This semester, I am adjuncting an online-only science fiction class at a nearby university that caters to full-time workers, bringing my number of simultaneously held paid jobs to three. Because I am primarily a freelancer, I think of things in freelance terms: maximizing money earned, minimizing time and effort. It all comes down to the hourly rate you command. When I taught before, I agonized about every decision: what books, what organizational scheme. This time? Not so much.

Here’s a rundown of how I approached adjuncting.

1. It’s not about the money.

Everyone knows this, right? Nobody adjuncts for money; the pay is pathetic. I ran the numbers. I make more money teaching aerobics.

But working for the university system has its rewards: they take taxes out for me. That is a huge bonus for quarterly-tax-paying me. I decided it was worth it because it provided me with practical online teaching experience, which I may be able to parley into something later. It also connects me with some colleagues, thus expanding the academic side of my network.

2. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

The first thing I did when I got the online class was contact a colleague, a fellow member of the Science Fiction Research Association who regularly teaches online-only classes, and ask him for advice. I was able to modify my colleague’s syllabus: he’d found the perfect textbook to replace lecture and to organize the readings.

I’d done prep work before—and I’m an expert in my field. I’ve taught face-to-face SF classes many times. I had a pile of desk copies. Rather than agonizing over every title, I selected an anthology with historical breadth, and novels that I knew well that were short, famous, or both. It was easy to fit readings into the textbook’s rubric.

Forget the students and their reading load; it was all about me. Bonus: I won’t have to rewrite modules and quizzes from scratch next time I teach the course. I can just reimport the entire class into the online teaching system, Blackboard, and tweak it.

3. Don’t be afraid to drop things that aren’t working.

I spent hours—hours!—doing link roundups for every unit, to provide extra sources for the students to look at, to make up for the lack of face-to-face opportunities for questions and discussion. I even offered students the opportunity to do the link roundups themselves in lieu of another assignment, because creating them was so enlightening (no takers, alas). I found audio recordings of primary sources! I found cool YouTube vids on aspects of the science! I found gorgeous illustrated covers! I linked to authors’ personal Web sites! I found other teachers’ pages on the texts!

My students didn’t look at any of it.

Similarly, I kept online chat office hours, except the interface was annoyingly buggy and only one student visited me—and that was to, well, chat, not talk about the class.

I no longer create link roundups, and my office hours are now by appointment.

4. Go for generalities, not specifics.

In my midterm survey, students asked for study guides. Study guides? I thought. (I had linked to some in the links roundups, but see above.) I dutifully wrote two study guides, only to discover that they prepared you to take the quizzes, which are open book and open note. So it duplicated effort: I had two tools for a single learning objective.

I inferred that a request for study guides really indicated a desire for strategies to know how to pinpoint what is important in a text. So I wrote a general 2-page study guide for our nonfiction book. It can be used to help understand what is important in every chapter. And I stopped providing specific prompts for the discussion board posts, because it was constraining discussion around a single topic. Instead, I replaced it with a single general question: “What insights into the week’s subject stories did the reading from the textbook provide?” I requested that student responses consider why I assigned a particular story to a particular unit.

It’s the student’s job to link the specifics of the readings to the generalities of the unit, not mine. Once I realized this simple fact, everything fell into place. I provide the overview and organizational structure, and they populate it. And I guide them as needed.

5. It’s an online class, but don’t assume online knowledge and skill.

About half my students don’t seem to have reliable Internet access, and some don’t even have computers. I had these Grand Ideas of promoting media literacy, but my students seem barely able to keep up with the minimum weekly requirements: taking a quiz on the reading, and making two discussion posts. I’d love to ask them to create artwork, or do a group report on works derived from Wells’s War of the Worlds, or, heck, even do link roundups, but with this population of students? It’s not going to happen. And that’s okay.

Similarly, I had hoped to prepare slide shows and record lectures for presentation online, but the university’s accessibility requirements put the kibosh on that. I am supposed to provide all such media to the university at least 2 weeks ahead of time, so that they may create DVDs of content to give to the students upon request—and I’m honest enough to say that this kind of forethought is not going to happen.

6. Caveats

I am able to cobble together all these jobs because I am on my husband’s health insurance. This puts me in a huge position of privilege, one I know is not shared by many adjuncts. And I’m also privileged because I do not rely solely on adjuncting for my income. As copyediting work increasingly goes offshore, I have to decide how I want to proceed: retrain, perhaps in the fitness industry? write? get a job teaching? accept an in-house job, which would require my moving away from my husband? Part of my decision to adjunct a class came from my exploration of these possibilities.

Despite my relatively privileged position, the drawbacks of adjuncts affect me as much as anybody. I get no special library permissions or access to locked library holdings. Even if my class had a face-to-face component, I wouldn’t get an office, even a shared one. I feel isolated from the larger university. And I engage with everyone via e-mail asynchronously. The only reason I’ve had contact this semester with my department and the dean is, I had to handle a plagiarism case and was required to do considerable paperwork.

