LaT checked out an Andromeda message board in which someone asked the question: "If the crew formed a band, who would they all be?" This is where we ended up taking it....

Viridian5: Because I don’t think you could fit all of them into one band. Dylan probably wouldn’t, that’s for sure.

LaT: I could see Dylan as the manager, maybe *g*.
LaT: But not in the band itself.
::::Snip::::
Viridian5: Behind the Music! The rise and fall of Andromeda Ascendant!
Viridian5: Harper’s drinking and ego trips, Beka maiming too-ardent fans....

LaT: Tyr and his groupies.

Viridian5: Power struggles as Tyr tried to become lead singer, manager, producer, and whatever else he could wrangle, whether he knew what he was doing or not.
Viridian5: Rev’s scandalous midnight snacks.
Viridian5: The spilled drink that nearly ended EmbodiedRommie’s career.....

LaT: Dylan’s struggles with the record company to get them all better cuts of the profits.

Viridian5: Beka’s less above-board struggles for same.
Viridian5: Beka and Tyr shooting bootleggers....

LaT: Harper and Rommie loading a serious virus to Napster to assist Beka and Tyr with same.

Viridian5: Tyr shaking down drug dealers at their concerts for part of their profits too.
Viridian5: The drugs, the scandals.... Beka’s fight against her former Flash addiction....

LaT: Dylan struggling with a different set of execs who want them to make their sound more commercial.

Viridian5: The crew pondering it. Dylan telling them that they must make their own music, hold to their own codes.
Viridian5: The attempts to get the band to do synchronized dance movements, which ended when everybody realized that they couldn’t speed up to Harper or have him slow down to them.

LaT: Dylan and Harper wondering if the turn in the nature of their relationship with each other will result in good or bad press.
LaT: Deciding they don’t really give a shit either way.

Viridian5: Of course not. ::grins::

October 12, 2001

Seamus Harper Online: "The Hive of Scum and Villainy That Is My Innermost Mind"

I’m still pissed about "The Widening Gyre," but when LaT told me that the official Andromeda site has been revamped, I had to take a look. The new stuff brought up immediate questions, like Why does Beka look like a blond Lara Croft? and What’s up with Tyr doing the Fabio thing? It’s very "cue bombshell female and male." They’ve just rolled out of bed (though somehow Beka managed to Lara Croft her hair first) and are waiting for your call! 1-800-dial-a-babe

All of which made me laugh derisively until I saw this:

Dial a babe indeed. So, I checked in to Seamus Harper Online and found much to cheer me up. It’s supposedly Harper’s personal homepage and shows a bio, diary entries, interests, a recipe for beer, notes on Andromeda ("The Ship Made Hot") and various gadgets, etc. Backstory! It’s also easy to navigate, informative, and funny, and it features highly in-character text. To my great surprise.

It turns out that my guess on the accent Gordon Michael Woolvett does for him was very close, because Harper’s from Massachusetts. (I’d guessed he was a New Englander, though his occasional Woody Allen moments made me hope for some of my hometown’s influence.) It’s all in the "A"s.

His origins and a brief outline of his life on Earth are here. And it turns out that Beka and her "psycho ex-boyfriend Bobby" took him off-planet. (As realitycek asked, "Does everybody have a psycho ex-boyfriend named Bobby?") Log entries give you a Harper’s eye view of the episodes, highlights of which (for me) are:

[On "Devil Take the Hindmost"] >> The nutcase Wayist in charge (not you, Rev!) blew up their crate of force lances, they fought off the slavers with spears and homemade bombs, and something really freaky and horrible happened to Rev that he and Dylan still won’t tell me about. Anyway, they seem okay, but no one’s in a rush to go back and pay Serendipity another visit. << [So Dylan didn’t tell him about the Magog, which explains why World War III didn’t start. But Tyr knows. Wonder if Tyr told him later.]

[On "Harper 2.0"] >>So I barely escaped becoming three inches shorter, we managed to get the data out and hide it someplace safe (damned if I can remember exactly where), and I’m back to being plain old original recipe Harper. So today’s lessons, kids: never let a strange Perseid tongue kiss your dataport, and always practice safe downloading. << [I knew that Perseid had Frenched his port, no matter what the video footage after the clamping down wanted to suggest. Guess somebody figured the audience wasn’t ready to watch a gray-skinned alien mouth a castmember’s neck.]

Harper’s ticked that Uncle Sid wined, dined, then tortured Beka and Trance... but didn’t invite him. Though the crew used Uncle Sid’s unlimited credit disc mercilessly once Beka and Trance got back. ["The Pearls That Were His Eyes"]

His comment that the events of "The Banks of the Lethe" left him feeling like Benjamin Franklin with Dylan as his kite makes an interesting image.

His entry for "D Minus Zero" is brief and uncertain, given his radiation sickness at the time.

[On "The Ties That Blind"] >> Yeah, the bad guys got what they deserved and it all turned out okay in the end, except for Rafe stealing most of Beka’s CD collection. Luckily, I’d already made my own copies of the essentials -- London Calling, Straight Outta Compton, and the collected works of The Pogues. <<

[On "To Loose the Fateful Lightning"] >> Another High Guard remnant, but not nearly as pretty as Andromeda. Oh yeah, and it’s filled with rabid, homicidal teenagers (I know, that’s redundant). <<

[An entry BA (Before Andromeda)] >> A traveller’s aid station on Sinti had a message for me… from Earth, of all places. It turns out Brendan and the gang scraped together enough cash to send me Christmas greetings from old Boston town. Made me feel kinda nostalgic, but I’m sure he wants something. And hey, not like I’m going back to that pit anytime soon. << [Foreshadowing?]

And there’s a place in the Andromeda universe called "Double Happiness Drift." *ahem*

I have no idea whether this stuff will be worked into the show, though it being an official site and the sheer work put into it makes it more likely than usual. All this work also gives me hope that they intend to keep the character around. Why else would they go to all this trouble?

Don’t answer that.

Kass reminded me that Harper’s first home--listed on the Seamus Harper site as Dunwich, Massachusetts--was the locale of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella "The Dunwich Horror." Karra tells me that a lot of the kids in Dunwich are children of Yog-Sothoth, so you have to wonder about Harper's bloodlines....

Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda: the show with more fanboys in power per capita than any other.

Though I’m sure they intend to use the American Revolution ties Massachusetts and Boston have too.

This Week’s Invention Exchange....

Viridian5: I see Harper as a Ray Kowalski/Joel Robinson mix. ::grins::

debitchan: ::laughing:: That works.

Viridian5: The jumpsuit from the pilot helps even more. The caption for the jumpsuit!Harper pic at right is "He works at Gizmonic Institute?" Okay, now I’m imagining him interacting with Crow and Servo. Ohhhh boy.

debitchan: <---on the floor. Oh god. Given enough Sparky cola, he’d be very happy.

Viridian5: I think so. Think of all the snarking material. And how much he’d torment the Mads.

debitchan: Oh my god. The invention exchanges would be incredible.

Viridian5: The combination teleporter/time travel machine/juice-o-matic....

Harper: "Do you want to drink yesterday’s orange juice... today?"

Dr F: "We can already do that, Harper."

Harper: "Oh, right. How about tomorrow’s orange juice today?"

Dr F: "Why would we want to do that?"

Harper: "Tough crowd. Okay, fine. Do you want to explode the shit out of some fruit!"

Crow and Servo: "Yeah!"

Harper: "Let’s call this one ‘Frank.’"

Dr F: "So, essentially, this device makes fruit explode."

Harper: "Uh-hunh. And does it from across the room."

Dr F: "And this is superior to other things that make fruit explode... how?"

Harper: "You can make fruit explode that you haven’t even put in the machine yet."

Frank: "What if you don’t put any fruit in the machine at all?"

