind? About Jae."

I tried not to spit out my coffee and almost succeeded. The smell of coffee in my nostrils was unbearable. "I don't think so, love. If she doesn't think it's a person now, after working with it for the entirety of its life, what are the odds that we can say anything to change her mind?"

Cass sighed and stopped pacing. "Yeah, you're right. I just…"

"I know. You want to do the right thing. But at this point, absconding with our new friend is probably the best we can manage."

"Yeah." She still sounded reluctant. "Maybe I can reach out to Mom's friend and see if she can help somehow."

I glanced at her dubiously. "You sure you want to talk to Dr. Mensah? Didn't you say she was a councilperson or something?"

I knew pitifully little about Cass's home planet because she never spoke of it. It was a freehold planet unaffiliated with any corporate entities where people were apparently nice to each other. At one time, she'd mentioned growing up on a farm alongside a large extended family, but the story always ended with her leaving home as soon as she was old enough to make her own way in the world. That her mother knew one of the Preservation Alliance leaders reminded me that Cass had connections, even if she chose to do everything on her own, all the time.

"She was until she retired a couple of years ago, I think. I haven't been back in a while, and I barely talk to move. I definitely don't keep track of her friends." She scratched at a scab on her arm. "I remember a news burst that Mensah rescued a SecUnit, but that was..." She frowned. "Well, long enough ago that I completely forgot about it until just now."

I cleaned up the mess I'd made on the table with the coffee. "We're sending the crazy corporate goon back with the tercera. And if you want to call your parent, that's up to you. I'm sure she'd love to hear from you."

"Says the guy that doesn't speak to his parents."

I stiffened and then remembered that Cass had no idea why I avoided my family. "My parents still believe I'm female. I'm not willing to add jack shit to that conversation."

The captain looked at me with the same warmth that had initially convinced me to join her crew. "Oh, man, I'm so sorry, Kris. I didn't realize your parents were idiots."

That made me grin. "Idiocy is a nice way of putting it, love. I used some stronger words last time I saw them." I got up and wrapped an arm around Cass's thin shoulders. "Come, let's go see about finishing this transaction and getting the hell out of here. I bet Jae is bored sitting in its cabin."

"It's recharging," Cass told me, another reminder that she knew what the SecUnit was doing at all times. "But yeah, let's go. Enough insanity for one day."

The End!

I don’t know where the characters go from here. I have some ideas but maybe that’s a story for a different time.

I wanted to tell a story about stealing a CSU and there it is. And CSU in this case is a complete sweetheart, so. :)

#murderbot #ao3 #fanfiction #adopted #combat secunit

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starr-fall-knight-rise · 5 years ago

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Humans are Space Orcs, “You Survive We Thrive

Things are heating up with Krill’s mini plot line. Sorry I posted a little late today :) Hope you like it

“So, what do you think?”

….

“This is… disturbing, most disturbing.”

“That poor?”

The psychologist, a sturdy little vrul, steel grey in color, with red-tinted orange eyes looked up from where he was examining the projected data rolling in lines of minutely scripted characters through the air to vanish.

He had no issue with his divided attention, continuing to read the scrolling data as he spoke with the official, “That bad, I have never read a psychological evaluation this…. Strange….”

“Psychological degradation.”

The doctor shook his head, “That is what seems strange about it. There WAS no psychological degradation. His intelligence quotient remains high enough that the test cannot accurately represent it in numbers. He not only succeeded in all our tests, but often broke them from the inside going out. He shows extreme scores on logical thinking, and procedural memory, but the strange part is his creative problem solving has skyrocketed enough to break the test. There is no degradation, but his scores and IMPROVING. I even created a matrix for emotional intelligence, not a perfect test, but think accurate enough, and he scores extremely well on that.”

There was a pause between the two of them.

“Did you think to test him against the human? See if maybe the changes could be explained by that?”

The psychologist looked on miffed, almost insulted, “Of course I took that into account. That was one of the first things I did.” He switched the projected information, “The human’s scores are….. Well they are erratic at best and downright confusing at worst. Let me explain. You see this here, as far as intelligence goes, he's about as smart as the average beta, which gives him a little over average for humans. I mean you would hope that he is, but there is nothing special. His spatial intelligence is…. Well its excellent, far beyond excellent. And the same can be said about creative problem solving. Emotional intelligence is higher than the doctors both show the same in procedural memory, however a relating to semantic memory the doctor far outstrips the human. Numerical intelligence does not seem to be the human’s strong suit. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen someone score that low before. I would say the same for episodic memory, accept worse. The human seems to think that he can remember things well, but it seems that he actually cannot.” “What does that have to do with anything.”

“Well you know how I said that the human’s intelligence scores put him at the low end of beta…..”

“Yes.”

“Well in aggregate, putting all his scores together, he would count as an alpha.”

The official stood back in surprise, “How? How can that be possible.”

“I am not entirely sure at this moment, but…. It is quite fascinating… I was thinking about going to talk to the human face to face, see if I can’t figure out this mystery.”

The official nervously shifted in place, “You should be careful, psychologist, you are starting to sound like the doctor did before he went off his rocker.”

“Has he gone off his rocker though?” The psychologist retorted.

“I mean yes, of course he has.”

“The tests say he hasn’t.”

The official harrumphed, “Well, aren't you also saying earlier that he had shown extreme increases on the aggression quotient as well as that for emotional response.”

“yes , but that hasn’t affected his other scores.”

The official sighed but then nodded, “Very well, but be careful, and don’t spend too much time with the human. He has proven to be dangerous, and may have an affect on you.”

“You worry far to much, it took the doctor months to be affected by him, and he had already showed signs of instability before that. I will be fine.”

***

“Dr…..Dr….. try to pay attention please.”

Krill lifted his head in annoyance pulling himself from a contemplation of all the stupid things the humans had probably been doing while he was gone, “I have answered all of your question. I have no idea why you would still be interested.

“We have plenty more questions.”

“No you have the same question but phrased slightly differently every time.” Krill sighed and glowered at the illuminated blue walls.

“Why are you so angry, doctor.”

He turned to look at them, “I am angry because I realize there are things about humans that I prefer over my own species sometimes.”

There was a pause.

“And what might that be?”

“Well, for one humans generally accept an answer after the tenth time I have given it. Not to mention that….. Well…. There are a lot of things.”

“Go on, we are listening.”

Krill sighed his shoulders sagging. He tried to control the human body language, but was finding it difficult, “OUr species has spent decades surviving, but isn’t the measure of a successful species one that can flourish. Our population has been stable for the past thousand years, and it has functioned the same way during that time. We don’t try to get better, we make it to, yeah that's ok and then we quit. Humans don’t just Survive, they TRIBE they are always trying to get better, to improve upon what they have. Where illness is a reason for death because we are no longer useful, they created technology to make life come to them. It has been less than a decade, and humans already live all across the galaxy. Their population has reached an all time eruption, and there is no reason it cannot get bigger. And here we are piddling along on our single planet, in upwards of ten cities doing the same thing we have done for generations.”

“The point of our species is survival.”

“We have proven to be good at that, why not go on from survival and into…… thriving.”

“The Universe is not meant for us. We are not as durable as others. Our planet is all we have.”

Krill shook his head growing more excitedly agitated, “that is where you are wrong, the bigger universe is out there for us. I have proven it. I have visited and stayed on death worlds for weeks at a time. Do you want to know the secret?”

The other Vrul looked a bit surprised, but intrigued. Looking on at Krill like he was insane.

“The secret is sociability. I survived because I had humans to help me. WIth their help I have been able to go anywhere and survive in any place. If we learn from them, we have a chance to live like they do.”

“And how is that?”

“Free.”

***

Commander Vir floated in near darkness a soft blue light illuminating him from all sides. He couldn't have said which was was up or which was was down. The only color he saw was blue, and aside from his own body there was nothing else, so he floated, rotating slowly his hands held out to his sides his legs relaxed and resting easily in the air. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine the warm heaviness of a space suit, and his breath against the glass, a thin barrier between him and space.

Images of his first spacewalk ran through his mind with the fiery light of a star rising behind a strange alien world.

There was a sort of soft rumbling that broke him from his thoughts, and he spun in mid-air to find a vrul float into the room. It seemed as if he was upside down though…. Or well he couldn't have said which one of them was upside down considering space didn’t seem to have a right side up or upside down.

He struggled for a few seconds rotating to face the Vrul.

Despite being the captain of a spaceship, he didn’t actually spend much of his time in zero Gs, though that was a fact he would forever be salty about.

“Commander.” The Vrul acknowledged floating closer as Adam finally righted himself.

“I am afraid you have me at a bit of a disadvantage…. Who are you?”

The Vrul stopped his orange-red eyes glowing strangely in the blue light, “I am the psychologist.”

“Ah, let me guess, you wanted to see what about a human makes your species so vulnerable to change?”

“Precisely, smarter than your tests suggested.”

Adam frowned, “You know that seems to be a thing with you Vrul. Every time I meet a new one of you, I spend most of my time getting insulted, and yet there isn’t really much I can do, since you guys don’t say anything that isn’t true.”

“And the doctor does not?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why is that.”

Adam, in boredom, began rotating backwards feet thrown up into the air, watching the Vrul as he slowly spun in a circle, “Hmm…. I think…. I think the answer is because we socialized him.”

Spinning back around, the commander would have said that the Vrul seemed surprised. Generally those emotions were easier to read on Krill, but he supposed that was part of the reason why he said what he said.

“That is… an interesting theory, human.”

“Not really a theory. A theory implies that it cannot be tested. I would suggest it’s more a hypothesis.”

The vrul looked at him in a contemplative manner, “Go on, I am interested to hear what you have to say on the subject.”

Adam was a little surprised, “Vrul were kind of known for being stuck up pricks who thought they were smarter than everyone else, but he supposed that this might just help krill out of his current predicament.”

“Well you have talked about the doctor changing a lot, and I have this theory that every one of those changes have to do with his adaptability living in a pack.” The Vrul waited for him to continue, so he did, “You say something about how Krill is more emotional now, right? Well, emotions are adaptable to humans. Aggression allows people to keep their place in the hierarchy. We have trouble listening to krill like we should, so he gets mad at us, as a way to show us he SHOULD be respected. You might have discussed his use of human facial expressions or body language, well, body language is EXTREMELY important to properly communicating with a human, if he didn’t adopt those habits than he wouldn’t be able to communicate with us effectively. You guys talk about how he moves wrong, well that's part to do with body language and part to do with how quickly humans move. He can’t keep up with us if he floats.”

The psychologist looked Adam over with a critical eye, “Have you been thinking about this?”

Adam shrugged, “Not really, it just makes sense. And I argue that it PROVES that your species is more adaptive than you originally thought. Krill isn’t broken, he has…. Well micro-evolved. I guess.”

The psychologist looked on with interest, “And…. what do you care about him.”

Adam snorted, “Look. Once you make friends with a human, or a group of humans your as good as family, sometimes better than. We have a saying on earth, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It means that the people you choose can sometimes be more important than the people you didn’t. Well we adopted Krill into our pack, he's as good as family to me, and I will do ANYTHING to keep him safe.”

WIth a slight shift of his body, the Vrul floated back.

Adam floated forward, “And when I say ANYTHING, I mean it.”

“But he's not even your species.”

Adam shook his head, “Doesn't matter, the human bonding instinct is so powerful that we routinely bond with inanimate objects. I bought a cactus (a plant) during my time in the airforce academy. I named him melvin, he’s still alive and lives at my parents house. We are great friends. I know a guy who won a stuffed pig at a carnival, and now it goes with him everywhere. My sister always buys the most mangled shaped food because it makes her sad to think that no one will buy it….. She's sad…. For vegetables.”

The Vrul had floated back even further.