The problem with my current workload is that it is crushing. I thought that adjuncting would permit me to reconnect with the text-based, English-teacher side of me, but I’m too overwhelmed with keeping my head above water to make more meaning out of the experience—a situation I imagine many adjuncts are in. To free up time, I’ve dropped every single thing I can, and I’ve streamlined so extensively that I can streamline no more. I’ve ruthlessly applied Getting Things Done techniques to freelancing and teaching. I’ve sacrificed some interpersonal engagement on the altar of expedience.

However, one thing has become clear: I need to decide how adjuncting fits into my larger goals. I suspect it may not fit at all; my goal is not, and has never been, to seek a tenure-track job. Considering the poor rate of pay, I would probably be better off teaching a few extra aerobics classes a week—at least that helps me with my presentation and personal fitness goals.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. The image by is Ms. Tina and is copyrighted under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. If you duplicate the post, please also copy the pictures and host them yourself. This post was originally written on November 25, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

I just received my contributor’s copy of Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009). In it is an In Focus section edited by my Transformative Works and Cultures coeditor, Kristina Busse, about fandom and feminism, and I’ve contributed an essay about fan gift culture. Many of the other contributors are people I work with at TWC.

The In Focus section is available for download as PDF here. The contents are as follows:

In Focus: Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production, edited by Kristina Busse

• Introduction, by Kristina Busse
• “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness,” by Francesca Coppa
• “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture,” by Karen Hellekson
• “Should Fan Fiction Be Free?” by Abigail De Kosnik
• “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergece,” by Julie Levin Russo
• “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership,” by Alexis Lothian

Thumbnail of Cinema Journal cover

The cover image illustrates our In Focus: it’s a screenshot from Lim’s 2007 fanvid, “Us,” which you may view at MediaCommons (curated by Kristina): “Us” – a multivid by Lim. This metavid has rightfully gotten a lot of attention, and it still brings tears to my eyes: there is so much of me (the fan) and what I believe in there. The artist was profiled at NPR at “Vidders Talk Back To Their Pop-Culture Muses.” This vid is a wonderful example of how fandom is sometimes all about us and our practices (the “den of thieves” of the song), and not (really) (always) about the source material.

Transformative Works and Cultures No. 3 has been released right on schedule.

The table of contents is here, and OTW’s announcement about it is here.

This issue has some great topics: filk and wrock, quilting, Lost, Law & Order: SVU, a couple items on the LOTR fan film The Hunt for Gollum, an essay about the troubling aspects of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, an essay about gift culture (a particular interest of mine)—well, just go read the issue yourself, because it’s all this and more.

We’d love it if you used the software interface to write comments to the authors. Remember, the issue is fully open access, so feel free to copy, paste, transform…it’s all good.

I have long been interested in organization and optimization, which is why I have blocked Lifehacker from my browser during the hours of 9 to 3. I actually file my papers, and I know exactly where, for example, the paperwork for my next aerobics recertification is, and that’s not for 2 years. However, I feel distinctly low-tech compared with some of the supermen and superwomen out there: I don’t have a smart phone, for example, so I haven’t joined the iPhone/iPod touch revolution. In fact, my Palm Tungsten E handheld dates from, like, 2003. I keep my calendar and day-to-day to-do list on paper (!!), and the most useful recent addition to my life is a cheap notebook, with a pen at the ready, so I can scribble down short-term notes.

Hard-copy calendar and note pad

Here’s an explanation of the software I use and how I organize my tools: Firefox add-ons, software for work and play—and, heck, why not?—a description of optimization hacks that let me work without too much distraction. I conclude with a run-down of my physical setup. I use a 5-year-old Dell PC running XP.

Firefox add-ons

• bit.ly preview :: Provides expanded link and other info about a shortened link (bit.ly and tiny.url) upon hover.
• Flashblock :: Blocks Flash animation; can be overridden by a click. Note: this blocks YouTube video previews.
• IE Tab :: Click an icon to render a page in IE, but within Firefox. Useful for pages, like Windows Update, that requires you view it with IE.
• LeechBlock :: Blocks certain sites/domains that you specify for a time range you specify. I block Lifehacker, Facebook, and LiveJournal from 9 to 3 on weekdays.
• Screengrab :: Saves Web pages as images. I don’t use this much but it will capture the whole page, not like PrintScreen.
• Twitterfox :: Creates a pop-up in Firefox’s lower right corner with updates of your Twitter pals. I am not following enough people to make this add-in a hassle, but if you follow a bunch of people or do finely granulated Twitter things, then TweetDeck is probably a better choice. I read the tweets of heavy posters via an RSS feed through Google Reader.
• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) :: Syncs your bookmarks and/or passwords between computers.
• Zotero (beta) :: Collects and manages citation info; plugs into Open Office Writer and Word, so you can easily embed info and cite. I haven’t been able to make it work with my writing process (yet?), but it’s handy for organizing bibliographic info.