Dr F beans Frank with a large mallet:: "Your film for today is Manos, The Hands of Fate. Since I’ve seen your numerous attempts to pick up women, I know you have a high tolerance for pain, but this one should hurt even you. Bon appe-die, Spanky."

Crow: "I would have called you ‘Alfalfa.’"

Servo: "Yeah, with the hair and all."

Harper: "Could that wait since we’ve got movie sign!"

Viridian5: It probably scares Dylan to think about it, how close he’s gotten to the new crew and what danger they’re in.

LaT: I think it scares the hell out of him, especially because he already has such a strong sense of responsibility any way.

Viridian5: Because he’s kind of infected them with the need to help people, which can sometimes get their asses kicked.
Viridian5: Not to mention endangering their lives over and over....

LaT: Exactly. Which is one reason I long for a scene in which he and Harper talk about what’s happened to Harper.

Viridian5: Hell yes. Will we have to wait ‘til sweeps for it?
Viridian5: I really hope not.

LaT: Well, it seems as though they aren’t going to do total Reset -- witness Dylan’s reasons for not wanting to help the Inarians -- so I can hope we’ll eventually get some talking about it between them.

Viridian5: We can hope. I mean, it would make sense.
Damn, the writers lost a lot of my faith.

LaT: Well, it’s one of those things that makes me think that the people involved in creating TV shows -- and I mean daily creation, too, like writing eps, etc. -- don’t actually watch them.
LaT: Some of the stuff that they are missing are things that would obviously present themselves if they were actually watching the show.
Viridian5: Maybe they get so involved in the pieces that they lose sight of the whole.
LaT: I think that’s it, basically. They watch these things in dailies and rough cuts, but I wonder if, when a season of something starts, its PTB actually watch it the way regular audience members do.
LaT: In a lot of instances, I would say no.

Viridian5: I’m also inclined to think that they don’t.
Viridian5: But some of this stuff is standard scriptwriting. Come on, guys!

LaT: Because if, for example, Andromeda’s writers did do that, then they would know what a glaring omission it is, based on how the characters developed over the past season, to not have Dylan or Beka ever have an onscreen convo with Harper about what happened to him.

Viridian5: Even the pieces theory can’t adequately explain that. It’s incomprehensible.

LaT: Unless it was written and was even shot, but then, got edited out for time.
LaT: I’d love to get my hands on the shooting scripts.

Viridian5: I know. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine they threw all of that stuff into one episode. The attempts to save Tyr and Harper and then the dealing with it should have been a different episode.

LaT: Kit mentioned in her blog the possibility that Trance didn’t tell Dylan and Beka about Harper’s condition. The problem I have with that, though, is that Rommie would know as soon as they scanned Harper, and there’s no way she’d keep it from Dylan.

Viridian5: Exactly. In "Pitiless as the Sun" Rommie knew the lieutenant felt guilty as opposed to scared. We’re supposed to think she wouldn’t scan Harper after the worldship excursion or watch the proceedings? There’s no way she’d keep that from Dylan.

LaT: Of course not. He’s her Captain. She would tell him.
LaT: Just like she would tell him she found Harper pointing a gun on himself.

Viridian5: Though, of course, we have no canon moment of her sharing this information. *sigh*
LaT: Grr ...
Viridian5: No actual documentation of whether Dylan showed how upset this made him in front of Rommie or waited until later.
Viridian5: No idea how he brought it up to Harper.
LaT: It’s frustrating.

Viridian5: Do the writers understand the purpose of drama in a story? Do they know that you create a situation so that characters must react to it?

LaT: Well, the friend with whom I was watching this stuff made the really good point that honestly, the changes we’re seeing in Dylan, Tyr and Rommie are all coming from the actors. It’s not script support so much as Kevin, Keith and Lexa understanding the need to play their characters a little differently.

Viridian5: I have to wonder what Gordon thinks about his scripting.
Viridian5: He has to be wondering.
Viridian5: I wonder if the actors are told much about their intended arc.

LaT: On most shows, they aren’t.
LaT: They find out as they get their scripts.

Viridian5: I know the reasons for that--the fact that scripts are contributed by numerous people, not all of whom are in on an arc--but I always felt like it detracts.
Viridian5: So he’s getting these scripts and maybe wondering what he should be doing when. I would in his place.
Viridian5: Could you imagine playing his role and not knowing when the character’s next blowup will be?
Viridian5: How do you modulate what you’re doing when?

LaT: Right. It’s tricky, although with Gordon, I would think he could analogize it to a terminally ill person, or, if he could go far enough in terms of, um, empathy, a rape victim, and then try and extrapolate how one would react in the aftermath of a] getting news of the illness or b] the attack.

Viridian5: Except that he doesn’t know when he’s supposed to blow sky high. They’re gonna fling it at us, aren’t they? One script, the same old Harper, next, full-on freakout.

LaT: Probably.

Viridian5: You already know that as a writer I cannot understand doing what they did to his character and then continuing on for long stretches as if nothing at all had happened. Grrrrr dammit!
Viridian5: Sorry. I’m just ticked off at them.

LaT: So am I.
LaT: I still hate the plot device itself, but not doing the appropriate kind of follow-up adds insult to injury.

Viridian5: I hated it too, and the lack of follow-up just underscores it as cheap stunt. They did it, they don’t know what to do with it, and now they won’t address it again until sweeps.

LaT: Which just proves my point that it never should have been done in the first place if they weren’t actually going to honor the choice.
LaT: The lack of follow-up is also hugely upsetting because of all the genuine missed dramatic opportunities.

Viridian5: If you’re going to do that to a character, milk it, dammit!

LaT: Just watching Dylan, Beka, and Harper sparkle at each other today [in "Pitiless as the Sun"] had me going "And we got all the fucking focus on Rev in ‘Exit Strategies’? When these three click like this?"
LaT: Susan felt the same way.

Viridian5: I don’t know. But it’s not like the writers don’t have a history of ignoring all the opportunities sparkling around them.
Viridian5: They need advisors or something. Somebody to sit them down and say, "This is what the audience sees. This is what you should do to take advantage of that."

LaT: I know but it makes me want to go to Tribune/PTB and say "Look. I actually watch the show, unlike, apparently, every writer you have. Let me tell you the things you could/should be doing, but aren’t."
LaT: GMTA!

A discussion about the flashbacks in "Be All My Sins Remembered" soon degenerated into this:

Viridian5: That episode made me want to see a show based on the post-Bobby adventures of the Maru crew.

Cowshark: Yeah, I’d really love to see some of that.

Viridian5: I imagine that just trying to civilize Harper could be a long-running arc.

Viridian5: "Harper, honestly, there will be more food again tomorrow. You don’t have to try to eat everything now."

Cowshark: "Harper, you’re not going to put that under your pillow, are you?"

Viridian5: Bwah! We never did find out what he had under there.

Viridian5: I imagine that a lot of his clothes fell apart the first time she washed them.

Cowshark: Sorry, mind went to a pleasant visual place there.

Viridian5: "Beka, the dirt was holding them together!"

Viridian5: He gets out of the shower she made him take wearing only a towel and finds the remnants of his wardrobe.

Viridian5: Nice mental place, yes?

Cowshark: Man, I’d be "accidentally" killing his clothes all the time.

Viridian5: Devious. Good thinking.

Cowshark: "How did my pants shrink again? I know I set that dryer low."

Kass: "Ooops, put too much bleach in ‘em, Harper, sorry."

Kass: "Why does my shirt barely cover my nipples?"

Cowshark: "Oh dear, I mixed up the washing powder with the cloth-eating nanobots again."

Kass: "Beeeeekkkkkaaaaa, where’s my underwear?"

Kass: "Beka, why do my pants look like lace, and where is my underwear?"