“So when I say that we can bond with inanimate objects, imagine how we feel about Krill. Not only my good friend, but our doctor and our surgeon. He saved my life on multiple occasions which also means I owe him a debt of honor like the Drev see honor. I can’t let him go until I repay him, and even then I don’t plan on it.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I am saying that I WILL get y friend back, no matter what I have to do.”

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summernightskyy · 4 years ago

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My Top 5 The 100 Women

Got tagged by @nomattertheoceans to do this! Thanks so much Lisa!! This took me forever to finally finish. (Can I just mention how hard this was for me though?!? I almost feel like it would have been easier for me to do my top 5 The 100 men - there’s so many amazing women on this show, but I also have had conflicting feelings for most of them at certain times lmao)

1. Clarke Griffin

Why was it so hard to find a gif of Clarke w/o Bellamy or Lexa, let Clarke shine on her own D:

I honestly really struggled over whether to put Clarke or Raven in my number one spot, but I ended up going with Clarke for a couple reasons. One of the things I’ve always loved about Clarke from the start is her tenacity - the girl literally never stops fighting. And yes, literally every single woman on this list is a fighter, but not all of them have had to make the tough calls that Clarke has with the consistency in which she’s been forced to make them. Does she always make the right choice? No, but I do believe that the choices she’s made have almost always been with good intentions. Even when she ended up making ruthless decisions that ended in many people’s deaths, I can’t think of a time where she didn’t try another more peaceful way first. She’s been willing to sacrifice her own happiness and mental well-being for the good of her people time and time again, and I see in her a mental fortitude that’s almost unparalleled. The other reason I ended up placing Clarke in my top spot is because of the representation she brings to the show, and that representation ended up meaning a lot to me. Finding a show with a Bi lead is hard enough even today, but in 2015? It was groundbreaking. While I’m still coming to terms with my sexuality, I think the teenage girl that I was watching The 100 back then needed to see that kind of representation; I genuinely believe that Clarke definitely helped me subconsciously start processing the fact that I might not be straight. She’s far from perfect, but I do think she’s a good person. I honestly think she deserves a lot more love than she gets from the fandom. That’s why Clarke Griffin is not only the first Bisexual lead on network television, sorry Sara Lance, Clarke did it first XD but also the first on this list.

(Also yes, I chose this gif of Clarke for a reason; the bi flag has the best colors, tell me I’m wrong ;)

2. Raven Reyes

I’ve loved Raven from the first second she appeared on my TV screen. How could you not? She’s smart as a whip, confident, and a literal rocket scientist. Raven Reyes is quite literally exactly who I would’ve liked to have grown up to be like in another world. She can fix almost anything. She’s a genius. She’s pretty much an astronaut. She’s spacewalked - that’s the stuff of dreams for me. Yes, there have been times over the course of the series where she’s annoyed me, but there’s always been more to like about her than not. She’s up there with Clarke when it comes to mental fortitude and determination - not even leg injuries and seizures can stop her. She’s always been a super intriguing character, and I’m honestly not sure where this show would be without her. And the cherry on top of all that is that she’s beautiful, and amazing representation as well.

3. Octavia Blake

At one point, Octavia would have definitely been my number one spot. At other points, she wouldn’t have been on this list at all, but I’m learning to appreciate her character again - and there’s a lot to appreciate. At the start of the show, Octavia was my favorite character. I loved getting to see her actually get to experience the world around her for the first time. She was headstrong, bold, beautiful, open-minded and kind. My journey with Octavia has hit some bumps along the way, I won’t lie. Her brother quickly ended up displacing her as my favorite character on the show, and while their relationship was unhealthy on both ends (through no fault of either of them - looking at you, Aurora), I wasn’t a fan of her taking Lincoln’s death out on him and the way she began to mistreat other people as well. I was afraid none of that would ever be addressed, and while I was beginning to enjoy her character a lot more already, I can enjoy it even more so now that it has. It was so fun watching her develop into the amazing, badass warrior she is now.

4. Emori Kom Spacekru

Honestly, if Emori had gotten more screen time over the course of the series, I’m almost certain she would be higher up on this list. My heart really bleeds for her, being cast out by her family like she was for something as trivial as a birth defect. I love how she worked so hard to get the Children of Gabriel reunited with their families, even if it didn’t turn out as well as she intended it to. I love the way she consistently stepped into danger and exerted influence as Kaylee Prime to try and help attain peace. One thing that I also really admire about Emori is the way she threw herself into learning from Raven during her time on the Ring. She’s such a boss and I was so happy when she successfully got Spacekru back down to earth in season 5! I’ve been super stressed over her well being, and I really want to see her (and everyone else on this list - but I’m most worried about her and Indra) make it to the end of the series alive.

5. Indra Kom Trikru

So, fifth place was insanely difficult for me to decide on, not gonna lie. I considered putting Lexa, Charmaine Diyoza, and even Callie and Hope (ultimately decided I haven’t seen enough of either character to justifiably put either of them up here over Indra). Honestly, if I had published this a couple weeks ago, Lexa probably would be in fifth place on this list. But after seeing 7x10, I ultimately decided to put Indra. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Indra mentioned to Sheidheda earlier in the season that she thought the fact that her mother was weak for having kneeled to him (even though it was to protect her). She’s very much a tough love and even somewhat cold person. That being said, I was amazed to see her do just what her mother did to protect Madi, even though I’m sure she would have fought to the death if Madi’s life wasn’t endangered. She has a very harsh exterior, but when she cares for someone - she cares for them. I really hope that before the end of this series we get to see her interact with Gaia and Octavia again. (Speaking of, where the heck is Gaia?!?)

I don’t really know if anyone I know on here that’s still active watches the 100, but if you see this and end up doing your own, please tag me! I’d love to see other people’s lists.

#the 100 #the 100 spoilers #top 5 the 100 women #clarke griffin #raven reyes #octavia blake #emori kom spacekru #indra kom trikru #i have a major crush on lindsey morgan #can you tell?#i mean #everyone on this list is gorgeous #but she marie and luisa are super stunning in particular

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mst3kproject · 5 years ago

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401: Space Travelers

Once Upon a Long Time Ago (August of 2015, to be exact), I started this blog with Samson vs the Vampire Women, pretty much at random… I was probably craving Chinese food. Now I’m ending it, though hopefully only temporarily, with Space Travelers, also pretty much at random. I guess I could argue that I’ve saved the best for last. I mean, this is the only MST3K feature ever to win an Oscar. It wasn’t one of the good Oscars, but you know.

Space Travelers, the non-Film-Ventures-International-title of which is Marooned, is a sort of pre-Apollo 13. The crew of Ironman 1 enjoy a successful blast-off and docking, but after five months in an orbital laboratory both the astronauts and the equipment are getting worn out and NASA decides to cut the mission short. On the way back, the capsule’s main engine fails to fire. The exhausted crew are now, uh… well, Stranded in Space. With only a couple of days’ worth of oxygen on board, their only hope may be a rescue mission far more dangerous than anything the space program has ever attempted.

I’m gonna try not to talk about Apollo 13 in this review, mostly, but I can say with confidence that Ron Howard watched Marooned a few dozen times before he started filming. There are shots that are very carefully copied and others that are deliberately referenced and then improved on – examples of both can be found in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. There’s a shot in which we watch from inside as a stage of the rocket falls away and burns up in the atmosphere. In Marooned this is Apollo launch footage, a bit grainier than the rest of the film and colour-corrected to the best of their ability. Howard’s version of the shot is much clearer and cleaner, but otherwise replicates the original exactly. Then there’s the bit where the astronauts first take off their helmets. In Marooned they hang on to them – in Apollo 13 they let go and watch them spin and float in the air.

The Oscar Marooned won was for its special effects, and the movie deserved it – in 1969 it must have looked fabulous, and it still holds up pretty well. The matte paintings are obviously paintings but they’re beautiful. The zero-gravity effects are used only when absolutely necessary but they’re not awful. For the most part the greenscreen work is pretty good, and I never noticed the strings. Things like control rooms, spacesuits, and capsule interiors are extremely accurate, since they were copied from the then-current Apollo program. The interior of the S4-B Lab looks kind of hokey in the eyes of somebody who grew up watching footage from space shuttle missions, as does the ‘futuristic’ red rescue craft, but that’s hindsight. The only thing I’m really going to complain they did wrong is that in some shots the spacewalking astronauts are not tethered. Do you want to go flying away into the infinite abyss? Because that’s how you go flying away into the infinite abyss, as our heroes eventually discover.

At the other end of the extravagance scale, the soundtrack is very sparse, almost nonexistent. I don’t recall a single scene in which I was aware of music, even on a radio or someone humming within the world of the film. Some movies can use a lack of background music to great effect – I liked how The Land that Time Forgot used it to differentiate between the ‘normal’ world and the fantastical land of Caprona. In Marooned a lack of music is an attempt to replicate the feeling of uncomfortable silence when nobody in the room knows what to say or do. Sometimes it works. At other times, it feels like something is missing. The moment when they try again to fire the engine and nothing happens really needed a musical cue at the end of the countdown – without one, it feels like an anticlimax instead of a moment of disaster. What ought to be the climax is just guys drifting around in space for what seems like forever, and then the movie suddenly ends.

Marooned is a movie full of good ideas, but it commits one really major sin and that is that it drags. It wants to be an important film that takes time to linger on the details, but it doesn’t choose the right places to do so. We hang around in space for ages watching the astronauts talk about nothing – their conversations are supposed to be the philosophical musings of men who think they are about to die, but they don’t seem to mean much. The conversations between the astronauts and their wives, where they discuss things like insurance bills and lab mice because they don’t want to face the inevitable, goes on forever. There are endless shots of rockets being prepared and helicopters flying. I don’t know how much of Space Travelers was excised by MST3K and how much was pre-cut by Film Ventures International, but there’s so much unnecessary material that you don’t miss any of it.

Besides the lack of music, the main reason so much of the film feels so dragging and unimportant is that we don’t know these characters very well. We can figure out that Jim is in charge, that Stoney is the optimist and Buzz the pessimist, but there aren’t exactly personalities associated with them. They’re just a bunch of big-faced 60’s guys. We haven’t seen them interact with their families in any other context than this disaster, so scenes that ought to pull on our heartstrings don’t have any emotional leverage.

The one moment when the movie really achieves the tension it’s going for is during the launch of the rescue craft, which must be precisely timed to pass through the eye of the hurricane on its way to orbit. Part of this is the technicians and reporters all chanting “Go! Go! Go!”, which is a surprisingly effective substitute for music as a way to pump up the audience. It makes us think of sports competitions and other situations where a large number of people chant together, and draws upon the associated emotions. Another factor is that there’s just so much going on here. This is their last chance, anything can fail at any time, and if they screw it up that’s the end of it. It’s slightly excessive, but everything in it was set up well enough that it doesn’t tip over the edge into disaster-movie farce.

The one moment when Space Travelers achieves the desired depth of emotion is when Keith has to give Mrs. Pruett the news that her husband is dead. She already knows what she’s going to be told when she enters the room. When she picks up the phone, Keith lies to her. Mrs. Pruett knows he’s lying, and he knows that she knows, but she does not challenge him. The spaces between the words are allowed to speak for themselves, and say volumes more than words ever could. Space Travelers needed more of that.

The amount of down time in the movie does give me plenty of opportunity to think, and there are two main things I find myself pondering. The first is the relationship between this film and the reality that followed so closely on its heels. I suspect an awful lot of people at NASA saw this movie in theatres and enjoyed it in 1969, because why wouldn’t they? It was a movie about them, in which they overcame impossible odds. How much was it on their minds when disaster really did strike in April 1970? Did it make them think about the idea of rescue, and how impossible it really was? Did they recall that one of the astronauts in the film sacrificed himself, and wonder if that would be necessary now?