Software (free unless otherwise noted)

The main software I use is Microsoft Office. I have Open Office handy and occasionally use it, mostly to turn a word-processed file into a PDF. For a free word processor, I like AbiWord, the portable version of which I carry around on a memory stick, along with other portable apps, including portable Firefox.

Although I love the idea of switching over to all open source, all the time, my clients give me proprietary plug-ins for Word that I must use to tag or prep or otherwise work with the documents. This is becoming less common as composition has been offshored, so now I work more with Word files and less with SGML tagged files, but I have retained some of the tools, particularly to clean up author-prepped files, because they are so useful.

Here’s a list of the software I use daily. I do not use antivirus software because nothing is downloaded to my computer: I use Gmail to filter everything and only download content I trust.

Day-to-day programs to help me traffic, prep, and edit files

• CSE Validator Lite :: I use this to view XML metadata files my clients send me; and to write Web pages. It color-codes syntax and does a quick validation.
• Editor’s ToolKit Plus (not free) :: Required for those of us employed in the publishing industry. Word template plug-in strips files, turns embedded notes into text, tags specs. The FileCleaner feature alone is worth the price.
• FileZilla :: Stable FTP software.
• Foxit Reader :: PDF viewer; way lighter than that bloated Adobe monstrosity.
• Gmail :: All my other e-mail accounts flow into Gmail. One Program To Rule Them All!
• Google Calendar :: I keep five calendars simultaneously. Only one dumps to my handheld: the calendar that tells me where I have to be at what time.
• Google Calendar Sync :: Syncs my Google calendar with Outlook, which in turn syncs with my Palm Tungsten E handheld. I export my Contacts manually from Google once a month and sync it with Outlook and then to my handheld.
• Google Groups :: I use my own personal Google Group (no other members are permitted) to store documents.
• IZArc :: Compression tool: zips and unzips files, including RARs.
• Launchy :: Launches anything you want from the keyboard: programs, Web pages, windows, whatever. Great for people like me who don’t mouse.
• PDFZilla :: PDF to Word/txt converter, so I can desperately attempt to create an editable document without rekeying it. Works well for neat blocks of text like figure captions; works less well for complex text like tables.
• Stedman’s Plus Spell Checker (not free) :: Medical dictionary plug-in. Indispensable.
• Texter :: Text expander; especially useful for signature lines and for repeated terms or HTML codes.
• Word wildcard macros :: The number one skill required for true efficiency.

System maintenance

• Start > Accessories > Tools > Disk defragmenter :: Yes, I use XP’s defrag tool. It seems to work fine.
• CCleaner :: Effective and light optimization, privacy, and cleaning tool. Highly recommended!
• SUPERAntiSpyware :: Pretty good antispyware freeware.
• Sunbelt Personal Firewall :: Er…my firewall. Free and not too annoying with the pop-ups.

Optimization hacks

Color-coded mesh bags

• Filing system :: For work, two files: an open one on the floor by my feet with current projects; and a nearby little file cabinet with files for active clients. I pull from the latter and file in the former when I have extant work from that client. I regularly update documentation and copy style sheets, etc., to my Google Group as backup.
• Hard-copy calendar :: Two pages per week, just a cheap spiral-bound paperback calendar from Walmart. I use stickies to list long-term items that I ought to work on; I write in items that need to be done per day to meet the longer-term goal.
• Launchy shortcuts :: PubMed, Webster’s online, IMDb, Amazon.com.
• Mesh bags :: See-through, color-coded mesh bags that I use to store cords and peripherals. Camera is blue! iPod is red! Cell phone cord is yellow!
• Palm Tungsten E handheld :: Obsolete but still works, although battery life is about an hour of constant use. I use the calendar function to flash me an alarm a half-hour before I need to be somewhere. I use the contacts function to store contacts. But mostly I use it to watch videos while working out.
• Reference books :: Chicago 15, Webster’s 11th, AMA 9th and 10th, Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, Stedman’s Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Symbols—all on a bookshelf I can access by simply leaning over.
• Scratch pad :: Little notebook where I write notes to self. I used to use stickies in my calendar, but the dedicated notebook works even better. It also makes a nice coaster.

Software for play

Here are the programs I use for play, mostly having to do with accessing or repurposing media, such as videos or photos. I keep meaning to upload stuff to my Flickr account (I have no photos stored there), or find out a better CD/DVD-burning program, or figure out how to use Gimp, but I never do. Moral of story: it is occasionally more efficient to work with what you know when your needs are few and simple. That said, my complex photo hacks are just…stupid, and I really ought to optimize that. Later!