Cowshark: "Beka, why is the ass cut out of my pants again?"

Viridian5: You realize that he’d be there trying to fix the dryer.

Kass: "I can’t find anything wrong with this, Beka."

Kass: Beka shrugs. "Dunno, Harper, I just noticed when I pulled yours out...." Holds up shirt that has missing sleeves and is much shorter.

Kass: ::cackling:: "Beka, uh, these are chaps."
"Chaps? What are chaps, Harper?"
"What these are, and where did my pants go?"
"Harper, those are your pants."

Kass: And him wondering why the front of his pants keeps getting more and more threadbare. And why his underwear was mysteriously shredded into thongs.

Viridian5: Well, she could say the thongs are to prevent him from showing plumbers’ butt crack.

Viridian5: It’s for his modesty! Since he can’t keep his pants up.

Cowshark: We’d be so dangerous on that ship.

Viridian5: It’d be all out war, you know. Who knows what he’d do in self-defense?

Viridian5: Fun, though.

Cowshark: Oh yes.

Kass: He’d always have a smile on his face, though.

Viridian5: And that’s what’s really important.

You know, I wonder if the folks who read my ultra-picky Andromeda reviews or just look at some of my bitchy subject headings for them are wondering if I hate the show. I hope not, because I actually really enjoy the show when the writing is firing on all cylinders and letting what’s really an excellent cast dazzle me. It’s rare for me to find something where I love just about every character (though Kevin Sorbo and Tribune Entertainment have been trying to make me really, really hate Dylan lately). I’m writing fic heavily featuring an ensemble for the first time ever.

I pick at it because I know what this show is capable of and don’t want to see certain involved parties *cough cough* screw it up. I have expectations of it, and how many times can I say that? I’m very attached to these folks at their smart, snarky best. I’m a little more than mildly obsessed with Harper, as everybody who ever reads my LiveJournal knows too well. I’m very concerned if it looks like Beka Valentine, one of the most bad-assed women on TV, may be rewritten and defanged into a dithering shadow of herself who needs to lean on her captain for manly support. Maybe it’s just weird luck of the draw having a string of moments of that stuff in a few episodes after one another, which is what I’m hoping.

I don’t watch this show the way I do other shows.

For example, I enjoy Smallville. I like it, and many weeks I even look forward to it. The mutating effect of Kryptonite rocks and the devastation their arrival wrought on the town are intriguing wrinkles on the Superman origin. Michael Rosenbaum is an excellent actor, and Tom Welling is showing a lot of promise and improvement just over the course of the season so far. Together they burn like a house on fire. Smallville often cleverly plays on the audience’s expectation that someday these two will be archenemies, that their fate is unavoidable. Or maybe it isn’t....

But I don’t watch the show very deeply. I kind of view it on the "fire pretty" level. The moments of cheese, the anvils of Superman-to-come, the WBisms, the bizarre science, Lana’s strata of eye makeup, Pa Duke’s platitude(s) delivered every episode, the way almost everyone who’s been around Clark’s powers while they were in action is either knocked out cold just in time to miss their use or is too dead to tell anyone about them... these are all things that are, at least for now, weekly parts of the show. And even the creators have become annoyed by the original Krypto Mutant of the Week thing and have started to mix different kinds of stories in. Yay, them. Do I snark about this stuff? Hell, yeah.

Do I have so much invested in this show that I discuss it weekly down to the small details in my LiveJournal? Nope.

I think I also expect more of the science fiction shows I watch, at least the shows that try to impart something larger than just shoot-outs and explosions, and at its brightest Andromeda does that, in this case showing us how people might be different from us or maybe not different enough in a society containing multitudes of races splintered across vast distances with higher technology and some appalling weapons. Each of the characters is a complicated mass of loyalties, secrets, and drives. We have ourselves a lot of dramatic possibilities here. (Which is how my fic career in this fandom started.)

As Harper might say, I snark out of love.

Surviving the Orgasmatron

I wish someone would write something like this. The inspiring conversation took place in March, but I still don’t have Tyr down well enough to do it myself.

It started while looking up Tyr’s full name....

Karra: "Tyr Anasazi out of Victoria by Barbarossa"

Karra: My spellcheck keeps telling me it should be "Barbarella."

Viridian5: *snerk* That’s an entirely different sci-fi show. "Tyr tries to endure the ministrations of the Orgasmatron...."

Karra: *snicker* As run by Harper, of course

Viridian5:
"Can you take it? I’ve heard that you ubers are supposed to be superior."
"You shall not break me! Ohhhhhh...."

So, what would the adventures of Tyr Anasazi out of Victoria by Barbarella be like? He already has the clothes....

Harper: Proud to Be an American....

For my own reasons, I was wondering why Harper anachronistically references our modern era the way he does. I know that the meta reason is to be cute for today’s audiences, but I’m looking for reasons that fit within the character’s framework. My thought is that the time period involved interests him because this is when our Boston boy’s land was a superpower, self-determining.

A global government probably followed. Later Earth joins the Commonwealth, which gets humanity passage through space, but humans seem to have been considered backward children in it, subordinate. Just listen to Uxulta in "The Fair Unknown." Only enthusiastic Perseid sponsorship led the Vedrans to sign humans in at all (revealed in "The Banks of the Lethe"). Harper gets glowy-eyed thinking about the technology lost during the Fall, but have we ever heard him do it over life under the Commonwealth? You know, aside from how Earth didn’t have Nietzschean overlords back then.

The battle story in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright" doesn’t really count because it’s mostly fictitious -- it’s obvious from the crew’s reaction to the names of the captains and ships supposedly involved, and "40 days and 40 nights" is Bible-standard for "a really long time; we don’t know how long really" -- and he’s amping it up for effect, especially with the "saving Earth" bit, since he knows full well that Earth was immediately invaded after that battle. Besides, it’s a "someone against Nietzscheans" fight he’s telling; it could have been any someone spitting in the Nietzscheans’ eyes to make him happy.

Other possible proofs:

He refers to the Founding Fathers in "A Rose in the Ashes" and says that they had a more poetic way of framing things than the Commonwealth did.

He describes the natural wonders of Earth in "A Heart for Falsehood Framed" by quoting "America the Beautiful."

In "Bunker Hill," it really sounds like he’s asking the Bostonians to rise up as Americans, as he mentions the Revolutionary War and how Boston was always at the forefront for freedom. I can swear that I saw an American flag in the subway home base the Bostonians used.

He’s cynical about democracy in "Home Fires" -- a sample quote being something along the line that there are no free elections, just, maybe, some inexpensive ones -- but so are most of my contemporaries. *cough* And he could be going for the deliberately outrageous in answer to what seems like the very, perhaps needlessly, complicated Commonwealth-style democracy being described. (Which could go to prove my point about how he’s not enthused about the old Commonwealth way of life.) His rah rah over dictatorships, since at least with them "you know who to hang" when things go wrong, could be his ruthless pragmatism talking, since he’s not so sure that Tarazed will vote to join the new Commonwealth. With a dictatorship, if the planet elected not to join, you have to fix only one guy. With a democracy or oligarchy or whatever Tarazed is, trying to track down who voted against you is a much harder thing....

Harper Operating System

Talking to a non-Andromeda friend the other night reminded me of something I really would like to see the show get into more. Or, rather, something I’d like the show to get into and do well. She asked me what the avatars did to Harper’s port in "Shanghaied!" and I told her that I figured they’d used it to manipulate his nervous system a bit. Because you know that his internal operating system has to thread through his nervous system and brain. At least I know that. ::grins:: Though the show has mentioned a neural net.

That whole bit in "Immaculate Perception" when he and Dylan are talking about how he’s not genetically enhanced, how he’s just "plain old human," did bring up the interesting question for me of how much machinery Harper has under his skin. There has to be so much more to it than the port area at his neck. The plug has to have a space to slide into. There has to be a section that processes and stores data. I figure that some parts have to thread through his nerves and brain just so he can manipulate things. That sounds like a lot of hardware.