I also wonder about the people involved in making the film, and the effect on them when Apollo 13 went wrong. Did they feel somehow responsible? I once started writing a piece of fanfiction in which one plot point was a hurricane in Manhattan – and weeks later, Hurricane Sandy happened. I know it would be ridiculous to call this anything but a coincidence, and yet I could never make myself go back and finish the story. The idea of sympathetic magic, that we can ‘jinx’ something just by talking or thinking about it, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche even when we supposedly know better. Thousands of people must have worked on this movie, and any or every one of them might have taken a bad hit to their mental health.

The other thing I keep thinking about is the nature of science fiction. We generally think of science fiction as being stuff like Star Trek or, for a more down-to-earth example, Jurassic Park. These stories posit things that might theoretically be possible but which nobody yet knows how to do. When we encounter something like Marooned, it’s harder to categorize. The closest thing I can compare it to in modern film is, I think, The Martian. While much sci-fi depends on things we can’t yet do, The Martian is centered on things we just haven’t yet done. There was nothing in the movie that was absolutely beyond humanity’s current technology – the least plausible thing in it was NASA getting funding to send humans Mars. Marooned presents the people of 1969 with a similar situation. They hadn’t yet put a long-term space station in orbit, but the space program was at a point where the biggest reason why they couldn’t was money.

The neat thing here is you could argue that this is the most important kind of science fiction. The ultimate purpose of stories, surely, is to help prepare us to cope with the world we live in. By saying ‘we could do this, and this is what might happen’, this hardest of sci-fis is doing exactly that job. Another reason I’d be interested to know if NASA techs were thinking about it, and what those thoughts were, while dealing with the situation of Apollo 13.

So that was it, folks – every movie ever featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, including twenty that did not yet exist when I got started. If Joel manages to find the show a new permanent home, on television or streaming, I will be back. If not, I’ll just keep doing Episodes that Never Were until I either get sick of it or run out of bad movies… and I doubt I can ever run out of bad movies. Thanks for sticking with me, and keep circulating the tapes!

#mst3k #reviews #space travelers #60s #i reference star trek

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zoadgo · 5 years ago

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147 with murven, pretty please

Okay so I’m just going through my inbox to write some drabbles and try to get back into doing fan fic. I think I know which prompt lists most of these were from, but I might be wrong. All of these are several years old tho, so idk. All drabbles are unedited and prone to many typos, sorry my dudes

147: “ I can take care of myself just fine.”

Some days, everything is fine. Well, as fine as things get. Sure, society as a whole is on the brink of collapse and they’re constantly struggling to avert the latest disaster, but there are communal dinners and picking out rooms in the farmhouse, and sometimes Raven gets to sit in the sun for a few minutes and she can pretend nothing bad is happening. They make jokes, and Indra is way too intense, and Raven sasses at Murphy who gives as good as he gets, and Clarke gets to be a mom, and it’s just... Nice.

But some days Raven wakes up with phantom pain dancing a jig hand in hand with her actual, chronic pain, and she wants to vomit as she puts on her brace, fingers shaking and tears stinging her eyes. She wants to cut off her leg, and go run away into the woods and live in the underground caves and never have to look at the people around her and remember the heartbreak that never seems to end. She doesn’t want to solve problems, and she doesn’t want to play nice, and those days her sarcasm turns to aggression, and everyone leaves her alone to work on motorcycles, throwing wrenches and cursing loudly.

And then there are the days where she can’t turn all that pain into rage. The days where she just wants to be held, she wants someone to see through every wall she’s put up, and she just wants to cry. And those days scare her most of all, because she knows how dangerous that is. She knows how much worse it gets when someone does see you, and then they leave. Taken away by the whims of fate, and the hands of her friends.

On days like that, of which today is one, she grabs a little jar full of insects - just in case, Raven has had more than enough mind manipulation for one life time thank you very much - and she goes into the woods. Research, she says. Sometimes she does study things, sorrow held at bay temporarily by a new discovery. But, more often than not, she finds her way up a hill or a tree, straining against her own limitations to get somewhere with a view. Somewhere that reminds her of spacewalks. And when she gets there, she sits down, and she cries. The sort of crying she doesn’t do in front of the others, not anymore. The sort that tears at something inside of her, makes it raw and bloody, and is impossible to stop.

And everyone always leaves her alone.

Which is why, when Raven hear a very distinct pattern of footsteps approaching, she immediately goes on full alert. Sure, the Children of Gabriel no longer live in the woods ready to attack anyone they see, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily safe. There could be a new splinter cell of them, or one of the convicts deciding they’d rather not do hard labour, or some new and unknown threat. So Raven rubs the tears from her face quickly and clumsily, grabbing her gun and turning towards the noise.

“Really, Raven? I thought you and I had moved past pointing guns at each other.” Murphy’s unfortunately familiar form emerges from the tree line, hands held up in surrender.

Just great, the one person she really doesn’t have the energy to deal with today.

“Go away, Murphy.” Raven grumbles as she turns away from him, laying down her gun and staring out at the vista beyond the cliff she’s sitting just shy of.

“Now, when has that ever worked?” Murphy chuckles as he completely ignores her, walking over and sitting next to her as if invited.

“Why can’t you ever do what you’re told?” Raven asks, wishing that it would sound more snarky and less whiny. But her voice betrays how pathetic she feels, and she can only hope Murphy is as oblivious to human emotion as he says he is.

“Oh, like you’re such a good little soldier yourself.” Murphy quips back, which, fair point. But Raven doesn’t have to admit that, at least not to him.

“What do you want, Murphy?” Raven asks hollowly. She really doesn’t have it in her for their normal back and forth.

“Other than the pleasure of your stimulating company?” She can see him turn to look at her out of the corner of her eye, but Raven doesn’t turn her own head. She keeps staring ahead, knowing how she must look, all puffy eyes and barely restrained tears. “Ugh, I guess some people are worried about you.”

He sounds so put upon by the concept, and Raven can’t help the bitter scoff that escapes her. Where are they, then, all these people who are concerned about her? Not that she wants them, she reminds herself. She wants to be left alone, this pain is temporary, and it’s better this way.

Safer.

“So they sent you?” Raven asks the clouds, and Murphy sighs. Honestly, if it was Clarke and them, why would they send the least empathetic individual they all know to talk to her?

“Well, I-”

“Listen, Murphy, don’t bother. I can take care of myself just fine.” She cuts him off, because she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want him here, she just wants him to leave her alone so she can go back to crying again.

“Well that’s clearly not true,” Murphy drawls, and Raven finally looks at him, if only to glare. But he’s looking at the sky now, tapping his fingers on his thigh, either nervous, or bored with the whole thing. Either way, he should just leave if he’s so uncomfortable.

“I’m fine,” Raven retorts, and Murphy looks over to level her with a look that clearly says he knows just as well as her how bullshit that statement is. Raven shakes her head, amending her words, “Well, I will be fine. I just- I just need to be alone for a bit.”

“No, you don’t,” Murphy says, probably just to be contrary. It sparks a little bit of anger in Raven, just enough to singe the heavy blanket of sadness clinging to her.

“Listen here, Murphy, you don’t even know what I’m going through, or what I need, so don’t pretend you have any say in this, and-” Raven rants with heat, and Murphy has the audacity to roll his eyes at her, “Seriously?!”

“Raven, for someone so smart, you’re so dumb sometimes. Of course I don’t know what you’re going through, because you never told me. Or anyone, actually, from what I can tell. But I don’t have to know what’s going on with you to know that you don’t have to be alone through it.” Murphy is oddly sincere, and Raven can feel her scrap of anger fading, and she’s afraid. Afraid of what might happen when it’s gone, if Murphy’s still here and her walls don’t hold.

“Murphy, just go back to whoever sent you and tell them I’m not in any danger, okay?” Raven tries, as a last ditch attempt, and Murphy groans in frustration.

“No one sent me, Raven. It’s me, I’m the “some people” who are worried. Because I get it, okay? I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know what it feels like, and it sucks. And being alone? That’s even worse. So you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, you can yell at me, or hit me, or whatever you need to do, but I’m not leaving you.”

The words aren’t kind or caring, and honestly Murphy kind of shouts them at her. But they’re real, she knows, because Murphy would never lie for anyone’s benefit but his own. Which means, for whatever reason, he actually cares, and that hits Raven like a tonne of bricks. All the air leaves her lungs, the fight leaves her body, and she doesn’t know what to do. Murphy, to his credit, doesn’t say anything else. He simply shrugs, leans back on his hands, and looks up at the sky again.

Raven is left with a choice. She can get up and leave, she can pretend she really is fine, or she can just... be. And it’s hard to stand, with the weight of the world crushing her, so she doesn’t leave. And honestly, she isn’t fine. She hasn’t been fine for a long time. Which means she takes the last option, and she’s not proud of it, but she’s not really ashamed either. She hugs her knees to her chest, and she cries, and Murphy just sits there. Eventually, when her sobs become sniffles, he rubs her back a little, without otherwise looking at her or saying anything. And it’s a little weird, yes, but the thing inside of her that is raw and bleeding feels like someone put a bandaid on it. It isn’t much, it certainly isn’t enough to fix it if the thing ever can be fixed, but it’s something.

And she isn’t alone.

#murven #john murphy #raven reyes #the 100 #drabble #fan fic #man i forgot how much i loved writing angst #also this feels really good to actually finish something #even if it's just tiny like this #Anonymous

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togetherkru · 6 years ago

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the 100 ask game

tagged by @pendragaryen. Thank you again 😘 , I told you it would take some time ;-). But I did it !!

1. What station on the Ark would you be from?

Farm station... Or Alpha, maybe.

2. What would you get arrested for on the Ark?

Hum. Would I get arrested on the Ark ?

3. Would you take off your wristband when you landed on the ground?

No, probably not.

4. What would the necklace Finn would make for you look like? (Clarke: deer/Raven: a raven duh..)

A flower I think. Ok it’s a bit difficult, but that would do it for me.

5. If you could resurrect any MINOR character who would it be?

yeah, just like @pendragaryen Zoe Monroe. Her charachter had such a potential...A wasted potential.

6. Create a squad of 5 characters to go on missions with. Who are they?

Bellamy, Clarke, Monty, Octavia, Finn or Raven. It depends on the moment of the mission :D

7. What Grounder Clan would you belong to you?

Trishanakru.

8. What would your name be in Trigedasleng? (example: Octavia=Okteivia…just make it up!)

Um... Well it’s not very convincing, but something like Steifani (??) kom Trishanakru.

9. Thoughts on Finn? Some people hate him, and others love him, so I’m curious

Well I found the character interesting : someone who seems to be kind, and good, and sometimes he really was (In Murphy’s Law, when he arrives and protects Charlotte, I found him nice...). BUT, in the end, he was hypocrital and manipulative.

10. Be honest. How willing would you have been to take the chip without knowing all the horrible things it does?

I'm not sure I would have been so attracted to the chip. I'm pretty down to earth.

11. What character do you relate to most?

Clarke. I like her resilience and her selflessness.

12. What character do you like the least?

Jaha, for sure, even though I loved the actor and his performance. But I find the character of Jaha full of contradictions and cold.

13. Describe your delinquent outfit. (Would you wear something like Murphy’s jacket with the spikey red shoulder patch or have a trademark like Jasper’s goggles? Be creative, yet practical)

Something like Harper ? So a leather jacket, jeans probably. And something in the hair.

14. Favorite type of mutant animal?

Phosphorescent butterflies ? Not original, I know.

15. What would your job be on the Ark?

I’m a teacher, and I really appreciated the scenes with Pike on the Ark. So a teacher, probably. A professor of earthly history, lol.

16. Would you have willingly pumped Ontari’s heart if Abby asked?

Nope. I would have fainted.

17. If Lexa wasn’t Heda, but she was still alive then who would have made the best commander?

I don’t really understand the question. It has to be a nightblood, right ? Do we know many ?

