#alaska is in the midst of an existential crisis

[alaskan-wallflower]

sometimes i forget i’m a junior and then u say it out loud and it still feels unreal like i was just a freshman, what happened 😭

[theradioghost]

could you elaborate on the long term plot of greater boston? i don't mind spoilers! i tried it but couldn't get past the first episode :( but i trust your taste and i've liked every other show you've rec'd so i wanna keep listening

EDIT: okay for some reason the formatting of this post is EXTREMELY befuckened and I can’t get it to behave, so it’s possible that this isn’t going to display with a spoiler cut and if so I am VERY sorry. the “keep reading” break is in the ask instead of the body of the post I have no idea what’s happening right now but if you don’t want spoilers please be aware this post spoils like everything about the show

Sure thing! I will .... do my best, but because of the nature of GB’s plot it’s a bit difficult to describe it without ending up either way too detailed or way too vague. But I will absolutely do my best because if there is any show out there that deserves it, this is that show. Cut for Obvious Spoiler Reasons!

So, there’s a LOT of plot that goes on, but what a plot summary could never convey is that the real heart and soul of this show is the characters. There are a metric fuckton of them, and every one of them is multidimensional and dynamic and wonderful, even if it’s not always obvious at first.

Leon Stamatis of course starts the show by abruptly dying of Existential Crisis/Panic Attack on a roller coaster, which sets everything else in motion. Of that big ensemble cast, at first the most important players are

Nica, Leon’s little sister who wants to be famous but doesn’t really have any concrete plans as to how

Dimitri, Leon’s little brother who is currently traveling in a submarine attempting to find Atlantis and keeps sending Leon letters, unaware that he’s dead

Louisa, Leon’s recent ex, a wedding photographer who later quits and becomes a crime scene photographer slash detective

Leon’s best friend/roommate Michael, who is unemployed and has just had a relapse after being sober for 12 years because he has no idea what to do without Leon

Gemma, a lesbian who absolutely hates her job as an editor at Third Sight, a company which publishes magazines relating to astrology/psychic stuff/divination/etc

Charlotte, Gemma’s pregnant wife, who has recently lost her job as an animation background artist and is feeling directionless

Professor Paul Montgomery Chelmsworth, aka the Mayor of the Red Line, a slightly eccentric college professor and casual friend of Leon’s who is inspired by his death to call for a referendum declaring that the Red Line of the Boston subway system will become an independent city.

It’s that last one that is the real ~main plot~ of the show: at first, more and more of the characters getting caught up in the campaign to create the city of Red Line, and then the chaos that results when they succeed and actually have to run it. But you also have characters like Louisa and Nica and Michael, dealing with a whole rainbow of grief and distress as they cope with Leon’s death. His eccentric personality is the other driving force of the show’s events -- Leon was caring and compassionate, but also obsessed with timetables, organization, and scheduling every action in his life down to the minute.

The other major force in the show is Third Sight, a magazine publisher with a focus on fortunetelling and the like; Michael ends up working there, along with Gemma and several other major characters. Third Sight also has an enigmatic boss no one has ever seen, who turns out to be a manipulative little bastard named Oliver West.

While Red Line successfully becomes a city, “Mayor” Chelmsworth turns out to have some major commitment issues and vanishes as soon as the vote passes, leaving Charlotte and Gemma to clean up the mess. Charlotte ends up interim mayor, but also begins to campaign for the upcoming mayoral election, in which she has two opponents: Isabelle Powell, a Black realtor and an incredible character whom I absolutely cannot do justice here, and Emily Bespin, Literally The Worst Person Who Has Ever Existed, Holy Fuck I Hate Her So Much.