Is there an option of upgrades? How often does it need maintenance and system checks, since some of the materials have to blow out or wear out at times? I guess they'd replace parts by nanobot. What kind of virus protection does he have? When he’s plugged in but not deep in a matrix with his body abandoned and his eyes closed, does he "see" what he’s manipulating across his vision like a tracery or just have it go directly into some part of his brain that allows him to "know" it? (As opposed to being inside, interacting with the vista that seems to surround him.) Given his dodgy immune system and the sheer complexity of what would be involved, the interior workings were all probably installed by nanobots instead of surgery as we know it, but it’s still delicate work. What are the risks to the process? Does anyone come through installation fine but then find that he can’t figure out how to use the hardware the way he should? Do some people experience it as something akin to schizophrenia and find themselves unable to deal? What’s the training process like?

And when and how did he get his system, anyway? It can’t be cheap. Before "Be All My Sins Remembered" showed that he got off Earth prior to installation, I conjectured that he was part of an experimental project or an indentured servant who had to work off the cost of his hardware. Now I have no clue.

Season 2 nearly forgot that he had it, mostly treating him as a guy with a metal disk on his neck as part of his costume. I’d be interested in seeing at least some of my questions addressed in season 3.

Who says that TV watching is a passive activity?

Trance, Time After Time

I had a dark thought recently that will probably further upset the friend who’s been trying to tell me that Trance really does care about the crew as more than pawns, something I’ve wondered about since "Into the Labyrinth" when we find out that Trance never even bothered to start looking for a cure for Harper’s Magog infestation months after she assured him that she and Rev would investigate every avenue. Appropriately, my new thought has its roots in that episode now that I’ve digested the finale.

We know that Trance has plans, that she’s been trying to guide the crew to a very important fate only she knows. We know that Trance has some limited view of the future. Implicit in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright" was the idea that she deliberately sent them back in time to a specific date and place to do a specific task, which suggests to me that her relationship to the past isn’t quite like ours either.

What if she wanted to get a check on herself and the state of her plans by having a future self come back to let her know and help her make corrections? Neither her present nor future self seemed surprised to see one another in "Ouroboros," and they got right down to the business of discussing their secret purpose. Her future self says that things didn’t work out well, and with no argument they trade places.

There’s only way for this opportunity to come about (since her two shots at piloting have no doubt convinced the crew to never ever let her near the piloting controls again). Harper has to create a machine to warp time. How do we get him to do that? By not bothering to come up with a cure for him, forcing him to take his cure into his own hands. And Rev’s feeling so guilty about the Worldship while being so simultaneously neglectful of his crew that she doesn’t have to worry about him spoiling her plans.

Think about it. Those Magog eggs seemed to be maturing fast in Tyr and Harper. In "Devil Take the Hindmost" it only took a few days for them to hatch and kill that infested woman. Trance somehow created not only an experimental surgery but an experimental drug with Rev’s help to keep the spawn temporarily dormant. In only a few days. Yet they stalled totally after that? Seems unlikely.

In "Into the Labyrinth," when she lets Harper believe that he was a slacker to leave his health in the hands of a medical professional he trusts, namely her, and he tells her that he’s going to work on his cure now, she says, "That sounds complicated. When do we start?" She hasn’t even started over the last few months? Despite her impassioned words that she’d be working on it when she broke the news to him? It doesn’t sound right.

But she tried to stop him from getting involved with Satrina, you might say. Yeah, except that she did it in exactly the way that would make Harper pursue it all the harder, something she must have known after being his friend for a few years. Telling Harper not to do something but refusing to tell him why he can’t is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. He’s just too curious. Soon enough he’s not only looking for the archive but wondering why she doesn’t want him to find it and what she might be hiding. As a further goad, she speaks to him dismissively throughout, such as when she says, "You know, since we’ve got a little time here we might as well find a good way to spend it. I know, I’ve got this really great game. It’s called ‘Harper tells Trance everything so she can save his miserable life.’ Would you like to play?" You notice that she knew when he’d be leaving to get the archive.

By the end of the episode he’s convinced that he has to cure himself. Not being a doctor, he knows he’ll have to do it through scientific rather than strictly medical means. And, hey, I still have the tesseract technology.... And Trance was guiding him down that path the whole time.

The events of "Tunnel at the End of the Light" suggest that Harper was necessary to defeat the invading aliens and thus probably didn’t die in Future Trance’s reality. Future Trance, knowing about the impending invasion, made sure he didn’t die in this one either, which means that she had more reasons than just her stated "Harper is my friend" for saving his life in "Ouroboros." She’s weirdly ingratiating to him in "Lava and Rockets," until he tells her what he thinks she’s really up to and she responds in a way that all but screams, "You’re right, you bastard."

I do think she likes him. More like how someone likes a pet, but she does. I just think she thoroughly used him. A lot is dependent on how much of the future she’s aware of and how far her vision goes.

You think this is paranoid? Some days I wonder if her curing Tyr but leaving Harper with only a stopgap was really the way events had to go. It seems kind of convenient.... But I don’t believe that wholeheartedly.

Yet. ::grins::

Future Contemporary Culture(s)

I’m thinking about contemporary culture and daily life post-Fall in the Andromeda universe. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, as evidenced in my Same Old Refrain series ("The Dead of Night," "Salvage," and "Nobody’s Fool") and "Raveling," but for whatever reason it’s come up again now. Maybe it’s from so many folks on my LiveJournal Friends page discussing boybands....

Far as I can tell, the various Star Trek series tried to avoid the idea of pop or contemporary culture, with everybody listening to classical music that’s thousands of years old and reading Shakespeare. You got the feeling that Worf’s operas and Garak’s shared Cardassian novels were their cultures’ version of classic literature. Even the "trashier" entertainments, the noir detective and James Bond and Rat Pack and Flash Gordon pastiches, are from sources far enough in our past that they almost have a kind of respect. You never get the feeling that anyone listens to or reads anything contemporary. Where are the current artists? The lack of ads in any of these cultures also makes me smirk, though not as hard a smirk as the stated canon in The Next Generation that the Federation doesn’t use money anymore. Uh-huh. Suuuuure.

The post-Fall Andromeda universe doesn’t claim anything as ridiculous as that, and the first season riffs on them being broke and needing things made me very happy. It has big corporations that close out the little independent haulers, and it has brand names, such as Sparky Cola. The symbols on some of Harper’s shirts might be brand names too. The universe has spam. "Make millions without ever leaving the comfort of your own homeworld...." Harper takes advantage of Castalian coverage of their signing to the Commonwealth to try to do a product pitch for a saloon. Mail is apparently something of a problem for people frequently on the go amongst the stars, as evidenced by that priority message from Uncle Sid that stayed unnoticed in one of Beka’s Inboxes for years. Tyr reads paperbacks(!!) of work by Ayn Rand and Nietzsche, but he’s a Nietzschean and pretentious.

Why wouldn’t they have contempory or pop culture(s)? Post-Fall, without the uniting influence of an empire... er, Commonwealth, they’d probably have many separate ones, with the ones on worlds being less affected by outside influences than the ones on Drifts, where ships dock all the time. Works would pass across the universe by shipping, tourism, etc. I can kind of see long-haul crews renting entertainment the way we would a U-Haul, using it and then dropping it off at another franchise location when they’re done with it.