18. How would you act if you ate the hallucinogenic nuts like Jasper and Monty?

I’d probably be laughing a lot and I'd sound rather stupid.

19. How would you have dealt with Charlotte’s crime? A more John Murphy approach or Bellamy Blake approach?

Surely a Bellamy approach.

20. Who should have been the Chancellor, if anyone?

Kane definitely. He’s such a good character, who learns from his mistakes.

21. Would you have been on Pike’s side like Bellamy or on Kane’s side? Or Clarke in Polis?

I must admit I hope to be on Kane's side. But can we really know without being in a real equivalent situation? Can we really know what the “right” side is ?

22. Mount Weather had a lot of modern commodities. (example: Maya’s Ipod) What is the one thing you would snatch while there?

The Ipod. A way to listen to music. Cool.

23. What would your Grounder tattoos look like? Hairstyle? War paint?

tattoos that would look like plants. A vegetable motif. On the arms and the neck.

24. Favorite quote?

Harper’s sentence “everyone dies, Monty. Let’s show them how to live” moves me every-single-time. And I think Clarke (and Bellamy) need to learn how to live (not to “survive”), need to let go. That’s why, I think, it’s a very good summery of the show.

But I also like Kane’s statement: “It’s not to late to choose the right side” (see question 21).

25. If all of the characters were in the Hunger Games, who would have the best shot at winning?

I would go with Luna or Octavia here. That’s what we saw in the show.

26. Least favorite ship? Favorite canon ship? Favorite non canon ship? NOT INCLUDING CL OR BC OR BE

Least fave: I don’t really have one. I watch and enjoy the show.

Fave canon: Marper (sigh) and Linctavia (sigh).

Fave non-canon: Raven-Murphy.

27. A song that should be included in the next season? If there had to be another guest star like Shawn Mendes on the show, who would you want to make a cameo?

That’s really difficult. Wow.

But I fell in love with a video from @teamhodgins (<3), with the song Chariot (Jacob Lee). I don't think it fits the atmosphere of the show, but it fits Bellarke SO WELL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiZSIFXAf0E

28. What would you do if you were stuck in the bunker with Murphy for all that time?

With Murphy ??? I’d probably kill myself. Or kill him...

29. You’re an extra that gets killed off. How do you die?

Like Lincoln ? Sacrificing myself for others ? That would be cool.

Or I would probably have died of some kind of infection as a result of a poorly treated injury. Not a heroic death, then.

30. A character you’d like to learn more about and get flashbacks of?

Not a popular opinion, perhaps, but I want to know Echo better.

31. A character you’d bang?

Um. That IS a popular opinion... Bellamy of course. Or Clarke. Or both.

32. Would you stay in the Bunker? Go up to Space? Or live on your own in Eden?

Definitely Eden.

I’m afraid of Space, and the Bunker ??? Is that even a question ?

33. In the Bunker, would you follow Octavia? What would you do to pass the time underground?

Well I wouldn’t be in the Bunker (question 32).

34. What crime would you commit in the Bunker that lands you in the fighting pits?

Well I wouldn’t be in the Bunker (question 32).

35. Up in Space, who would you bond with first? Who would be the most difficult for you to get along with?

Aah. I would bond easily with Marper, and with Bellamy, Raven and probably Emori. It would be hard for me with Murphy. I think I could get along with Echo of Season 5..

36. How long do you think you would last on Earth by yourself?

Not long.

37. When the Eligius ship lands what do you do?

hide and observe. Like Clarke, but without the riffle. At least I hope so.

38. Favorite Eligius character? Least favorite?

Diyoza, because, you know, “I like her style”. Least fave: Vincent. So creepy.

39. Would you Spacewalk?

Noooo. Space is far too dangerous.

40. Would you prefer to eat Windshield Bugs, Space Algae, or Bunker Meat?

Space Algae. But as I said, I wouldn’t be in space. That’s why I wouln’t live long (question 36) LOL.

41. Would you start a war for the last spot of green on earth? What would your solution be to avoid it?

I’m a teacher, so I have to be diplomatic. I would negotiate for everyone, of course.

42. Would you rather dig out flesh-eating worms or stick thumb drives into bullet holes?

??? Maybe it’s a little less dangerous with stick thumb drives into bullet holes ? (I can’t even believe I wrote this)

43. Are you willing to poison your sister for the Traitor Who You Love? What would you do to stop Octavia?

For the Traitor Who I Love, yes, maybe. That’s hard... But I don’t think there was another solution at this point. I can’t even find something else to do...

44. Would you go to sleep in cryo or stay awake like Marper?

Good question. Even with the Love of my life... a lifetime, it’s very long. So probably cryo.

45. Who are you waking up first to explore the new planet?

Bellamy, Clarke, Raven, Abby. Diyoza too. I like it spicy.

That was fun. Long but fun 😄. I’m tagging (if they didn’t do it already, of course /or if they want to) : @geekyogicheese, @natassakar, @katersann , @emmyisgrey , @yourereallyhere, @bellarkespace , @historyandships , @lameblake and anyone who wants to !

#tag game the 100 #tag game #my answers #the 100 ask game

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easilydistractedbyfanfic · 6 years ago

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The 100 Ask Game

Thanks for tagging me, @mamabearsdontthink - this looks like FUN!

1. What Station on the Ark would you be from?

I have a pretty green thumb with houseplants and outside flowers and some fruits/veggies. I could realistically be in Farm Station, I think, though Factory might be a fit too.

2. What would you get arrested for on the Ark?

Political protest, for sure. Possibly with regard to the hierarchical aspects of their society and/or the representation of the people in the lowest stations.

3. Would you take off your wristband when you landed on the ground?

No, not at all if I was aware that people on the Ark needed to know we were alive in order for them to also be saved.

4. What would the necklace Finn would make for you look like? (Clarke: deer/Raven: a raven duh..)

Probably a rabbit or an owl, based on what I like and have jewelry about

5. If you could resurrect any MINOR character who would it be?

Jacapo Sinclair, no question

6. Create a squad of 5 characters to go on missions with. Who are they?

Raven, Diyoza, Abby, Luna & Murphy - yeah that’s gonna be wild and I might die but it sure would be fun beforehand

7. What Grounder Clan would you belong to you?

I’m from the area of the Boat People and could see myself as a member of Floukru although I might miss land and gardening

8. What would your name be in Trigedasleng? (example: Octavia=Okteivia…just make it up!)

Jenn = let’s go with Jynn

9. Thoughts on Finn? Some people hate him, and others love him, so I’m curious

Disliked him fully upon first viewing but after rewatch I think he had some merit. He was not loyal to Raven but I don’t think he did it on purpose

10. Be honest. How willing would you have been to take the chip without knowing all the horrible things it does?

Nope, I would be a holdout. I don’t give in to peer pressure, I’m a skeptic and I’ve lived a long time without ever smoking a cigarette or doing drugs, plus I like organics and refuse to invite Alexa or Siri into my home. Yeah, don’t trust The Man, man! LOL

11. What character do you relate to most?

Oh, Raven, easily. We are not the same, but I get the way she made herself strong by focusing on what she was good at and burying the hurt, and her constant desire to keep the painful emotions bottled up. She’s outwardly confident but inwardly worried, and she tells herself all the time “I’ve got this” even when she’s freaked out.

12. What character do you like the least?

Dr. Tsing, that horrible horrible horrible so-called “doctor”

13. Describe your delinquent outfit. (Would you wear something like Murphy’s jacket with the spikey red shoulder patch or have a trademark like Jasper’s goggles? Be creative, yet practical)

I don’t like to be dirty and I hate being cold, so I’m in dark colors and probably bundled up compared to others. My favorite color is blue though, and if I am from Floukru, maybe I have a dark blue jacket or a shirt with blue patches on it. I would also always carry an extra pair of socks in case my feet got cold.

14. Favorite type of mutant animal?

There’s not many to choose from

15. What would your job be on the Ark?

I could see myself working a bit undercover like Nigel, getting covert things for people or making deals, although my regular job might be for Farm Station

16. Would you have willingly pumped Ontari’s heart if Abby asked?

yeah, I could do that

17. If Lexa wasn’t Heda, but she was still alive then who would have made the best commander?

I’d pick Indra. She was kind of blood thirsty in the beginning and turned away Lincoln from Trikru, but she proved open to other suggestions, she learned to trust Kane and she even avoided killing Pike although she wanted revenge because she realized they needed him to complete the mission they were on. So later Indra, not early Indra. Otherwise probably Luna.

18. How would you act if you ate the hallucinogenic nuts like Jasper and Monty?

Hmmmm.... I get overly affectionate when drunk, so if that’s any indication, I should probably stay away from those nuts

19. How would you have dealt with Charlotte’s crime? A more John Murphy approach or Bellamy Blake approach?

Consequences with compassion - hopefully the Bellamy Blake version

20. Who should have been the Chancellor, if anyone?

Jacapo Sinclair, mostly because he wouldn’t have wanted the job. The best leaders are the ones who are least likely to want power

21. Would you have been on Pike’s side like Bellamy or on Kane’s side? Or Clarke in Polis?

Kane’s side

22. Mount Weather had a lot of modern commodities. (example: Maya’s Ipod) What is the one thing you would snatch while there?

Ingredients for food like cake and other desserts. Yum!

23. What would your Grounder tattoos look like? Hairstyle? War paint?

I have a rune compass tattoo at the base of my neck. I might have more tattoos if I was a Grounder, but not obvious ones - maybe inner wrist, maybe something on my ankle or behind my ear. They would likely be symbols of things or types of characters that would provide protection or inspiration of a life goal. No war paint, I don’t think, though that could change if the cause were just. For hairstyle - I wear my hair down about 98% of the time, so maybe there would be some small braids but I doubt my hair would ever be fully pulled back.

24. Favorite quote?

You know, it’s not well known, but Murphy tells Ontari that “It’s better to lie your way out of a problem than kill” and that always sticks with me. Plus anything Sinclair ever says to Raven (oh my heart)

25. If all of the characters were in the Hunger Games, who would have the best shot at winning?

Luna, because I think she could outlive everyone either by fighting until the death OR by stomping off by herself and outlasting everyone out of sheer willpower

26. Least favorite ship? Favorite canon ship? Favorite non canon ship? NOT INCLUDING CL OR BC OR BE

Least: I have never been onboard the mem0ri train

Favorite canon: Murphy & Raven and their whole dynamic

Favorite non-canon: Murven but now there’s sex

27. A song that should be included in the next season? If there had to be another guest star like Shawn Mendes on the show, who would you want to make a cameo?

"What’s Good” by Fenne Lily or “Bill Murray” by Phantogram for songs in the show. For a guest star, I could really get behind Pink being someone who lives on the new planet and is kinda crazy and all about being a strong female leader. She could do something wild or she could do some haunting ballad that would make us all have feelings and I could so see this now

28. What would you do if you were stuck in the bunker with Murphy for all that time?

Is this a trick question? I mean, there was wine in that lighthouse bunker, and I already said what happens when I get drunk.

29. You’re an extra that gets killed off. How do you die?

I wanna go like Sinclair, barrette dad or David Miller - protecting someone I love. It would probably be Raven, honestly.