• DVD Flick :: Converts AVI to DVD format.
• foobar2000 :: I don’t use this to listen to media; I use it to rip CDs as one continuous track. I do this to aerobics music, so I can use my iPod for class; it’s the only way to make the songs truly gapless. I also use it link up several CD’s worth of audio dramas into one huge file.
• Format Factory :: Converts to MP4, so I can push video to my handheld and watch it while working out.
• iTunes :: Oh, how I hate this program, this bloated monstrosity! I have a second-gen red iPod nano I got in 2006. I have my preferences set so iTunes doesn’t re-sort things willy-nilly. I also do not download cover art, so as to conserve space on the nano.
• Jasc Paint Shop Pro v. 8 :: Totally obsolete; came with my computer. But I know how to use it to do things like resize and crop, and it has a tool that lets me figure out RGB colors in a way that lets me control said colors in CSE Validator Lite.
• Photobucket :: I use this free service to store images that I blog. I got my accounts ages ago, before Flickr was the big thing (yes, before Flickr was purchased by Yahoo!), and I haven’t bothered to move elsewhere. It links to Twitgoo, a Twitter image tool.
• Picasa :: Photo organization program. I use it to download pix from my camera, then upload images to my Google Photos account, where I then copy the ones I want to blog to my Photobucket account, letting these services do the resizing (because it degrades the image quality the least). I also use Picasa’s editing tools to get rid of red-eye or to slightly darken or lighten the image. If I need to crop, I use Paint Shop Pro.
• Real Record Now! :: It came with my computer, and I have never upgraded it. I use it to burn CDs and DVDs.
• Windows Media Player v. 10 :: No, I haven’t upgraded. I wish it would stop asking me. I use it to stream DI.fm trance radio all day long.
• VLC Media Player :: Why, yes, it does play everything.

Physical setup

Physical setup

• Dell Dimension 8300 (desktop computer) running XP and Office 2003.
• Dell 19-inch monitor.
• Microsoft Optical mouse Blue USB (not that I use it much; I’m keyboard only!).
• Belkin 4-USB expander dongle (permanently attached to desktop, so I don’t have to stand on my head to access the USB port on the front of my tower).
• Dell Latitude D510 laptop (only used occasionally; has programs on it, but no data).
• Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite (split ergonomic keyboard).
• Router/wireless.
• Steelcase chair.
• Tracfone LG cell phone.
• HP LaserJet 1000 series (black-and-white laser printer).
• HP Officejet 5610v All-in-One (fax, scanner, color printer including photos).
• Palm Tungsten E handheld.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. All the images were taken by me and are under the same copyright. If you duplicate the post, please also copy the pictures and host them yourself. This post was originally written on August 31, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

Here is my Personas profile. It was quite a bit of fun watching it scan for information on me (“Karen Hellekson is…,” and keywords would flash by). I’m surprised about how little of it is about…er…copyediting, which I do for a living. I’m pleased to be considered an educator, and I certainly do a lot of service work. I’m employed in the publishing industry, and I used to write book reviews for Publishers Weekly, so the “books” thing makes sense. But why is “sports” listed so high? Must be aerobics!

Hellekson Personas profile. [View full size]

The thing that strikes me about this exercise is how the computer perceives my presenting myself on the Internet. I think of myself as primarily a copyeditor who does academic stuff on the side, but I don’t tend to write about my copyediting for privacy concerns. Likewise, I don’t blog about the work I do for the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures, but I spend a huge amount of time on it.

In interesting post yesterday on “Being Yourself Online (of usernames and avatars),” Brian Croxall talks about presenting himself online and controlling the message. Like Croxall, I have organized my online presence to a single username. But my connection with the fan world means that I post under my fan name also, although I have done very little of that since I started working on TWC because I do not have time; I now serve fandom not by creating but by administrating. Yet seeing my Personas result without the fan component means that an important aspect of me is absent.

I think it’s a good idea to create an online identity under your RL name that you can control, but I would also argue that having a separate identity may be an important part of the performance of self.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 25, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

This semester, I am teaching an online-only science fiction literature class at the University of Maine at Augusta as an adjunct. I requested to teach the class for a number of reasons, some having to do with my day job: copyediting medical manuscripts. If I want to go further in the copyediting field, positioning myself as an educator, particularly one with experience in distance learning, may go a long way. Partially, it’s an attempt to bring together some disparate threads of my life. I have been surprised that people find what I do as a day-to-day job interesting, and certain intersections between publishing and my academic interests are valued. So teaching a SF class may end up bringing together literature and copyediting in some intriguing ways, just like I’ve been able to link copyediting and my extensive experience in the publishing world with the academic journal I coedit, Transformative Works and Cultures. In addition, I can see the writing on the wall: copyediting is increasingly being offshored, and I may soon run out of work. Although I am pretty sure that I would prefer not to teach full time (although maybe this class will let me know otherwise!), I would welcome the opportunity to teach occasionally and work with topics that interest me.