Right now we often feel that everything’s already been done, that everything is just a lame copy of something else; how would it be 3,000 years from now when you have millennia of recorded art available from a multitude of alien races? Beka’s collection of vintage music is famous, with "A Rose in the Ashes" suggesting that she’s a rock ‘n’ roll fan, and Harper’s anachronisms come from somewhere. Things were lost post-Fall, but you can’t lose everything. There must be a lot of hybrid art out there, some of it more successful than others, as I think of Harper’s reaction to the thought of Perseid stand-up comedy in "Fear and Loathing in the Milky Way."

(My creation of music weaving within "Raveling" was partly inspired by this line of thought.)

So they must have contemporary music and whatever new technology has replaced books, movies, and TV shows. (In "Outside the Box" I had Cassie reveal that the odd couple cop show lives on, in slightly revamped form.) I’d like the actual series to get into this.

Wow. Now I feel like I’m in grad school, writing a paper with a title like "Post-Fall Popular Culture: Scavengers of Lost Glory?"

Missing the Chair

I’ve been watching Andromeda’s first season and sighing over things the show doesn’t do anymore. You know, like let Harper on the bridge, pilot, or talk to people other than Trance. But, actually, the whole crew doesn’t socialize together as much as it used to, and I’m linking it to something else season two did away with, namely, the rock ‘em sock ‘em pilot’s chair.

Not only was the chair practical--try doing a trip the length of Makes a Lovely Light’s flight standing up with a board at your back the way they do now, plus, hey, seatbelts--and fun, it was also the epicenter of the crew’s social life. How many times did they gather around the chair and have a talk? Harper and Tyr seemed to have a particular fondness for reading while sitting in it too.

Now the chair is gone and nobody socializes on the bridge, because who wants to stand if you don’t have to? And it’s a colder, less personal ship for it.

Show and Tell and the Madness Resulting

Greatly expanded from something I sent to Riv a while back....

It’s hard to watch the second season of Andromeda as a Harper fan and not worry over Harper’s place in the show. He’s been marginalized, pushed to the edges, getting less screentime. He’s rarely allowed to interact with someone other than Trance, and not even having 13 organic killing machines nesting in his body got him a break or much sympathy. Or much screentime. At some point the show seems to have decided that Dylan, Beka, and Tyr are the officers while Harper and Trance are the manual labor, with lesser status. (The more vestiges of the Commonwealth we see, the more it looks like it had been a highly classist society. As the Andromeda is coming to be run more and more like a High Guard military ship, is this division in crewmember status inevitable?) It looks like it’s trying to reduce him to two-dimensional comic relief, as when he’s forced to entertain and distract the delegates in "Tunnel at the End of the Light," a thing that would have been more humiliating only if Dylan had forced him to do it naked. (Heeeey.... ::slaps self::) He’s the engineer, and the ship is being sabotaged. Shouldn’t Dylan set him on some technical task?

And yet....

The series is telling us all the things above, but it’s showing us something very different.

"Dance of the Mayflies": Harper is the guy on the ship who’s most vulnerable to contagion but stays to fix everything and figure out a killing voltage while Dylan spends most of the episode out there swinging his dick, er, force lance uselessly trying to fight undead creatures he has no idea how to defeat. Dylan getting a solution out of literally nowhere at the same time as his engineer sees it in action and gets the inspiration is so ridiculous and credulity-straining that it kills me.

"Belly of the Beast": While everybody else is busy philosophizing, brooding--"Is Dylan alive? Should we kill ourselves killing this thing?"--macking, or erotically bracing the pilot at her station, Harper is actually fixing things and fighting to save their lives. Well, first he’s making sure that he doesn’t get dissolved by giant space squid stomach acids or burned alive or his own crewmembers don’t unwittingly flush him into space, but then he’s fixing things. Yeah, Beka, Tyr, you remember that little guy who’s running through the ship trying to restore control so you can save your asses? Not a good idea to accidentally kill him. Jeez. Did they even think for a moment that they weren’t sure of where he was while they were venting the ship? No. They didn’t think about it until they realized that they still didn’t have manual control. What? He’s not there yet? Why didn’t you check first? They’re talking and flirting while he’s risking his life, rewiring systems, and trying to psychoanalyze a suicidal AI. Who’s the hero here? (Dylan coming up with the two solutions in the Maru at the same time as Harper was a little less ridiculous here than it was in "Dance of the Mayflies," but it still strains my credulity. Engineering is Harper’s specialty. He should have at least gotten it first.)

Yet nobody will even dance with him at the end. And, Harper, honey, don’t feel bad about missing Dylan’s speech o’ platitudes--Dylan couldn’t wait for him?--because it wasn’t that great. At least Dylan noticed that Harper was missing before starting without him. Given the way second season was going, you couldn’t be certain of that.

So Harper’s criminally unsung, and the episode seems to play his tribulations for comic relief--Look at him shimmy out of his jacket before the acid eats though it and into him! Ha!--but it shows him saving their asses. All of their asses, since Dylan’s plan was a kind of kamikaze thing.

"The Knight, Death, and the Devil": I still feel that Beka and Harper were hung out to dry by writer incompetence. They never would have made that mistake on even the worst day of their lives. Just saying.

"Immaculate Perception": It was necessary for the Knights of Genetic Purity to be sneery Nazis who look like they clean their hands with bleach they’re so neurotic and fastidious, because otherwise there would be no reason but personal loyalty for Harper to stick around with the Andromeda instead of join the Genites. None. I don’t agree with the mass slaughter, but I certainly agree that a united Nietzschean nation would be a huge threat and that humanity, particularly unenhanced humanity, needs protection from it, and I wasn’t even raised on an Earth raped, plundered, and ruled over by Nietzscheans. It’s not like anyone else is looking out for humanity, particularly not enslaved-by-Nietzscheans humanity. (Note to Genites: recruit on Earth and the other slave worlds.) The audience is encouraged to think that Harper has turned and be angry with him, while Tyr’s treachery (and personal reasons for it) are shown in full view with the audience being expected to almost side with him.

It was an amazingly risky thing Harper did in flying the Maru in against the trigger-happy Genite fleet and pretending to join up, but he did it anyway. And he does all of this to help a guy whose idea of affection is to cuff his head. Would the Andromeda have won against the Genites if Harper hadn’t conned them into thinking the Andromeda much more outmoded than it was and then getting their defenses down in the Maru? Maybe, but it would have been much harder. (And I do believe that the con was Harper’s plan. The Genites’ recording toy seems to be audio only, and Dylan looked too confused when Harper started talking that way near it. By the time they did the Maru part of the plan, Dylan and Beka were obviously in on it. Here I go into detail on how I saw the plan unfolding and explain my thinking behind Harper wanting to leave after three days of finding no trace of Tyr. )

"Tunnel at the End of the Light": The rest of the crew gets to look macho and shoot things while Harper is ritually humiliated in front of the delegates. Fun. And yet... Harper saves the Commonwealth and the universe. Rommie and Dylan were sneering over his diplomatic skills and initially barred him from the reception, but he was the one who stopped the delegates from running away and the fledgling Commonwealth from disintegrating by talking like a Nietzschean to the Sabra delegate. He negotiates the conditions under which the other ships would aid the Andromeda, and he got the delegates to sign the charter into being. Seamus Harper, savior of the Commonwealth. His bomb, several times more powerful than what he was cleared to build because he doesn’t believe in not doing anything to his utmost, ends the invasion. Seamus Harper, savior of the universe. He’s too busy monitoring the enemy fleet’s status--actually working as opposed to just watching the remnants of the wormhole through the pretty window--to get a chance to find out what’s up with Beka, though it ticks me off that we didn’t get to see his or Trance’s reaction in the finale. He’s going to be devastated.

Harper works the real jobs while everyone else is being macho galumphing around with their dicks in their hands.