30. A character you’d like to learn more about and get flashbacks of?

Diyoza

31. A character you’d bang?

Damn, this is a revealing quiz. I’d totally bang Diyoza but this question probably needs it’s own list

32. Would you stay in the Bunker? Go up to Space? Or live on your own in Eden?

I’d probably prefer the Eden environment, but ultimately I’d go to space even if it scared me and felt claustrophobic because I would need peer relationships

33. In the Bunker, would you follow Octavia? What would you do to pass the time underground?

yeah, I’d go along but mentally I might be preparing my eventual escape - creating a fantasy world to escape from the reality of it all

probably read and learn some kind of martial arts

34. What crime would you commit in the Bunker that lands you in the fighting pits?

I don’t like to recite pledges or make oaths I don’t intend to keep

35. Up in Space, who would you bond with first? Who would be the most difficult for you to get along with?

I’d get along with Raven right away, and not just because I love her but because we do have some things in common and I could put up with her snark. Tougher would be Em0ri if she was being mean to Murphy like in S5

36. How long do you think you would last on Earth by yourself?

I think I could go awhile if I had berries, leaves and water as choices. If I had to eat bugs though, I’d probably find a way to kill myself quickly. I’d eventually get lonely, which would be a problem, but if I could find books I’d last a hell of a lot longer too.

37. When the Eligius ship lands what do you do?

Watch for a while, for sure. See if I could find a way to lure them away from my area for good.

38. Favorite Eligius character? Least favorite?

Diyoza is my favorite for sure

least favorite - McCreary but in a I love to hate him way

39. Would you Spacewalk?

No. I love roller coasters but I wouldn’t bungee jump either

40. Would you prefer to eat Windshield Bugs, Space Algae, or Bunker Meat?

Algae if I had to pick, otherwise my life would totally be in danger because I’d be so repulsed

41. Would you start a war for the last spot of green on earth? What would your solution be to avoid it?

I’m up for diplomacy and would keep trying til all options were gone before I’d head to war. Maybe inter-marriages, or skill trading/trainings

42. Would you rather dig out flesh-eating worms or stick thumb drives into bullet holes?

Thumb drives into bullet holes since at least I wouldn’t get infected by that

43. Are you willing to poison your sister for the Traitor Who You Love? What would you do to stop Octavia?

Yeah, if I thought the biggest chance would be that it knocked her out rather than kill her, and that having her out of the way would mean peace

44. Would you go to sleep in cryo or stay awake like Marper?

Sleep along with my faves

45. Who are you waking up first to explore the new planet?

Not too different from the show, maybe, although I would have sent Indra down to explore with that team since she’s an experienced leader and fighter, but if we wanna go a bit fantasy like for a moment, then I’d wake up Raven & Murphy and “accidentally” lock them in a closet together for as long as it would take.

Consider yourself tagged if you wanna participate, and I’d love to read your own choices!

#the 100 ask game #the 100 #this was revealing

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she-who-the-river-could-not-hold · 6 years ago

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The 100 Ask Game

Thanks for tagging me @thelittlefanpire!!! This looks like so much fun omg and what a great way to kick off show day! Answers and tags below the cut!

1. What Station on the Ark would you be from?

Either farm station because I’m from a rural state, or whichever one Clarke’s in (I’m completely blanking) since my dad also works in the medical industry.

2. What would you get arrested for on the Ark?

Either fighting back against the system or stealing art supplies, or maybe rations for those in need.

3. Would you take off your wristband when you landed on the ground?

Absolutely! Especially since Bellamy asked.

4. What would the necklace Finn would make for you look like? (Clarke: deer/Raven: a raven duh..)

An owl!! Or maybe a cat.

5. If you could resurrect any MINOR character who would it be?

Ooohhhh. Probably everyone’s answer, but Wells.

6. Create a squad of 5 characters to go on missions with. Who are they?

Bellamy, Clarke, Lincoln, Miller, and Monty.

7. What Grounder Clan would you belong to you?

Trishanakru!

8. What would your name be in Trigedasleng? (example: Octavia=Okteivia…just make it up!)

Oh god... uh kinda drawing a blank how to change Kathryn up. Open to suggestions.

9. Thoughts on Finn? Some people hate him, and others love him, so I’m curious

HE MAKES ME SO UNCOMFORTABLE I really can’t stand him and I think he’s a lot more terrifying than he’s talked about. Rewatching the early seasons he was so scary to watch as he evolved. I mean he murdered a bunch of people and then when Clarke shows up he’s so far gone he’s decided he’s the one who found her. He literally only felt remorse because Clarke was upset? Horrible.

10. Be honest. How willing would you have been to take the chip without knowing all the horrible things it does?

I think I would have eventually caved but definitely could hold out for a while.

11. What character do you relate to most?

Easily Clarke!

12. What character do you like the least?

Eeeeeehhhh Finn and Cage I think would be the top two.

13. Describe your delinquent outfit. (Would you wear something like Murphy’s jacket with the spikey red shoulder patch or have a trademark like Jasper’s goggles? Be creative, yet practical)

Combat boots, fingerless gloves because I’m a badass, black leather jacket. Kind of a cross style of Clarke and Raven.

14. Favorite type of mutant animal?

THE TWO FACED DEER BABY

15. What would your job be on the Ark?

Well they probably don’t have use for artists up there? So maybe teach or if they needed someone to transcribe history or current stuff. I also enjoy politics/work in it so I could be a representative.

16. Would you have willingly pumped Ontari’s heart if Abby asked?

aldksjfklsdjfjsd I GUESS

17. If Lexa wasn’t Heda, but she was still alive then who would have made the best commander?

mmmmmmmm. Of Night Bloods I’m going to go with Luna when we first meet her. In a “normal” world I could see Madi becoming a good one, though I’m not sure that’s where the season will take her since the commander stuff seems up in the air.

18. How would you act if you ate the hallucinogenic nuts like Jasper and Monty?

Oh god probably not well?? I can just imagine my personal anxieties about myself finding ways to manifest it would be a nightmare.

19. How would you have dealt with Charlotte’s crime? A more John Murphy approach or Bellamy Blake approach?

Definitely Bellamy’s.

20. Who should have been the Chancellor, if anyone?

Mmmmm Kane wasn’t good on the Ark, but he really transformed on the ground. Clarke as well since she’s willing to make the hard decisions.

21. Would you have been on Pike’s side like Bellamy or on Kane’s side? Or Clarke in Polis?

Kane’s! Would have absolutely helped rebel.

22. Mount Weather had a lot of modern commodities. (example: Maya’s iPod) What is the one thing you would snatch while there?

iPod would be cool but tbh having normal meals??? the life! I do love drawing though so honestly that would be amazing to have all of that art there.

23. What would your Grounder tattoos look like? Hairstyle? War paint?

Would love some badass upper sleeves and thigh pieces! Maybe related to whatever clan I’m in. Hairstyle would definitely be similar to Octavia’s braids or even Echo’s when she’s in space in that first episode. I love braids. And uhh maybe not technically war paint, but I love smudgy dark eyeshadow. So a lot.

24. Favorite quote?

Not very deep haha, but I love “The dead are gone. The living are hungry.” and “For all its faults, Earth is really beautiful.”

25. If all of the characters were in the Hunger Games, who would have the best shot at winning?

Definitely Octavia, I feel like season four with the conclave really set that story idea up haha! Clarke would be great at alliances. Okay really just another chance for me to shout out @pawprinterfanfic’s Hunger Games AU read it if you love angst and amazing writing. She knows this question better than I do.

26. Least favorite ship? Favorite canon ship? Favorite non canon ship? NOT INCLUDING CL OR BC OR BE

Least favorite: Anyone/Finn, does Bellarke count as both canon and not? Jk um Canon: Monty/Harper, Non-Canon (officially): Bellarke, Luna/Raven

27. A song that should be included in the next season? If there had to be another guest star like Shawn Mendes on the show, who would you want to make a cameo?

Ohhhh man that’s so hard! Would love some Florence Welch up in here! As to guest star uhhhhhh let’s just say same. Or tbh Lady Gaga as a weird cult leader would be pretty sick.

28. What would you do if you were stuck in the bunker with Murphy for all that time?

I think I’d be able to hold off going completely crazy but maybe not. I think I might be alright though, but I can’t remember if he had enough food? Definitely not if that’s the case haha.

29. Your an extra that gets killed off. How do you die?

Probably charging into battle like an idiot

30. A character you’d like to learn more about and get flashbacks of?

I would enjoy learning more about Echo’s time as a spy in Azgeda tbh. I want more development on her end (like just her, not in relation to anyone else) so that would be cool to see how she’s become the way she was. Unpopular take but I’m actually pretty okay with not seeing all of the flashbacks. Oh! Would love some good Eligius stuff or pre-all of that featuring those people.

31. A character you’d bang?

Bellamy fucking Blake. Though Roan and Beard!Kane are close seconds.

32. Would you stay in the Bunker? Go up to Space? Or live on your own in Eden?

Ideally go to space!! Though Eden seems great haha, though if I didn’t have a Bellamy to talk to that would suck.

33. In the Bunker, would you follow Octavia? What would you do to pass the time underground?

Well self-preservation would say yes once she got the gun out. I like to think I’d be like Gaia though and keep my head on pretty straight while getting through it with faith that it would be over eventually.

34. What crime would you commit in the Bunker that lands you in the fighting pits?

Mmmm probably fighting back against the tyranny, or just even speaking out against it. Or stealing rations for others who need it.

35. Up in Space, who would you bond with first? Who would be the most difficult for you to get along with?

I think I would get along really well with Clarke or Raven! They remind me of myself a lot. However a lot of my friends in real life are very much Monty and Jasper hahaha so definitely them.

36. How long do you think you would last on Earth by yourself?

By myself?? Barely haha. Though I suppose a part of this show is showing what people do when survival instinct kicks in so maybe I’d be better off than I think!

37. When the Eligius ship lands what do you do?

100000% hide out at first. Try and figure out a way to present myself as useful to them if I can to make sure that they don’t think I’m a threat.

38. Favorite Eligius character? Least favorite?

Favorite: tie between Shaw and Diyoza. Least is McCreary.

39. Would you Spacewalk?

Oh yeah I think I’d be really tempted to haha.

40. Would you prefer to eat Windshield Bugs, Space Algae, or Bunker Meat?

asdklfjsdfjs algae maybe?? I mean I guess if I hungry enough I’d eat bugs...

41. Would you start a war for the last spot of green on earth? What would your solution be to avoid it?

Yeah I’d definitely fight for it if it came down to it. But peaceful negotiations would be a priority to make sure the land is protected.

42. Would you rather dig out flesh-eating worms or stick thumb drives into bullet holes?

Absolutely stick thumb drives into bullet holes! No question.

43. Are you willing to poison your sister for the Traitor Who You Love? What would you do to stop Octavia?

Man if I had a sister and she was pulling stuff like that, I’d say yes. Not fighting fire with fire only works when you’re not going up against a dictator with zero regard for the lives of her people and the only survivable spot of land.

44. Would you go to sleep in cryo or stay awake like Marper?

Oh man. Probably go to sleep. I think I’d want to see what’s out there, even with running the risk of the dangers out there. That ending was perfect for them though, as heart-breaking as it was. But I don’t know if it’s for me.

45. Who are you waking up first to explore the new planet?

Ah! Well in a dream world MONTY would be perfect. But I think Bellamy and Clarke are great choices.

Tagging: @raven-reyes-of-sunshine, @captainwilldameron, @ravensluna, @el-corazon-y-la-cabeza, @the-most-beautiful-broom, and @johnmurphysass!

#get to know me

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vulpinmusings · 5 years ago

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Ski’tar and Friends part 5: The Ulmarid Asteroid Shuffle

Ski’tar, Vemir, and Six prepare to leave Ulmarid in their dust, but the asteroids surrounding the planet hold one last surprise for them.

The first part

The previous part

We spent about a day in low orbit, inside the asteroid shell surrounding Ulmarid, for a little recuperation, a lot of Drone repair, and to give Captain Navasi time to come to grips with the deaths of so many fellow Starfinders. Once Sixer, Vemir, and I were back in shape, though, we started getting restless. Being a transport ship, the Odyssey had no workshops or other amenities that could hold our attention for long, and I was feeling particularly anxious to learn more about the mysterious shiny rock we’d found on the Unbounded Wayfarer. The three of us eventually concluded that we didn’t strictly need an active-duty Captain just to fly back to Absalom Station, but before I could suggest that we just take off, Sixer pointed out that we should at least talk to Navasi about leaving, if only to avoid trouble from Iseph.