I last taught in 2002–2003, face-to-face English classes on the topic of SF that met once a week. I taught two semesters in a row at two different local universities. I like adjuncting because I get to teach in my field, SF literature, without having to teach service classes like Composition or Intro to Literature. I’m particularly excited to be teaching again at UMA because I really like the student body: UMA is a nonresidential school, all their face-to-face classes meet once a week, and the student body tends to be less the traditional 18-year-old just out of high school and more the full-time worker who has decided to get a college degree, and they’re doing so one class at a time. The ideas that the student body comes up with are much different than the ones I see when I teach a more traditional student population.

Before I was permitted to teach an online class, I had to take an online class about teaching online. This class was organized through Blackboard. I found the experience valuable: I learned how to structure the class, how to handle Blackboard’s administrative tools having to do with various sorts of assignments and quizzes, and how to deal with asynchronous discussion. However, I was definitely not impressed with Blackboard as a tool. It’s nonintuitive (and, at least on my computer, agonizingly slow), and it seeks to replicate certain aspects of teaching without really pushing the envelope with possibilities inherent in online pedagogy. Students are familiar with Blackboard because it is used for their other classes, and there is tech support provided by actual university employees, so I, as the instructor, won’t have to troubleshoot.

I had mad, wild ideas about how to incorporate some of Henry Jenkins’s core competencies for engaging in participatory culture (read about them here), which involved choosing a text we were reading in class and studying remixes—perhaps with students even making remixes of their own! (Yes, we’re reading that classic upon which a number of remixes have been based: Wells’s The War of the Worlds.) I wanted to use the online experience as a metaphor for SFnal engagement with technology, and I wanted to bring into the class my own interest in derivative artworks.

However, on the basis of the feedback I received from fellow instructors in the online class, and on the basis of certain pesky requirements having to do with access (notably, making available to students a DVD of any visual media I might want to incorporate, such as me lecturing on something—this requires about 2 weeks’ lead time, which I am, realistically speaking, not capable of), I radically ramped back my desires and expectations. The class, as it currently stands, is largely text based, and it will revolve around reading and discussion. The feedback I got from my contact person indicates that such English classes are the norm, so the way it’s currently structured will be acceptable to the students.

I’m thus going to use this class as a test, to see how far I could go in the future. For example, rather than Blackboard, I would like to use certain Google tools, such as Google Documents, that permit collaboration; and I like the idea of a public class blog. Some instructors ask students to edit or create Wikipedia entries, thus incorporating research into the class while simultaneously letting students see exactly how much weight should be given to Wikipedia when considering it as a source. I hope to incorporate some of these elements into the class, but I’m playing a wait-and-see game first, so I can assess the students’ computer access, comfortableness with other media, and ability to generate non-text-based transformative artworks.

The class as it currently stands revolves around Adam Roberts’s Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, second revised edition. This book is a proxy for lecture. It’s a short, simple book that defines SF, provides its history, and then delves into topics such as race and gender. In addition, I’ve chosen Thomas Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories for our short-story anthology. It’s not that recent, but it’s in print, it has a nice historical overview, and I’ve used it before—plus I’ve shared beers with Tom and he’s really cool. Add to that five short novels, and that’s the reading for the class. Students are required to make two discussion posts a week, a long one on a prompt I write about the reading and a shorter one in response to another student. The midterm and final will be longish essays on a broad prompt. And staying current (attendance, keeping up with the reading) will be assessed by weekly machine-graded quizzes. The overall goals of the class are to read some classics in the field and come to some understanding of what SF is, and to consider SF narrative as cultural product.

I must acknowledge my colleague, experienced community college instructor and online pedagogy expert Craig Jacobsen, for providing me with advice and a sample syllabus, and for turning me on to Roberts.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 24, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Two fairly high-profile transformative fan artworks hit my radar a while back, and I’m finally getting around to blogging about them. Both are firmly within fannish traditions, but they have very different sensibilities: “The Hunt for Gollum” and “Battlestar Redactica.” I encourage everyone to view them both, to compare and contrast. Both fan productions are available to view for free.

2. The Hunt for Gollum

[2.1] Chris Bouchard’s “The Hunt for Gollum” is a 40-minute live-action vid (it calls itself an “independent film”) with a cinematic feel and a mostly male production team. Gollum comes out of the Lord of the Rings film fandom, as opposed to the book fandom, and the production is geared to evoke Jackson’s films. Indeed, the production values are fabulous: wonderful acting, great costumes, original incidental music, the whole nine yards. The script fills in some missing time: Aragon tracks Gollum to find the truth about the Ring. The plot elements are pulled from Tolkien’s Appendices.