The election is being manipulated behind the scenes by Oliver West, who also takes advantage of Nica’s isolation and a near mental breakdown to convince her to help him by orchestrating several escalating ~pranks~ in Red Line. Honestly he’s manipulating literally everyone, and also heavily backing Emily Bespin, in an attempt to profit off of influence in the new city. Eventually this ends up with Michael kidnapped and imprisoned, several other characters attacked and one badly hurt during a wedding in Red Line, and Isabelle Powell’s nephew framed for the attack. That results in Powell’s supporters beginning a set of protests which throw Red Line into even further chaos, even as Charlotte and Nica begin to have some real moral epiphanies about how they’ve been acting.

As events continue to escalate and the election draws closer and closer, the now-assembled cast have to figure out just who exactly is manipulating events and how -- not to mention how to prove Powell’s nephew’s innocence, what the hell has happened to Michael, and what the hell they’re going to do if Bespin wins the election and makes good on her promise to evict everyone involved in the protests.

Meanwhile, Dimitri is traumatized by finding a mass grave at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, gets rescued and then imprisoned in Alaska by infamous vanished plane hijacker DB Cooper, finally makes it home to Boston disillusioned and lonely only to inevitably find out his brother has been dead for two years, and then gets totally rejected by his sister, because he basically can’t catch a break.

Also meanwhile, the same conflicts playing out in Red Line play out on a more metaphysical level, in the structure of the show itself. While the first season only hints at the possibility that Leon might not be quite as gone as everyone thinks, as the show progresses Leon’s ghost makes his presence known by starting to argue with the omniscient narration. Increasingly taking over the show’s narration until a brilliant scene where said narrator quits and audibly gets up from the microphone and leaves, Leon, the man who spent his whole life trying to impose order on the chaos of the universe around him, finds himself battling the very structure of the story they’re in, in an attempt to help his friends as both he and they are caught up in the chaos of Red Line and Oliver West’s plans. Unfortunately, the structure of the story has other ideas, and plans of its own.

None of this, of course, even begins to touch on the cheese robots; or Michael’s ongoing struggle with self-actualization and alcoholism; or Mallory the foulmouthed teenager who somehow manages to first witness and then be involved in nearly every major plot event of the show; or the in-depth examination of structural racism as it relates to things like housing and city planning and Boston’s history and well-intentioned white liberals and the imprisonment of Black youth; or Star Trek obsessed chaotic neutral gay reporter Chuck Octagon and that one time he flirted with his own mirror universe self; or the complex but beautiful process of Charlotte and Gemma working on their relationship in the midst of all this chaos because while they have troubles throughout they truly love one another and are trying to be better people; or the fact that one of the other major characters is an insufferable Loud Vegan member of a polyamorous commune who -- on the advice of his ~spirit advisor~ the ghost of 19th century feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft keeps changing his name throughout the show to things including Earthman, Panda Bear, Extinction Event, and Dipshit; or the unfortunately real Olive Garden food truck; or the laughter and the tears and the flamethrowers and the fact that one of the show’s most important and heartbreaking conversations takes place on an amusement park log flume ride audibly filled with liquid nacho cheese.

It’s a good show, is what I’m saying, basically.

[empireofspruces-blog]

Chapter 1

He was born out of time.

That’s what he told me that first time we met. I had just flown into Fairbanks, Alaska, my ankles still shaky, and I was sipping on a chocolate malt milkshake, double the malt. And time was all I could think about.

The modern world is not for everyone. Yes, there is excitement, temptation and comfort to be found in it. But what else do we have in this life if not the need to connect with the divine? And tell me, what is more divine than nature?

That’s what I was thinking about as I looked across the table at Gael, a man exactly twice my age but with an aura that exuded something like the tender years of boyhood. Gael, wilderness guide, follower of dreams, keeper of whiskey-jacks, master of rivers, writer of poetry and the love of my life. Although I had no idea at the time. We had just met. I had travelled all the way from Vancouver to meet him.  

I was twenty-nine, full of anxiety about the future, already tired and looking for something with a little bit of certainty. Maybe I was having a quarter-life crisis. I don’t know. I think I was. What else would persuade a semi-suburban girl to venture all the way to the middle of nowhere, Alaska to meet a man twenty-nine years her senior?