The Captain had not left the cargo hold since the Starfinder corpses had been brought on board, so it wasn’t difficult to find him. We listened to him mourn for a little, and then I said that we wouldn’t mind him staying in the cargo hold for the duration of the return trip if he wanted, but we really should be getting back. Navasi agreed, and so off we went to our stations.

Vemir took his seat in the pilot’s chair, fired up the engines, and immediately flew us into a small asteroid. As I dutifully routed power to recharge the forward shields, I gently reminded Vemir that the goal was still to go around the big space rocks, not through them. As we slipped around the asteroid, I came up with a brilliant idea: if Vemir can’t navigate around the asteroids, why not make sure there aren’t any asteroids in our way? I told Sixer to warm up the forward guns and start blasting, and we made it into the heart of the asteroid field without further collisions.

Likely concerned about the impact and the sound of our guns firing, Captain Navasi decided to join us on the bridge to see what in the name of the gods we were doing. Just as I started to explain my genius plan, Vemir and Iseph both reported something odd: some of the asteroids seemed to be abruptly changing course toward our general location. My suspicions immediately went to some extraplanar intelligence inhabiting the asteroid field – I mean, this was the Vast; who knows what you’ll find out here? - but Iseph’s scans of the area revealed a much more conventional explanation: there was another ship out there in the rocks, firing wildly as it came our way. It was a rust-encrusted heap with a sharp-toothed mouth painted onto the front of the hull to make it look like some interstellar predator come to prey on us.

That visual impression proved to be spot-on. The other ship hailed us with a long-winded and altogether too giddy declaration of their intent to shoot us down and loot our ship, dressed up as a prayer to Besmara, the goddess of space pirates. Navasi traded some harsh words with the pirate captain and determined two things: these were the pirates who shot down the Unbounded Wayfarer and crippled the Endless Vermati, and they also happened to be the exact pirate crew Vemir had taken a bounty out on. Convenient.

There was no chance of talking our way out of a ship battle, nor of getting out of the asteroids and to a safe Drift point without getting shot to pieces first, so I strapped in for trouble and got the auxiliary power routing commands ready to go.

Now, here’s something interesting about Vemir’s piloting skills: ask him to fly through a field of asteroids with no time limit or other extra pressure, and he’ll bump every third rock along the way. Face him off against another ship that’s determined to kill us, and suddenly he’s pulling off perfect turns and dodging around asteroids like a champion stunt flier while always keeping our strongest shields turned toward the enemy. Of course, when I say “strongest shields,” that doesn’t always mean much. The pirate’s guns hit as hard as that Ulmarid bug-worm, and there were more than a few times that a shield quadrant went down entirely despite everything Ispeh and I could do to keep them charged and balanced.

Iseph actually had a real rough time at the Science Officer’s station. Either she just wasn’t comfortable with the Odyssey’s systems, or she doesn’t work well under pressure. She’d handled the battle with the Vermati well enough, but that had been less of a battle and more of stabbing at an already wounded animal until it died. This fight was a much more stressful situation because not only was our opponent fully functional and well-armed, but the pirate captain was constantly on the comms, praising Besmara and mocking our efforts to get away every time his ship flew across our bow. Our life support got a little damaged at one point, but since that only resulted in minor temperature fluctuations and a slight decrease in air quality and our shields were in constant need of recharging, I decided to forego any repairs until after we survived the battle.

Our ship’s turret had a long-range missile launcher, which Sixer fully depleted over the course of the fight while landing only one actual hit with it. For the most part, we had to rely on our aft or turret coil guns as we dodged around. Whenever Vemir managed to point us at the pirates and maintain a reasonable distance at the same time, however, Sixer unleashed the full fury of our forward heavy laser cannons and cut the pirate’s shields down as quickly as they did ours. Unfortunately for them, they evidently didn’t have a genius Ysoki engineer like me on board to get theirs shields back up.

After much weaving about between rocks and taking shots at one another, we ended the battle by managing to get two heavy laser blasts into their port side in quick succession, causing enough damage to shut down their core. Once we were sure the threat was no longer such, we debated what to do about the pirates. I voted that we board the craft and see if they still had anything of value from the Unbounded Wayfarer. Captain Navasi expressed doubt that the Wayfarer had been carrying anything more important than the iridescent rock and the planet information we’d already obtained, and nobody else felt up to a boarding action. I thought Vemir would be on my side, since he would need to bring something back as proof that he’d completed his bounty hunt, but he said that a fragment of the pirate’s ship would be proof enough. Utterly outvoted, I didn’t bother pushing for looting and just turned my attention to patching the life support while Sixer blasted the pirates to bits. Vemir did a quick spacewalk to get his bounty token, and then we finally got out of the asteroids (without hitting any more!) and en route back to Absalom Station.

Although our mission hadn’t resulted in rescuing any survivors, Venture Captain Arvin was immensely satisfied with our efforts and with the data we’d managed to bring back. I will admit, I didn’t intend to turn over the rock we’d found, since I wanted to discover it’s secrets (and potential volatility) for myself, but Navasi remembered the thing, and once he’d brought it up there was no chance I was going to get to keep it. Oh well, it’s probably for the best.

Captain Arvin paid us the rather exorbitant reward money that Vemir and Sixer had haggled out of him way back at the start, and I found myself suddenly richer than my entire clan back on Akiton, at just under 50000 credits.

Akiton is a planet with a nearly dead economy, you see. Even 5000 credits would’ve made me a fabulously wealthy rat there.

The Venture Captain wasn’t done with the rewards, though. As a second instance of what may be a trend, beginning with those candied meats he sprang on us after the Vermati episode, Arvin gave us the coordinates to a planet with many high-end clubs, theaters, VR parlous, and other entertainments the likes of which the three of us had never seriously considered to be within our reach. We graciously thanked the Captain for the unexpected gift and unanimously decided to put off visiting the place until the vague future. Of greater import, Arvin also extended us invitations to remain available for missions for the Starfinder Society. Having rather enjoyed the taste of adventure this little search for a missing ship had given me, I was the first to accept. And, to my relief, Vemir and Sixer also agreed to keep working with the Society. We Ysoki are social creatures at heart, and it doesn’t take long for us to learn another person’s character. Six and Vemir may be an emotionally stunted android and a tradition-bound Vasantha, respectively, but they’re good people and I can’t imagine facing the mysteries of the Vast without them by my side. Or standing between me and danger. Either works.

#Starfinder #ski'tar #Vulpin plays

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ratherhavetheblues · 6 years ago

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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘PERSONA’: “Just what kind of person are you, anyway?”

In some ways, the output of films by Ingmar Bergman could be called an early rendition of serial drama, minus the TV and plus the theatrical rhetoric. That medieval couplet, The Seventh Seal (1957), and, The Virgin Spring (1960), introduces an “impossible” and necessary “trick,” pertaining to acrobatics and juggling. And the rest is about how the hell it’s done.

The weighty reflective saga therewith, coincides, for us in the new millennium, with a film market allergic to “weighty reflective sagas.” Getting on with bucket lists becomes a particularly insidious concern, insofar as the temptation to dip into a so-called masterpiece (and nothing else) is exactly anathematic to the tenor of the work. This difficulty requires an acrobatic feat in order to prime the spectacle to its best futurity. Included in this maneuver, therefore—and we have to admit that even in the 1960’s when the supposed Mona Lisa, namely, Persona (1966), was making some noise, no one, including Woody Allen, had a serious clue—would be pretty much disregarding the pretenders and watching for the few who well know what investigative popularity is worth on this questionable planet.

Persona is not a one-off and any effort to approach it that way is doomed. The opening passage of the film entails a young, bespectacled boy, played by child actor, Jorgen Lindstrom. His action spans a corpse in a morgue and a fervent stroking of a large portrait of a beautiful woman’s face. In the film, The Silence(1963), that same child, called Johan, encounters, with those same schoolboy, round-lens glasses, turbulence in trying to come to a harmony with his attractive, dangerously reckless mother; and, as a default choice, his beautiful, careful aunt. The painful and obscure action of Persona cannot come to coherence in the absence of a rigorous examination of The Silence. As it happens, Elisabet, the protagonist of Persona and a famous stage actress, stages a many-months refusal to speak and refusal to deal with her husband and son—sharply curtailing her paying career but getting down to business with the unfinished business of reckless, elusive Anna, in the film of three years before, where interplay shatters upon irreconcilable intentions. Whereas Anna shoots the works and hopes for serendipity, Elisabet, the occupier of designs, has a plan. Seemingly inert, particularly at the first stages when she is bedridden, she will soon be more overtly acrobatic, in her own eccentric ways. Moreover, despite Olympian disdain, she will, with characteristic undemonstrativeness, endeavor to put into play a juggling act whereby seemingly errant trajectories become welcomed constituents.

In order to fathom this peculiar action, we must highlight, in the spirit of the four Bergman films we have touched upon in previous blogs, the remarkable cinematic physicality raining down upon figures whom the unwary might assume to be in the midst of a fairly common medical treatment regime. That prelude, locating the same player in two films, has been designed as an introduction of the dynamics of the cosmos (which humans play an important part in), not the kick-off of a melodrama of rational souls being troubled and thereby—hopefully—rescued. One close look at the abysses of this storm, and the idea of rescue has been obviated. (The continuity of risk-takers having reached a showdown whereby a new plateau of outrageousness must be explored comprises the real “narrative” here, and everywhere Bergman chooses to aim. The Silence and Persona constitute a conclave of badass mommies fumbling the gentle love intrinsic to their heresies. So, too, Claire Denis, carrying the Bergman crisis in our century, with, for instance, her White Material.)

The masterful cornucopia of rapid, disconcerting camera cuts at the beginning of the mystery (whereby Bergman’s imagination becomes public through the exceptional cinematography of Sven Nykvist) coincides with the production team acknowledging its own tendencies to veer away from excellence. From out of a darkened screen, ambient ringing tones gradually fanfare an image of a film projector experiencing trouble with clean flow and sharp focus. The clumsiness culminates in a fireball, with film stock gone for good. Persevering discloses more grief—an intense white light—and then, for a microsecond, a vagina-like composition. Rattling from friction in the apparatus gives way to a howling noise level. At last we see something unequivocal, a black panel with a large Z inscribed. That is followed by the count-down from 10 to zero, and squealing noise. An erect penis comes and goes in a flash. Then a trumpet blast and a figure resembling a fetus. From out of this struggle we find a potency of not merely physical birth, but the whole gamut of a creative possibility. There is a falling back to another projector in flames, this time describing a total eclipse of the sun in the form of a film reel. Another trumpet charge, and then we’re confronted with an upside-down children’s literature drawing of a little girl in a body of water just below her knees, as Karin, the psychiatric patient (erroneously diagnosed), first came into view in Through a Glass Darkly (1961). The inversion also suggests a spacewalk. After a brief glitch, there is the little girl again, now moving her arms and hands. Woodwind orchestration joins this action for a second or two. More malfunction, and—what do you know!—a perfectly rendered scene of a child’s moving its hands in a naturally graceful way. The hard-won, translated word, “hand,” in The Silence, peeks in. At this point, too, the boy from The Silence returns (not puttering around a hotel or a train, but fired into the extraterrestrial force of the overture, lying upon a stone table, seemingly at a morgue, or some other precinct of arrested vitality). His visit is brief, in accordance with all the other apparitions. Near a bedstead a figure in a skeleton jumpsuit pops out of a coffin and plays Punch and Judy with a black monster, reminding us of Johan’s bitter entertainment to is aunt, in light of recently seeing his mother making love to one of the hotel staff. The tarantula jiggling along next, upon a sunlight void, puts into the spree Karin, the protagonist of Through a Glass Darkly, who loses her spunk and mistakes a helicopter (arriving to carry her back to a mental hospital) for a giant spider being God Himself. Maintaining the distemper, we see a pudgy fist squeezing a swatch of hair, within which being now a writhing spider. The hand goes on to gouge an eye and involve in a disembowelment. Which brings us to a spike being driven into a hand and affixed to a slab of wood. The tortured hand flexes its fingers the way the legs of a tortured spider would move. On to a stone wall, tree trunks (likewise inert) in the snow, iron spikes along a stairway, a huge mound of ice, old faces (perhaps dead). Here we discover that the boy is alive, and, after unsuccessfully resuming his sleep in the morgue, stages a spate of caressing the massive face of a beautiful woman, probably his mother, unapproachable on the other side of a transparent wall. Perhaps she is a goddess, for better or worse. Her fading in this melancholy downpour ushers in sights of that advantage far from the heart of the frisson on tap. A Buddhist monk, torching himself in the Vietnamese miasma, brings its verve into a quick extinguishment. Quick-cuts of the cast, having been pushed by this rampage to march to a different drummer, subside as rear-ending a second or two of the errancy of the Keystone Cops—hoping for advantage but never (luckily) getting there.