So much tells that the series sees Harper as two-dimensional comic relief to be marginalized, yet it gave him a rich, angst-laden backstory and shows him constantly saving the ship, to the point where I can’t see him making a dramatic gesture that would stop his crew from taking him for granted without it having to kill them all. The series shows his heroism, yet even his own "family" is ignoring him. He almost dies and he saves their asses multiple times in very practical ways while the rest of them are running around getting to do the macho thing, yet he’s sneered at as a second-class citizen, in one case by someone who used to treat him like a brother.

The tell vs. show is killing me. He’s comic relief and lynchpin. Fool and savior of the universe and the Commonwealth. (Or maybe he’s The Fool?)

Meanwhile, I am frustration and hope, because I cannot read what this series intends to do with him, if there’s a plan here, or if they intend to give him less screentime next year. I worry that his role might be to toil loyally on in the depths of the ship unseen while his "family" strides the bridge like heroes, lofty and oblivious. As Riv put it, it may be that they’ll "break his heart and we won’t be allowed to see that ... [because] the comic relief doesn’t have feelings, just more and ever more pratfalls."

If Harper remains Harper, he loves his people and ships and challenges too much to leave no matter how they treat him. But even Rommie only stops complaining to him to use her knowledge of his love for her to try to manipulate him into letting her probably kill them all. At best, Trance tries to buy and jolly him into forgetting how shady she is, while at worst she threatens, belittles, or guilt-whips him. Dylan barks or gives platitudes. Does Harper get to see Beka much anymore? Not really. Tyr is currently the closest thing he has to a friend on this ship, and that is sad. The awe and "good job" from Dylan in "Pitiless as the Sun" and the hug from Beka in "Una Salus Victus" are things we need to see more of. Instead, he’s far more likely to get Rommie bitching him out and resenting him for not being Dylan in "Una Salus Victus," though at least he calls her on that.

Don’t mind me. I’m walking off to beat my head against a wall....

What They Want

I get the weirdest inspirational things right before bed when I can’t write them down. In the morning the inspiration is either gone or the drive to write it is. Anyway, the other night I got some bizarre thoughts about a story in which the crew is lulled into a trap by being given what they think is their greatest desire. Tyr is patriarch of a restored Kodiak Pride with several wives and children and the Andromeda as their roving home. Dylan is captain of Andromeda, the new Commonwealth’s flagship, with a full crew of brownnosers, and he’s not as happy with it as he thought he would be. Beka is the rich captain of a fleet... and bored. The trap can’t figure out Trance at all. Nothing weird until I got to Harper’s.

Harper is a graduate student at a Boston university doing an engineering internship on an Andromeda-like vessel. More specifically, he’s eating pizza and watching awful movies and having rambling conversations with a group of intelligent, crazy, and attractive school friends that he’s sort of puppy piled with. Sex later. Earth is free, the U.S. is its preeminent power, and there are no aliens or Commonwealth. And he’s secure and happy.

I can only think that this came up because I keep getting hit and run images from that "trapped in the past on Tarn-Vedra with Dylan, Harper’s studying at the All Systems University and sticking out like a sore thumb while trying to find a way back" story that I haven’t even started. That I probably won’t start until season three, if then.

(11/3/02: The completed "trapped in the past on Tarn-Vedra with Dylan, Harper's studying at the All Systems University and sticking out like a sore thumb while trying to find a way back" story is "In the Falling Away.")

My conjectures and worries about Andromeda season three still can’t match the terror of waiting for season two after TV Guide reported the spoiler that Harper would be infested by the Magog, something that was a death sentence prior to that episode. Then I got to wait a month before the episode played....

In that month my mind played through ways of keeping him around even if he died. I prefer him alive, of course, but I think that my thoughts on a cyber resurrection were kind of interesting. I figured that maybe the crew would let him plug into the matrix before they mercy killed him so he wouldn’t have to feel it. Except that his body dies and he’s still showing up in the matrix, perhaps after some period of disorientation when he can’t talk to anyone because he can’t pull himself together and they figure he’s gone. So he’d be in the matrix, perhaps popping up as a hologram outside now and then, at first, though I imagine he’d want a drone of his own so he can interact, maybe spiffying the body up for himself since he’d made Rommie.

I figured that this was a well of plot ideas. Will he wonder if he really is Harper or just a recording that thinks it’s Harper? I think he’d wonder. How would the crew react to him? Would they ever get past the guilty, discomfited stage? Would Tyr start to treat him as a machine? Trance doesn’t seem enthused about machines at all. If Harper did a Rommie-style job on a drone body for himself, maybe Dylan and Beka would be lulled now and then into forgetting what he’d become, until something forcibly reminded them. (Tyr’s senses would tell him the difference, Rommie can’t forget, and Trance is... Trance.)

If they downloaded him to a drone body, would he still be able to pilot in slipstream or is intuition a function that needs organic flesh and synapses, not just a formerly organic mind? And if he tried to pilot and failed, what would the emotional fallout be for everybody?

On a related note, what kind of effect would being a machine have on his abilities as an engineer and tinkerer? Machine thinking and organic thinking don’t work along the same lines.

How much control would he be able to assert over ship functions from the inside? Would Rommie like having company? She’d probably get annoyed with his tampering.

And the post-traumatic stress would be a doozy.

Would he go insane?

Just my odd brain at work. I’m still wondering if it’s possible to pilot a dead body around via its implants system, since my conjectures on data ports say that the tech would wind through the nervous system and brain....

Tormenting Tyr

Viridian5: "Converge" started out as one sex scene, but then I realized that Dylan would need a real world sex scene to compare and contrast with.

Nico: Oh, yeah. You know it. It was just for the comparison. ::nods seriously::

Viridian5: It’s very important to be objective.

Nico: I totally agree. In fact I think that Harper also needs to try Tyr out so he can get perspective.

Viridian5: *snerk* Is that why?
Viridian5: No other reason?

Nico: Yes. Because Tyr is the perfect man, so of course he’s, like, the standard for sexual encounters.

Viridian5: Perfect body. Doesn’t mean he’s any good at pleasing his partner.

Nico: Exactly. You’d have to try it out to see!

Viridian5: You’re such an optimist. <g>

Viridian5: I’m waiting for the story in which Tyr’s sex partner finds out that he’s a selfish lover and gets pissed off about it.

Nico: You know Harper would kick his ass for that one.

Viridian5: And trumpet his failures all across the ship.

Nico: He woooooooould!
Nico: Bwehehehe!

Viridian5: "...then he lasted three minutes. Then he fell asleep while I was still hanging...."

Viridian5: "Nietzschean stamina? Where?"

Nico: ROFLMFAO! Oh...oh God...I want to write this... bwehehhheeeee!

Viridian5: Please do!

Nico: ::wails with laughter:: More dialogue! Do more!

Viridian5: Poor Harper, unsatisfied and ticked off. "I can get myself off by myself, if you know what I mean. At least with a dildo I can control the angle...."

Nico: ::rolls around laughing::

Viridian5: "At least most wham-bams come with a ‘thank you, ma’am.’ Didn’t even get that. A snore, yeah. A thank you, no."

Viridian5: "Nietzschean efficiency. You know what Nietzschean efficiency is like? Three seconds to get it up, three minutes to work it out, then out like a light."

Viridian5: "It was like having sex with a brick wall. All those muscles are pretty to look at, but I think I bruised myself on them...."

Nico: ::dies, dies, DIES!:: Tyr will kill himself!

Viridian5: Yep. It’s too late to kill Harper now that everyone on the crew knows.

Nico: ::just. fucking. dies many times::

Viridian5: Beka starting to make premature ejaculation jokes whenever Tyr’s on fire control. "Hey, don’t spend our wad too quickly!"

Viridian5: The amused looks. Harper’s continued disgruntlement.

Viridian5: "Size isn’t everything, fella."

Viridian5: "The way he handles his gun like he knows what to do with it? Nothing like how he handles his dick."

Nico: ROFLMAO! EEEEE!