[2.2] As a fan artwork, this is in the relatively unusual genre of live-action fan vids [1], and it’s further rarified by being incredibly slick, more pro than fan. In fact, this short film straddles the pro/fan divide. On the pro side, it’s clear from remarks on the Web site that the people on the team are either professionals in the film industry or they want to be, and the level of excellence reflects these aspirations. Their dedicated URL also signals their serious intent. Further, Gollum’s Web site notes that the production team came to some sort of unexplained understanding with the Tolkien estate. All these signal professionalism.

[2.3] On the fan side, the story it tells is pure missing scene, a well-known fan genre whereby the fan artwork seeks to fill in a gap in the canonical source, usually in terms of story or character—here, story. Further, the cinematographic sensibility is clearly meant to evoke Jackson’s films; the final shot of the film only clinches it. The fannish transformation is of an original cast and script into a Jackson-esque tag, yet it is clearly a derivative story (because from Tolkien) told in a derivative way (because channeling Jackson). Also embedding it in the fan realm is its disclaimer, which, in fannish tradition, emphasizes the nonprofit nature of the endeavor.

[2.4] One important thing about Gollum is that it can be viewed completely independently of the films and it makes perfect sense. Like all derivative texts, it gains extra layers of meaning when viewed in conjunction with the primary source, although in this case, the story isn’t really crucially necessary. The extra meaning I obtain upon viewing isn’t some insight into Aragon’s or Gollum’s characters, or some “aha! so that’s how they found out that information!” moment that made explicable a formerly confusing bit of the film. Rather, the meaning I obtain has to do with faithfulness to cinematography and world building. For me, it’s a primarily visual fan artwork about world building meant to dazzle—more homage than site of extratextual meaning. A die-hard fan embedded in the LOTR film fandom might read it completely differently (and more usefully).

3. Battlestar Redactica

[3.1] CVM_Productions’ “Battlestar Redactica” is a rerendering of the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica, created by a single person who recut clips together, thus greatly changing the story. The artwork is made up of two vids of recut aired footage: part 1, “Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-edited Mutiny” (1:46:34), and part 2, “Battlestar Redactica: A Fan-edited Resurrection” (1:09:12). Short-form fan recuts—particularly of silly TV or film trailers—are popular on YouTube. Longer fan recuts such as this, based on TV shows, are more rare, although there is a site dedicated to mostly movie recuts, Fanedit.org. In the long-form genre, the best-known example is undoubtedly Mike J. Nichols’s 2000/2001 The Phantom Edit, a fan recut of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace that hit the media hard and itself spawned a thousand edits [source].

[3.2] CVM_Productions credits several people who helped her by providing feedback, but this artwork was not created by a team of people, as was Gollum. Rather, it was created by a fan embedded in her larger fan community, and like many such artworks, it itself has resulted in at least one derivative fan work: a music vid about Redactica’s version of Kara Thrace, one of the characters whose story is greatly altered. Further, CVM_Productions has placed her Redactica-specific site on LiveJournal, a friendly home to various fan communities. In short, Redactica feels fannish to me in a way that Gollum does not.

[3.3] Where Gollum is additive to story, Redactica is transformative of story: the tagline of the Web page associated with the artwork reads, “I reject your Battlestar and substitute my own!” CVM_Productions took the last half of season 4 of BSG and recut it to a preferred reading. Certain plot elements, notably the romance between two major characters, are excised altogether; other elements are downplayed. Some scenes are reordered to place certain plot elements next to each other, or to indicate altered reaction. CVM_Productions has posted extensively about the journey she took creating the two vids that comprise the Redactica, thus providing valuable insight into her artistic process, and I recommend reading the text associated with the artwork after viewing it.

[3.4] One big change in Redactica is the ending: CVM_Productions ran out of footage to articulate her desired ending, so she obliquely hints at it through montage. Of this new ending, CVM_Productions writes,

[3.5] The fan-edit closes to a new montage of modern technology and our relationship to it designed to offer a more balanced look than simply dancing robots. This is not intended necessarily to clarify the nature of our relationship to the Colonials (although it may do, if you choose), but rather to acknowledge there is one, even if purely metatextual, because their questions are also ours. [source]

[3.6] Redactica can be watched on its own and will make sense, but on the download page, CVM_Productions clearly indicates that the recuts ought to be viewed in context. She places the fan vids in a viewing sequence with extratextual elements. For example, for part 1 of Redactica, she suggests that first one watch 4.11 “Sometimes a Great Notion,” then watch the “What the Frak Happened Official Recap,” and finally watch the fan recut. Informed watchers will get far more out of the recut because the point is that it is different. The reworking of the character of Kara Thrace is particularly audaciously delicious when held against the canonical version.