Thence the ensuing drama becomes punctuated by after-shocks of that lead-off blast. We can cite many such deep-space incidents in the wake of Elisabet’s being transferred from the hospital to her psychiatrist’s beach house. But the most striking delivery for this matter going forward derives from the thinly masked contempt and hatred emanating from that seemingly generous practitioner mooting the change of venue. (This stage comprises one of those theatrical set-pieces so incisive to the exploration of Bergman’s rare and difficult undertaking. This is filmmaking which invites the visceral forces of speech to complement its optical firepower.) Garbed in a white lab coat as proof for her lucidity beyond compare, the certified Olympian lays down the law, as far as she can see it. “Elisabet, I don’t think there’s any point in your staying any longer in the hospital. It’s just hurting you to be here. Since you don’t want to go home, I suggest you and Sister Alma [the patient’s one-on-one hospital nurse] move out to my summer place by the sea. [Elisabet peeling an apple and looking uncomfortable in face of a new and more complicated surround. The no-nonsense decision-maker, from her advantage-point in the heights of knowledge, taking a certain satisfaction in beholding the outcome of fuzzy, pretentious thinking.] You think I don’t understand… The hopeless dream of being. Not seeing appearances, but the real. Conscious and awake at every moment. At the same time, a chasm. The feeling of vertigo and constant hunger. To be unmasked once and for all. [Elisabet, in close-up, is seen to be impassive about that philosophical sound-bite.] To be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated. Every tone of voice a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace.

[The patient gives the doctor a quiet glare for her impudence.] Commit suicide? No, too nasty. [She lights a cigarette. The Silence’s intellectual , Ester, was a chain-smoker.] One doesn’t do things like that. But you can refuse to move or talk. Then, at least, you’re not lying. Then you needn’t play any roles—so you might think! But reality plays nasty tricks on you. [A sneer passes over the ‘care-giver’s’ face. Elisabet considers her options.] Your hiding place isn’t watertight enough. Life oozes in from all sides. [Don’t imagine for a second that our protagonist doesn’t know about that which oozes from all sides. The cop by another name gets into her better’s face.] No one asks whether it’s genuine or not, whether you’re lying or telling the truth. Questions like that only matter in the theatre, and hardly even there. I understand you Elisabet. I understand your not speaking or moving… that you’ve turned this apathy into a fantastic setup. I understand and admire you. I think you should play this part until it’s played out. Until it’s no longer interesting. Then you can drop it, just as you eventually drop all your other roles…”

First , with the prelude, there was a glimpse of a relentless test of the kinetic world at large. Now, we’ve taken on the breathtaking presumptuousness of history, delivering an essentially deadly storm. Persona brings us along to Elisabet’s showtime in the no-nonsense of making some headway, which is to say, an appointment with love—or, if you will, creativity. Perhaps, in enduring with dignity that stuffed-shirt, she had just had her crowning moment. Perhaps there will be an even more effective spike at the beach and its largesse. But headway here can only be slight, a slightness which might turn out to be just enough. Having become fed up with a triumphant cosmopolitan career—her moment of truth coming by way of silencing a performance of a Sophocles Electra (a world-wide event in spades, on the order of a handbook for murderous advantage); and in the spirit of those collapsing projectors—there is something remarkable about her not merely tolerating but actually studying her guide-dog Catholic nurse.

Alma had introduced herself to the patient as from a farming family and following in the footsteps of her no-doubt-devout mother’s medical care work. None of those priorities would interest her at this point; but the new nurse’s body language of engaging volatility, would. The early gambits may have been a bit of a disaster—her tuning into a radio play that was a soap opera, and then asking, “What are you laughing about? Is the actress [in the show] so funny?”; insisting, “I enjoy films and the theatre…I have tremendous enthusiasm for artists [something her sterile boss would never arrive at, but;] I think art is an important part of life, especially for those struggling, for one reason or other… But I’m skating on thin ice”—but, as portrayed by actress, Bibi Andersson, a hearty, bucolic figure, resembling in many ways the portrayal of Anna, by actress, Gunnel Lindblom, in The Silence, Alma would be a breath of fresh air to an Elisabet (portrayed by actress, Liv Ullman, very fine in the form of an acrobatic gambler who unfortunately hates juggling games). After finding the wrong place on the radio dial, her second choice snags a Bach string composition, which transfixes Elisabet on her bed, seen in profile, and she places a patrician hand over her face. The progressions of the music help her somewhat reinstate that portal of play beyond the advantage driving her so far from others.

While, later that night, sleepless Elisabet stumbles upon the burning monk on TV and Bach becomes a casualty, Alma stays up a bit, applying moisturizer to the skin of her throat and applying attention to the sagging status of her imminent marriage. She muses, “You can go along doing anything you please… we’ll have a couple of kids whom I’ll raise… I don’t even have to think about it…” She declares that her life is sound, and promptly contradicts a clear sailing. Both, at different levels, feel the same horror. And yet Alma can ask herself in the darkness of her bed, “I wonder what’s really wrong with her…” Next morning, the slightly enigmatic working girl reads aloud to the full-scale enigma a letter from the actress’s husband not undergoing clear sailing. There is a resemblance in that correspondence to that unsatisfactory soap opera. “Was there some terrible misunderstanding between us? You taught me what it means to be married… You’ve taught me that we must see each other as two anxious children, full of goodwill and the best intentions… governed by forces we can only partially control…” [Verbose Ester, in The Silence, also concludes that those damn “forces” preclude joy. Alma shows her patient the photo, included, of her young boy. Elisabet tears it up].

On to the beach, where badass runs wild; but not wild enough. This second phase of the saga has been provided with copious edgy optical features, in order to antidote the vale of conflict staged by the skeptical women, which veers toward everyday distancing. What must not flag here for us is their singular (but varyingly intense) sense of being castaways on a shore astronomically remote from the priorities of the mainstream. In that light, there is Bergman’s ironic voice-over at the outset of the little trip as if we were about nineteenth-century novelistic couching of a bourgeois holiday. (In The Silence, a figure in the mold of Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot, similarly warns us not to expect an excursion bolted down to respectability.) “Thus, at the end of summer, Mrs. Vogler and Sister Alma moved out to the doctor’s summer place…” Also in the vein of (the faux) melodrama to come is the first glimpse of the two ladies at the open expanse. There is a healthy forest being confronted by a brick wall. Organic motion and inert matter—deliberately too obvious, in the service of introducing a devastation not for belles-lettres. “Apathy gave way to walks.” Also in the mode of parody, there was their carefree humming in the sun as they attended to identifying on a table the mushrooms they had enjoyably picked. More playful design-crimes occur in their chic straw sun hats, Elisabet in ethereal white, Alma in more pragmatic black. From out of this comedic cloud of goodwill, the patient takes Alma’s hand, being a contrast of rough skin when placed together with Elisabet’s smoothness and elegantly long fingers. The Sister becomes flustered and trots out the folk superstition, “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to compare hands?” Another presage having to do with a phenomenon that won’t be fun. (The translated term, “hand,” from The Silence, resurfacing here, with intent to imply that this more recent interplay will be drenched in impasse; but, in view of our protagonists here being far more compatible than that preceding duo, we are also cued to notice the positive difference.)

However, with Alma’s choice of recreational literature shifting from delicate botany to broadside, a little rift becoming a landslide kicks in, now dispensing with old-time graces. “Elisabet, may I read you something from my book [as if the previous sinkhole were not warning enough]. Or am I disturbing you?” [disturbance soon becoming the norm]. The silent one, beginning to make some tiny headway with her silence, perhaps rather prematurely testing the resilience in sight, signals that such a disturbance would not rain on her parade; and the rains come apace. “All the anxiety we carry with us, all our thwarted dreams, the implacable cruelty, our fear of extinction, the painful insight into our earthly condition, have crystallized our hope for another-worldly salvation. The tremendous cry of our faith and doubt [Elisabet disclosing being disturbed by the same off-the-cuff slovenliness she saw in the doctor, which constitutes a wrecking ball against her very different forum]. Against this darkness and silence.” [The frames of Alma’s reading glasses cast an irregular halo on her temple. This touch speaks to a far more recent regime than the logic of the majority. Accordingly, Alma’s book’s run of reasoning misses that shading.] “… the most terrifying proof of our abandonment….” Suddenly a bull in a china shop, the Sister marches on by asking, “Do you think that’s true?” This corrosion of the two protagonists could be a distant match for the burning suicide. Perhaps half asleep in the warm sun, and confused by the polemic so foreign to her, the presence attempting to preside, over a paradoxical depth, thoughtlessly nods yes, as to an agency of primal efficacy being a pipe dream. This allows the weaker (shot-in-the-dark logician) to appear to be the stronger. “I don’t believe that!”

The certainly familiar and typical aggressiveness of the doctor would have appeared to Elisabet as a virulent form of plague which the medical-science constituency would be among the last to notice. (Karin’s rare sensibility being subverted by her medic-husband, in Through a Glass Darkly, comprises a preceding instance of the syndrome of overweening estimation of technicity which our main protagonist has got herself caught up in.) Having been game to take a flyer on a segment of the population she seldom, if ever, encounters, this didactic concern would flood her investigation like a mutant of the same disease she already knows and hates. Alma, thinking her stand in the sun to be somehow definitive, that evening, over lots of wine, recites a favorite tale where she is the leading lady of a moment of vision, by dint of an orgy a few years before. With Elisabet installed on her bed in a neoclassical gown, like what perhaps an oracle might wear, an oracle wisely refusing to say anything, the Sister recounts a day, at another beach, when her fiancé had left for the afternoon and she and another woman attracted two young men for the successful performance of repeated and varied coitus. Alma’s chronicling this presumed breakthrough to a New World is both carefully honed and self-congratulatory; and it arouses in the oracle a strong suspicion that she had overestimated the verve of her partner. The latter’s preamble, “I should change [clothes] but I’m too lazy,” finds in the actress her cue for a silent and complicated and embarrassing campaign. (Alma’s verbosity here does, however, display a fascinating blend of crudity and will to cogent power. That Elisabet fails to discern and act upon this phenomenon in good faith brings a newly riveting dramatic outcome to this film project’s problematic brilliance. Alma prefaces her blockbuster by playing homage to previous generations of nurses when working in that field was like taking a vow of poverty. “Imagine, believing so strongly in something, you dedicate your entire life to it! I like that! Helping others… Don’t you agree?’ (Elisabet, who had been trying to conjure some heights of her own by rhythmically moving her hands, musters a sad smile.) “It feels so good to talk! I’ve never felt like this in my life!” [The big name’s tentativeness acting upon the not-so-selfless nurse as a jolt for her gusto.] At which she tells about an abortion she and the fiancé proceeded with. “We were both relieved. We didn’t want children. Not then, anyway. [she cries.] It doesn’t make any sense… Nothing fits together!” Eventually getting to the highlight of her wanderings, she rattles off golden moments like, “Suddenly I turned over and said, ‘Aren’t you coming over to me, too?’ And Katerina said, ‘Go to her now.’ He pulled out of her and fell on top of me, completely hard. He grabbed my breasts. It hurt so bad! I was ready somehow and came almost at once. Can you believe it? I felt it like never before in my life! [Elisabet, in close-up, smokes a cigarette, her eyes showing she is millions of miles from her.] … It’s never been as good, before or since…”