It was 2006 and I was in the midst of trying to finish a Ph.D. in English Literature at Simon Fraser University. I say trying because a thing like that never feels like doing, it always feels like trying. Never do a Ph.D. Really, I mean it. It is a spectacular cause of existential suffering and amounts to nothing more than the fulfilment of a fanciful wish.

Maybe I was just bored…but there was this feeling inside of me like I was searching for something big. And I really can’t say why but all I could think about was going North. I was born in the North, in the small town of Smithers, British Columbia. But I hadn’t lived there since I was two-years-old and I wanted to be in a place that felt more extreme, that had something to offer me that nowhere else could. A place that made me feel whole.

I’ve since learned that Alaska is a place that collects broken people. I don’t mean weak, just broken by someone or something that was impossible to overcome anywhere else but here. Alaska is not a place for the frail, and those that come here broken are mended by the humility that it takes to survive in one of the harshest and wildest places on the planet. Just coming here says something about a person’s fortitude and those that stay become the best kinds of people.

This is how I met Gael, in my search for humility and fortitude. It was fall, October, and I was teaching a course at the university while working on my thesis. I kept thinking about Alaska. I’d applied for a couple of jobs there with no luck and I kept wondering how I could get there. I thought maybe there was someone like me out there who was looking for something too. A man.

I’m a researcher. It’s easy for me to search for and find information within any medium, but online was the best place to meet people that were far away. I started by searching “meet Alaskan men” in Google. I know, admitting all this really hurts my credibility but it is the honest truth about how this all happened. Googling something like that seems like an act of desperation. But really, I was just an outlier searching for another outlier and where else do outliers meet than in unlikely places?

The first thing I found in my search were all these statistics about how the number of men far outweigh the number of women in Alaska. I instantly had this image in my mind of the real Frontier days, when lonely men would post an ad in the local newspaper: Seeking Wife on Remote Homestead. Well, Alaska is The Last Frontier and men still post ads seeking wives, except they do it on Craigslist instead of in print. I wondered if I was even capable of entering into that kind of arrangement…I was an unlikely foreign bride. But I thought…maybe I was capable. If things didn’t work out, I could always just go home to Canada. I had nothing to lose.  

The men I found on Craigslist were mostly broken men in the Lower 48, looking to steal away to Alaska, woefully unprepared to face the reality of living in the wilderness. In most cases, they didn’t seem to have a single ounce of experience living outside of the city environment. This made me uneasy. I myself, although I had spent my fair share of time camping in the backcountry, had limited knowledge of things like harvesting firewood, organic gardening, off-grid power systems, not to mention the countless minor details that you have to be aware of to have a functioning homestead…like knowing where to pee as to not attract bears. If I was going to live out in the bush, I needed someone who had knowledge to share.

So, I swallowed my pride and my reservations and I posted my own advertisement. I don’t remember now exactly what it said. It was something along the lines of “Seeking Husband for Wilderness Living”. How funny is that? But you know what? I got hundreds (hundreds!) of replies. Men from all over Alaska: farmers, trappers, pilots, labourers, students, salesmen…all envisioning a future with me.

But the only one that stood out to me was Gael: the man born out of time. It was his way with words. He bequeathed romance into every syllable. I didn’t even need to look at him to know that we were kindred spirits. And so there I was, after three months of correspondence, sitting in front of a man that I knew meant the world to me, yet I barely knew him at all.

I want to tell you our story, because I think it’s a beautiful one. It’s the kind of story that you hear about all the time but because you can’t see it happening right in front of you it is impossible to accept as more than a fantasy. But this is one story that I have lived and I have only one true motivation for sharing it with you:

This is the place where all our hopes about life come from, from the stories about love that sometimes do happen. And it is in these hopes that we find all the meaning that we can manage. It is this meaning precisely that allows us to be carried forward into dreams that are made reality. 

Copyright: Leroux, March 10, 2018.