Viridian5: Harper continues to be disgruntled... until Dylan takes him on.

Viridian5: That is far more than Tyr can stand. He will not have the crew thinking that Dylan is a better lover than he is.

Nico: Bwahhhh!

Viridian5: So, you gonna write this? ::nudge::

Viridian5: Especially since Tyr will now have to try to prove his true prowess to Harper? Actually try to figure out what will get him off?

Viridian5: And maybe to Dylan too, just to stop the smugness?

Nico: Bwaahh! Oh, man...brain..is..melting...

Viridian5: Beka showing up at his door, wanting some too, since it’s discriminatory only to go after the male members of the crew and she wants to see that he’s a real man after all?

Nico: ::drops dead::

Viridian5: I really know how to hurt a Nietzschean, don’t I?

Nico: You do. He may very well just despair and die.

Viridian5: He’s so strong, so superior? He’ll just have to take it.

Viridian5: Please write it?

Nico: ::gurgles:: I’ll try it and see where it goes. Getting Harper and Tyr together sounds like a giant story.

Nico: You can post this...just mention that I’m thinking about writing it and then maybe if I don’t finish it, someone else will. :)

Viridian5: Yeah, getting them together takes a bit of finesse, especially here where Tyr doesn’t care enough to give his very best or seem to realize what a bad performance will get him....

September 6, 2002

IRISH! Oh, Sorry.

Something I've snarked over for ages is that the show plugs how Irish Harper is. He drinks! His whole family has super Irish names! He used to play the tin whistle! He's Irish! IRISH!

You know?

September 7, 2002

Inside and Outside Dylan Hunt

When I went to see Kasha, she said something about my Andromeda fic that I've heard before from other readers, that she likes my Dylan better than the one on the show. Which suggests that I'm not writing the character as he really is. Well, I am writing him as he is, but the difference is that the show gives a far more objective viewpoint than my usual tight, third person POV.

First I'll go into what I see of him on the show. A casual viewing of first season usually leads viewers to thinking of him as a standard, generic, uptight hero type. Watching deeper shows that he can be a nice, good, heroic guy, but he's also arrogant, impatient, high-handed, self-deluded, devious, secretive, convinced of his righteousness, megalomaniacal, unstable, reckless, and ruthless. He has the diplomatic gestures and talk down, but if they don't work, out comes the armament and trickery, so under the velvet glove of compromise and talk is the iron fist of firepower and divine right. He can also be a prissy little bitch.

A major problem is that he doesn't admit to the things I've listed after "nice, good, heroic guy," and his negative traits have only strengthened during second season, when he became more certain that he gets this time period now and knows that he has a crew of professionals to cover his ass. After the battle with the Magog Worldship, his bouts of depression and uncertainty rarely recur, because he is now convinced of his righteousness.

He's very invested in his self-image and can be manipulated that way, as everybody close to him knows and has done. Watch him eat up Rev's talk about snatching life out of death and maybe creating innocent Magog as an excuse to let Tiama slowly and agonizingly come to term with a clutch of flesh-eating Magog larvae in "Devil Take the Hindmost." He's also thinking that he can use those Magog against the slavers. (Except that once the spawn kill the slavers they kill the colonists too.) You know that he went out to fight the zombies in "Dance of the Mayflies" because it's something a hero would do. Even though he had no clue how to put the zombies down permanently and was really just putting his life at risk. He's also let his crew talk him into doing the shady things that need to be done, perhaps so he doesn't feel that it's solely his responsibility when he gets his hands dirty. Rev was a gleeful enabler of this in season one, particularly in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright" when he tells Dylan to join the Nietzschean fleet in the battle as the lesser of two evils and then later when he says that the Divine must have meant them to come back in time to slaughter 100,000 Nietzscheans.

I can't help feeling that Dylan's noble decision not to allow the frame-up of Telemachus Rhade in "Home Fires" to continue, even though it would give him Tarazed as a signatory world and add to the fleet he'd need to protect thousands of worlds from the Magog, is actually more about him needing to feel that he was fair to Rhade's descendant. It's also a very inconvenient time and situation for him to be principled in. His heroism and commitment against oppression can be inconsistent, as Harper found out in "Bunker Hill" when the captain who helps every lost soul who crosses his path decided that it wasn't practical to help Earth, even though the humans of Earth were willing to help him against his enemies, which is more than most of the people he aids is willing to do. He then throws Harper a bone of a half-hearted, two-person mission to the planet, promises to bring the big guns later, for the first time in forever breaks his word, and then shrugs over the maybe thousands of people who were killed because they trusted him to back them up. His impatience tells him to abandon the kids of "To Loose the Fateful Lightning" when they don't set aside the "uncivilized" ways that have kept their society alive for 300 years and immediately follow his ideas, even though they could desperately use aid in the form of education and supplies. He expects his crew to follow his orders without question and without knowing what he intends to do, even if they seem dangerous or stupid, but watch his reaction to Uxulta in the "The Fair Unknown" giving him orders.

He's not entirely sane. We know he's not. He's lost everything he's known and loved and hasn't even allowed himself much time to mourn them. I get the feeling that if the Andromeda had drifted free of the black hole on its own and he hadn't had the stimulus of a salvage crew to battle and then win over, he might have fallen into a pit of despair and insanity. (Actually, I also wonder if eventually he might have decided to pursue justice Balance of Judgment style in a universe and time period he knew nothing about.) Instead, he's been running around with a new goal--restore the Commonwealth--and is Not Thinking about it all.

I wonder if Dylan's going to get crazier in season three now that the foundation of a new Commonwealth is established. Though I hear there are problems with it, which may keep him going for a while longer.

Instead of adapting to fit the universe and era he's in, he's trying to change the universe and era to fit him, as Tyr mentions in "Una Salus Victus." Though he does make some changes to himself, in that he lets the desperate state of society at this time excuse some of the less pleasant things he does. His arrogance looks more and more like it comes from the society he lived in, as every glimpse we get of the Commonwealth and Vedrans show us an arrogant, classist people.

He figures that handing Molly a commission in "Lava and Rockets" completely makes up for destroying her ship and her career. That he hands it to her immediately after they have sex, making it look like he's paying off a whore, is tasteless, but I doubt he thinks of it that way. Besides, she's getting a three-week cruise on her way to the academy, and that should make up for everything. That she'll be putting out throughout those three weeks is just a nice side effect for him. You notice that he never asks his crew or sentient ship if they want to ferry the captain's woman around the universe for three weeks, but why should it concern them, since it's kind of a vacation for them too? Besides, he's the captain and it's his ship, so it's his decision to make, not theirs.

He has blind spots the size of Kansas.

If he becomes a chick machine in third season, he'll probably feel that he has a right to a social life and that his ship's wandering ways makes it impossible to have a committed relationship, since it would be awkward for him to play such favorites amongst his crew and he can't expect the women he comes across to give up their lives to go away with him. Not that he'd want them staying with his ship unless they could be useful.

He can be a nice, good, heroic guy. When it suits him and his self-image. When it's practical for him.

What this is heading to is that the Dylan of my fic comes off better because we see him only through his eyes and Harper's eyes. The important thing about writing him from the inside is that he thinks he's a great guy, noble and true and right. The bad things he does are either unavoidable or necessary. When his crew disagrees with him, they're wrong or short-sighted. He has reasons (and excuses) for the things he does, and when you write from his POV they color the narrative.