Elisabet’s incubation would not have found reflective value in her nurse’s heart-to-heart gushing, “Katerina unbuttoned his pants and started to play with him. And when he came, she took him in the mouth. He bent down and kissed her back…” But that leaves the question of why she subsequently writes a letter to the doctor in a vein of restrained ridiculing of Alma’s naïve patter. Would we find the clue in the same current of unfortunately rushing to a stand against the possibility of a sentient cosmos? Had she, once again struck by a register seemingly a dead-end, jumped, this time, to seek relief by rubbing the supercilious host’s nose in the medium she regards to be paramount, a towering sphere of efficacy? (Such dramatic dynamics not only strain the bounds of filmmaking but almost overexpose the range of theatre. Does Bergman, here, in the current of upping the ante about the “impossible trick,” introduce novelistic factors? We’re headed for a terrain which does deliver to the film viewer its coherent depths. But structural factors, as we are just in the midst of, become confusing—unless read like a novel. Consequently, a supposition that the film is a paradoxical and endless and wonderful puzzle has come about, to the detriment of the manageable heart of the action.)

Disappointed and distracted Elisabet fails to seal the envelope of the poison pen letter; Alma, driving it to the post office, notices that and—being a Scandinavian hurtin’ gal—reads it, and then hurts some more. The letter includes, as the staffer reads it, “My battered soul is recovering… Alma cares for me in the most touching way… Perhaps she’s even smitten in a charming, ridiculous way… Anyway it’s fun watching her… She complains that her sense of life fails to accord with her actions… an orgy with a strange boy, and a subsequent abortion …” Right from the reading at a side road, however, this rupture—with Alma raving at length—is held in forms of optical beauty, to question the seemingly obdurate death spiral. Shaken by the treachery, she leaves the car and comes to the edge of a lake, the calm surface of which creating a mirror-image amidst the primeval pine forest. That inducement to disinterestedness tellingly, with its duality , of an exigency of juggling amidst high volatility.

It is that beckoning topspin of the battle to come which maintains the singularity of this saga in face of what could readily collapse to a melodramatic screed of resentment. After childishly occasioning a shard of glass by which the traitor may be injured, there is an explosion of physical violence including Alma’s coming close to pouring a boiling pot of water over the now-hated radical. This is accompanied by a fusillade of moralizing by the chatterbox. And that topspin does its best to stitch together the veritable think tank on the brink of bankruptcy. “You used me! For what, I don’t know. Now that you don’t need me anymore, you toss me aside! Yes, I know perfectly well how phony that sounds!” [She wouldn’t be in the loop if she couldn’t feel embarrassed by this level of speech. The orator fails to recognize that Elisabet is weighted down with her failure in bidding for a new nobility.] “You hurt me badly… You got me to talk, to tell you things I’ve never told anyone. Great study material, eh?” She tries to take the high ground by asking, “What kind of a person are you, anyway?” When she settles down a bit and takes the coffee Elisabet offers, Alma capitalizes on the crime to whitewash the exposed laxity. “Is it really so important not to lie, to tell the truth? Can a person really live without babbling away, without lying and making up excuses and avoiding things? [The accused turns her back on the prosecutor.] Isn’t it better to just let yourself be silly and sloppy and dishonest? You don’t understand what I’m saying. There’s no reaching someone like you. You act sane and the worst thing is, everyone believes you. Except me, because I know how rotten you are.” At this, Elisabet strides out of the house. Alma says, “God, what am I doing?” And she rushes along a shore neither sloppy nor dishonest, apologizing over and over to her would-be partner. The projector self-destructs, again, at this melt-down of creative endeavor. The seascape exerts a balance against an interplay of ardent but inept representatives of the serene and the industrious. “I don’t know what got into me! I’m here to help you!”

Any serious prospect of cogent illumination for this team seems to have vanished. But the remainder of this odd couple’s gig does painfully pull out of the hat the contours of a real deal. With stagecraft bona fides, Bergman lulls us into thinking that quite incisive Elisabet is put upon by a totally common Alma. The film’s payoff, however, is much more about what a pedestrian figure like Alma can truly “help” an acrobat like Elisabet. “You won’t forgive me because you’re too proud,” is one of the more intriguing gambits in Alma’s grab-bag. “You won’t stoop to my level because you don’t have to…” But in fact, does she not have to do a ton of “stooping,” in the course of an essential “juggling”? The latter moments of the race along the shore—with Alma stooping and Elisabet leaving her in a jetstream which nature provides for the sake of distancing what appears to be a waste of time—in fact opens upon a rich array of unexpected sources. That the starring figure does indeed feel a pull to stoop, is revealed during Alma’s giving up the chase and sitting amongst large boulders feeling lost. Elisabet has returned to the house, but her attention is on those rocks. She paces about the living room and goes out to a patio continuing along a table of rock jutting out toward the sea. Filmed at mid-distance and from below, she creates a grand frisson, right up her alley; but her intensity is devoted to having left Alma an item of road kill. In close-up, she looks into the setting sun, toward her partner’s whereabouts. Shielding her eyes from the glare with her hand, a black shadow of her fingers presses into her anxiety in once again having failed. But that temporary shadow has put into play that rest-of-her which she lives for, that uncanniness, now also about canniness, the mundane. Complementing her intuition that Alma cannot be easily brushed off, she opens a book with a photo inserted as a book mark, a photo of Nazi troopers rounding up Jews, many of them being terrified children. This alert as to vicious simplism constitutes a subterranean, ongoing theme whereby Bergman lingers upon the poison from lacking a dialectical “juggle” between poetry and prose. (In Through a Glass Darkly, the protagonist’s husband, a scientific zealot with a Master Race aggressiveness, fabricates his wife’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. In The Virgin Spring, a trio led by a man playing a Jew’s harp, rapes and murders a young girl—a bold focus upon maniacal advantage. Persona intensifies this horror, in its comprehensive investigation of kinetic suppleness.)

That night, Alma having returned on her own, wakes with the same frenzy seen by Ester, the voice of increasingly dubious reason, in The Silence (shot upside-down and creating a blur that doesn’t spell magic). She listens to a portable radio, pressing, “We don’t speak… we don’t listen… we can’t understand…” She comes to Elisabet’s bed, touches her throat and whispers, “When you sleep, your face goes slack…” Hearing sounds out their window, she checks, and encounters Mr. Vogler, blind and on the same sentimental page as the nurse. Elisabet had in fact not been asleep, and she accompanies the soulmates (the husband so estranged that he can’t detect the absence of his wife). (Surrealistically in the footsteps of Belles former beau intruding upon the Bêtes’ palace.) “The doctor explained everything [sort of like the way Dr. Martin had it all figured out for his wife, Karin, in Through a Glass Darkly]. You build a community. It gives you security… ” The troubled petitioner disregards Alma’s denying that she’s his wife. And soon the “passionate, compassionate” helper plays along with the romance. Elisabet places Alma’s hand upon him. She rushes to him and declares, “No, don’t worry, my love! We have each other! We have faith in each other! We know each other’s thoughts!” He declares, “I don’t know what to do with my tenderness!” They rush to bed; and after that Alma can no longer play the part, and she becomes frantic. “Give me a sedative!” Her sign-off as part-Elisabet runs, “I’m cold and rotten and indifferent. It’s all just a sham and lies!” (The separated, peculiar lover places her hands on a table as if producing a shattering chord to close this mishap which proves to have staying power.)

The denouement is characteristically oblique. Sedative or not, the versatile careerist confronts her difficult caseload in the form of delivering a professional document to contribute to a hopefully bright future for the patient on the basis of a display of hard-won inference. That the analysis is lubriciously vicious would be only par for the course. “It happened at a party one night, didn’t it? Someone in the group said to you, ‘Elisabet, you have practically everything as a woman and an artist, but you lack motherliness’ [the woman and artist glares at her biographer] … You grew more and more worried, so you let your husband get you pregnant. When you knew it was definite you became afraid—afraid of responsibility, of being tied down, of leaving the theatre behind, afraid of pain, afraid of dying, afraid of your body that was swelling up. But you played the part the whole time. Then there were several attempts to abort. But they failed…” (We see Elisabet seated at the table, with Alma’s back in the shadowy foreground. Here, too, there is another murderous gaze as the final seconds of their relationship ends.)”You wanted a dead baby… [Here the patient closes her eyes and looks down. But does the moment brim with guilt or the gulf on incomprehension she faces?] A difficult delivery… You were in agony for days.” More needling from the care-giver ensues, especially about the child being so intent toward her. “He looks at you , and he’s so soft…”

What remains, a close study will reveal, is reverie by each of them in the wake of that “agony.” (The exception is a perfunctory passage of Elisabet packing; and Alma dragging in the patio furniture, departing with her suitcase and boarding a bus.) First, there is Elisabet beholding Alma as she hopes, as the doctor hoped, to stage a road kill, with her “report.” After reliving that attack, it is for her the matter of fruitful interplay that becomes set in relief. The supposed hermit conjures a successful heart-to-heart with Alma, their heads lovingly close and their faces sharing one figure. The title, Persona, is singular, in accordance with the raging self-assertion which slashes the field. But that does not take into account the myriad transcending moments, which touch upon and fuel a comprehensive sensibility (a Persona), whereby the acrobatic enactment of moving (including being still and silent) may reach an elusive primordiality itself, and where juggling of presences means both one and many. On the heels of this supernal daring, we get a slice of something much smaller. The Sister is back at that inquisitional bench, making Elisabet squirm, and she prefaces her daydream by way of public opinion. “I’m not like you. I don’t feel the same way you do. I’m Sister Alma. I’m only here to help you. I’d really like to have… I love… I haven’t…” [Now the bench has migrated back to the hospital.] She sees herself marching into that slacker’s retreat, and, with fanatically angry tone, she comes close to the Nazis in that photo, getting down to a quick fix. She stares down the softie, who in fact would find the exercise pointless. “I’ll never be like you. I change all the time. You can do what you want. You won’t get to me.” Alma pounds her fists on the table. “I take, yes… What’s it called? No! No! No! Us, we, me, I… Many words and the disgust…” [Elisabet closes her eyes. Her lips tremble in silhouette, not without eerie beauty, not without expansiveness… She scratches with her patrician fingernails the skin of one of her wrists. Alma sucks the blood. The nurse/ jailer repeatedly slaps Elisabet’s face. A cut shows Alma’s second take. She enters the hospital room, brings Elisabet to a seated position and holds her, head-to-head [making both of them ardent, however inconsistent, acrobats and jugglers. “Repeat after me,” Alma orders: “Nothing.” Elisabet says, “Nothing,” so wrong for her. “That’s it! That’s good! That’s how it should be,” the technician in her celebrates. Elisabet lies down. The heads are together. Elisabet is seen gently caressing her nurse by sliding her neck behind Alma’s neck.

As Alma, in a prim little hat, and her spiffy nurse’s uniform boards the bus by the wide-open sea, the production crew on a dolly puts in a little visit to make sure we see them in the same , often agonizing, boat or bus. The boy and the beauty reemerge. Homecomings abound. Has the trip been broadening?

#ingmar bergman

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