4. Conclusion

[4.1] I can’t help but notice a big gap between these two fan texts. I like both of them for the obvious care and thought that went into creating them. Both of these artworks prove that derivative fan labor is a labor of love. Of the two, I prefer Redactica because I understand the context and community it came out of. It’s speaking to me as a fellow fan, not really the larger world. It privileges my knowledge of the canonical text. It assumes I have baseline knowledge, and it unapologetically builds on that. It’s…well…private.

[4.2] Gollum, on the other hand, is public: it is meant to be viewed, in isolation, in a public forum, and although knowledge of the films and the story add a layer of meaning, ultimately, this fan artwork is just an extra. Yes, it’s a beautiful extra, but it doesn’t tell me anything new about Jackson’s films, or about Aragon, or about Gollum. Perhaps it gives me some context, but I think that at the end of the day, I’m okay without the context. Redactica, on the other hand, transformed me by transforming the text: it showed me new possibilities inherent in the canonical narrative.

5. Note

1. I have personal experience with live-action fan vids: I was (sort of) a member of Mini-UNIT Minstrels (MUM), who followed Chicago’s The Federation in silly derivative sensibility (think Doctor Who meets the Monty Python crew). I published a paper about these vids after interviewing the cast and crew, a very grad student–y “let’s apply Jenkins’s textual poachers theory to these artworks.” (In my defense, I was a grad student.) Until Gollum, live-action fan vids had fallen off my radar, maybe because nobody has asked me to play the crucial lynchpin role of “secretary,” as I did for MUM, but now I find myself intrigued again. Please comment if you know of any current fan-run production teams who are working on live-action fan vids!

Post slightly updated on August 15, 2009, to add fanedit.org URL as per comment below.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. It was originally written on August 14, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

It goes without saying, doesn’t it? I’ll say it anyway: major spoilers. As I write this, only the first episode has aired in the USA, but this covers the full five eps.

1. Children of Earth

Earth’s children [1]

[1.1] I just rewatched, in one long jag, all five eps of Torchwood: Children of Earth, which comprises season 3 of the show. I laughed. I cried. I shook my fist at the screen because something happened that I really, really did not like at all. (More about that under the cut.) If you liked seasons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, all I can say is, it won’t prepare you for season 3, because the stakes are higher and the themes are darker: children, love, commitment, duty, honor. This is the program that had something real to say, in season 2 in particular, about life and death, but T:COE takes the promise of the first two seasons to a whole new level.

[1.2] Season 3 of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, aired in the UK on 5 consecutive days from July 6 to July 10, 2009. It began airing on July 20 on BBC America, and it will be available on DVD on July 28. (Why, yes, I have preordered my DVD from Amazon!) The plot, in a nutshell, is thus: Aliens announce, by seizing control of and speaking through all the children in the world at once, that they are coming. They want something—something to do with our children. And it not going to be good.

2. Themes

The Torchwood team: Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), and Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd) [1]

[2.1] This miniseries has several themes. One is family, as articulated by the Torchwood family, Ianto’s sister and her family, Jack’s revelation of the existence of a daughter and grandson, Frobisher’s murder-suicide to save his daughters from a fate worse than death, and Gwen’s pregnancy and the family she has created with her husband, Rhys. Another theme is duty and service: various politicians attempt to cope with the crisis, from engineering cover-ups and off-the-record remarks, to spinning the removal of 10% of Earth’s children as a useful method of reducing Earth’s overpopulation, to sacrificing the children of a dedicated public servant to the aliens, to committing treason for an ideal. The scene in Day Four where a female civil servant lays out the criteria by which children should be selected—those who are likely to contribute less, the lowest 10%—is devastating as she—a woman! a mother!—says what everyone is thinking. Late in the series, the theme of drug use arises, when the aliens say they use human children for “the hit”: the children are incorporated into the aliens’ bodies, as the ambassador demonstrates to everyone’s horror; their bodies provide pleasurable chemicals. In short, Earth has been contacted by a bunch of drug runners. The revelation of the aliens’ utter selfishness (and possible commercial interest) makes their actions all the more abhorrent. They are not acting out of desperation but greed.

[2.2] One important theme in Torchwood in general, across all three seasons, is the nature of life and death. The character who epitomizes these concerns is Jack, because he cannot die. In T:COE, he dies over and over again: he’s shot at least four times, he’s blown to bits by a bomb implanted in his body, he smothers or drowns in liquid concrete that then hardens into a block, and he dies from the virus released by the 456 as a demonstration of their power. Every time, he comes back. The government thinks that his remarkable regenerative powers have something to do with the rift and/or the Hub, Torchwood’s Cardiff base of operations, but as educated watchers know, his immortality is the result of the grace of the Doctor’s TARDIS. The other character in Torchwood most associated with death, in addition to Jack himself, is Owen, Torchwood’s doctor, who in series 2 becomes a walking dead man with a fragile, nonhealing body. Owen, along with his colleague, Tosh, dies, but his condition is used to make several points about the nature of life and death, and to contrast with the sort of life-death immortality that Jack enjoys.