We can see the complimentary things he thinks about the crew that he never actually tells them

Dylan doesn't look quite as good from Harper's POV, but Harper has come to realize that he can't expect consistency from people--see "Bunker Hill" above--and he doesn't see Dylan as a hero. He bitches about things Dylan does a lot but he follows orders anyway because Dylan is one of his two bosses, and the boss must be obeyed. (I've wondered if total obedience was the price for Beka keeping him on the Maru. If so, it looks like he's transferred that with her to the Andromeda.) Dylan has become one of His Own, and he forgives His Own for things he'd never in a million years accept from other people. His life has accustomed him to the idea that he should take what he can get and be happy with it, though he still has some romantic, idealistic thoughts that he's gotten stomped on for. In my fic, he thinks that Dylan can be a good sex partner and good company sometimes.

Thus, the Dylan in my fic is usually being depicted through the golden haze of his own mind or through the affectionate, ultimately forgiving filter of Harper's. Dylan comes off the worst in my stories in "Raveling," when I showed some of the skanky events of season two only through Harper's POV.

Hey, I rarely go for the simple One True Pairings....

December 1, 2002

His Mother Dresses Him Funny?

Karra: The grey shirt with the #7 on it is amusing.

Viridian5: #7?

Karra: yeah. Harper near the end was wearing a grey shirt with a green diagonal stripe and a green 7 above his breast.

Viridian5: I didn't see the 7. Interesting.

Karra: I should look for a cap. http://www.ladymaigrey.com/seasonthree/away/108.jpg

It's hard to see, though.

Viridian5: Love Tyr's "playing the keyboards and rocking hard" pose behind him.

Karra: Ditto.

Viridian5: Ah! 7. A lot of times I could barely make out the green stripe, let alone a number on the sleeve.

Karra: It's a very...odd shirt.

Viridian5: Like that's a giant surprise considering what has come before?

Karra: Good point.

Viridian5: Where do they get these things? I mean, is this stuff designed and made or somehow found and bought?

Karra: It has to be found. I can't see anyone sitting down and saying, "Ok, for this scene, we want Harper to wear a white shirt that looks like it's made from t.p. Make it, costumer girl!"

Viridian5: I mean, really!

Viridian5: But who the hell is finding this stuff?

Karra: Kevin?
Karra: Gordon?

Karra: Maybe they make Gordon get his own costumes. I know they used to do that on a lot of shows. Make the actors use their own clothes.

Viridian5: I don't know, because Harper's style has changed so much over the run of the show.

Karra: hmm. True.
Karra: Too bad there's no Andromeda magazine like there is with Buffy and Star Trek.
Karra: You could write a letter.

Viridian5: *snerk* Is there a way to write a letter like that and not sound like a perv? Probably, but I don't think I'm capable of it.

Karra: I'm sure there is. *G*

Viridian5: But I can't do it!

Karra: You could say you're a theatre major, and are curious as to how certain shows come up with the costuming choices in their programming.

Karra: hee

Viridian5: I can't. I would break character in my letter. They would be able to tell.

Karra: Hee!!

Viridian5: I would not be able to resist putting shades of "Can you please dress him like he's an adult with some taste?" in there.

Karra: Ha!!!
Karra: I'm tempted to post something on Gordon's website board

Viridian5: But then I couldn't say that in case it does turn out that Gordon's providing the clothes.

Karra: Ooh. Good point.

Viridian5: In which case I'd have to love him despite his terrible, terrible taste in clothing.

Karra: me too.
Karra: His poor, unfortunate taste in clothes.

Viridian5: For my own sake, I can't believe that it's entirely his own call that he's dressed like a 7-year-old whose mother is very cruel.

Karra: *snicker*

I'm choosing to believe that it's Kevin picking his clothes.

"Narcissus"

I couldn't let go of the thought of vidding to "Narcissus," so here's my loose outline. Not that I know how to do any of this. Anyone who'd like to take up pieces or the whole is more than welcome to.

"Narcissus" by Alanis Morissette

Dear momma's boy, I know you've had your butt licked by your mother
I know you've enjoyed all that attention from her
[Andromeda at various points in "Under the Night"]
And every woman graced with your presence after
[Tinkerbell-sized Andromeda standing near the photo of Dylan and Sara in "D Minus Zero"]
Dear narcissus boy, I know you've never really apologized for anything
I know you've never really taken responsibility
I know you've never really listened to a woman
[Dylan and Beka in the hallway angry with each other in "D Minus Zero"]

Dear me-show boy, I know you're not really into conflict resolution
Or seeing both sides of every equation
Or having an uninterrupted conversation
[Dylan and Telemachus Rhade fighting, along with Dylan and Gaheris Rhade fighting, in "Home Fires"]

And any talk of healthiness
And any talk of connectedness
And any talk of resolving this
Leaves you running for the door
[Tyr, upset, and Dylan talking about Dylan locking Drago's body up at the end of "Una Salus Victus." You know, the "everything on this ship belongs to me" talk. Yeah, Tyr brings some of it on himself, but "everything on this ship belongs to me"?]

Why, why do I try to love you
Try to love you when you really don't want me to
Why, why do I try to love you
Try to love you when you really don't want me to
[Tyr and Rommie saving Dylan's ass while he’s making time with Molly in "Lava and Rockets." End with a snip of Rommie looking pissed off on the bridge as he walks off to his room and Molly.]

Dear egotist boy, you've never really had to suffer any consequence
You've never stayed with anyone longer than ten minutes
[parade of bimbos]
You'd never understand anyone showing resistance
Dear popular boy, I know you're used to getting everything so easily
[The kids taking over the bridge in "Loose the Fateful Lightning"]
A stranger to the concept of reciprocity
People honor boys like you in this society
[Dylan at the podium with the applauding representatives who want him to be Triumvere in "Tunnel at the End of the Light"]

And any talk of selflessness
And any talk of working at this
And any talk of being of service
Leaves you running for the door
[Harper in despair on Earth, Dylan on the Andromeda very much elsewhere in "Bunker Hill"]

Why, why do I try to help you try to help you
When you really don't want me to
Why, why do I try to help you try to help you
When you really don't want me to
[shot of Tyr looking dubious over Dylan's assertion that the Pyrians will talk in "Point of the Spear"]

You go back to the women who will dance the dance
[plentiful possibilities for this one, but kicked off with Sara in "Banks of the Lethe"]
You go back to your friends who will lick your ass
[Rev and purple Trance behind Dylan telling Beka they won't leave with her in "D Minus Zero"]
You go back to ignoring all the rest of us
You go back to the center of your universe
[Beka and Tyr in that same scene as Dylan does his "you leave, I'll get you blown up" thing]

Dear self-centered boy, I don't know why I still feel affected by you
I've never lasted very long with someone like you
[Dylan and Harper's first meeting, with pan up Dylan’s body, in "Under the Night"]
I never did, although I have to admit I wanted to
[The two of them walking together in "Shards of Rimni" as Harper thanks him for bringing him along]
Dear magnetic boy, you've never been with anyone who doesn't take your shit
You've never been with anyone who's dared to call you on it
I wonder how you'd be if someone were to call you on it
[Rhade coming in and shooting Dylan dead in "The Unconquerable Man," with loving shot of the corpse (Yes, I'm evil.)]

And any talk of willingness
And any talk of both feet in
And any talk of commitment
Leaves you running for the door
[Dylan on the bridge watching Harper being tortured by the mad in "Mad to Be Saved", Dylan and Beka shuffling through the ventilation system away from the jigsaw as Harper is tortured]

Why, why do I try to change you, try to
Try to change you when you really don't want me to
Why, why do I try to change you try to
Try to change you when you really don't want me to
[Rhade trying to do the mission the way he thinks is best in "Forced Perspective."]

You go back to the women who will dance the dance
[plentiful possibilities for this one]
You go back to your friends who will lick your ass
[Trance alone with Dylan talking about how evil Marduk is in "Slipfighter the Dogs of War"]
You go back to being so oblivious
You go back to the center of the universe
[shot of Dylan looking lethally arrogant on the bridge in "Point of the Spear" while Beka looks dubious]

Andromeda Episode Reviews