[2.3] But the overarching theme of T:COE is love. The 456 mock humans’ ability to love their children, citing horrific infant mortality rates, and also citing the unfortunate decision back in 1965 to give the 456 twelve children. When John Frobisher kills his children, his wife, and himself, he does it because he loves them and is attempting to save his daughters from a fate that he literally considers worse than death. When Frobisher’s secretary dons contact lenses that permit the Torchwood team to record everything she sees, she does it for the love of her now-dead boss, a good man driven to his death by an unscrupulous politician. Ianto’s sister, Rhiannon, takes neighborhood children into her house and takes risks to keep them safe because she loves her own children. However, at the center of the this theme is the love relationship between Jack and Ianto.

3. Gaying up Ianto Jones

Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd) [1]

[3.1] Even after two seasons of Torchwood, we really don’t know much about Ianto. He’s the quiet, hot guy in a suit who delivers coffee in season 1 and who gradually becomes a field agent. We know he and Jack to be lovers, but of course the audience for T:COE must also be casual watchers who haven’t seen seasons 1 and 2, and thus, some time is spent on Ianto and his relationship to Jack, the better for Ianto’s death in Day Four to evoke an emotional response. (I know it evoked an emotional response in me, my usual refrain: “You did not just do that.”) Ianto is presented in season 1 as straight, in that he has, or had, a girlfriend (1.04 “Cyberwoman”), and Gwen is rather surprised when she finds out that he and Jack are lovers, but in T:COE, little ambiguity remains about his preferences.

[3.2] T:COE tells us more about Ianto than the entire first two seasons of the show, during which whatever he and Jack had together wasn’t clear. They seemed to care for each other, but it wasn’t presented as a committed love relationship, and they didn’t acknowledge themselves to be a couple. Rather, as Gwen puts it in T:COE, it’s “shenanigans in the dark.” But in T:COE, their relationship deepens and changes as Ianto confronts his feelings. The catalyst for some of this is his coming out to Rhiannon in Day One. She asks him about it: a friend of hers had seen Ianto dining intimately with a man who was “gorgeous, like a film star, like an escort.” Ianto, looking panicked, is finally driven to say, “He is very handsome,” thus admitting all. He continues, “It’s weird. It’s just different. It’s not men. It’s just him. It’s only him. And I don’t even know what it is, really, so, so I’m not broadcasting it.”

[3.3] This inexplicable something is love. Now that self-contained, buttoned-down Ianto has come out, now that he and Jack verbally spar about being a nagging, typical couple (although they tend to have these conversations while not really looking at each other and trying to be casual), the narrative repeatedly presents him as gay. Moments after he comes out to Rhiannon, his brother-in-law greets him cheerfully with “Hi hi, gay boy! Says you’re taking it up the ass!”, followed by a bear hug. It’s the best coming-out party ever: nobody seems to care much, although Rhiannon is touchingly concerned about his happiness. In Day Three, Clem declares him “queer. I can smell it,” and more than one character asks, “Ianto. Is he gay?”

Ianto and Jack [2]

[3.4] Several of Ianto’s scenes with Jack show Ianto feeling out whatever their relationship is. When a doctor in Day One treats them as a couple, Ianto tells Jack, “He thought we were together, like a couple. He said, ‘You two.’ The way he said it: ‘You two.’” Jack responds, “But we are. Does it matter?” Ianto, clearly uncomfortable, says, “No. It’s all a bit new to me is all.” Later in Day One, Gwen also calls them a couple, leading Jack to say, “I hate the word ‘couple,’” a sentiment that Ianto says he agrees with. Several other exchanges along these lines occur, where the two of them express discomfort while simultaneously moving closer together: they are a couple, but only now are people treating them as such.

[3.5] Although we see the result of a long-term relationship with the immortal Jack—his daughter, who appears older than Jack, notes that he never changed, while her mother grew old and died hating him for it—Ianto notes that they ought to make the most of their time together. Ianto wants to learn more about Jack: he asks him what it felt like to die in the explosion, when a bomb implanted in Jack’s body goes off. Did it hurt, or did everything just go black? (The answer: it hurt.) He demands of Jack that he be told information: where Jack is going, what he is doing. Jack responds by answering the question, and then offering a tidbit of what is to Ianto shocking information: “And just so you know, I have a daughter called Alice and a grandson called Steven, and Frobisher took them hostage yesterday.” Can anyone really know Jack? Or is it, as Jack asserts, all there on the surface, with nothing beneath it?

Jack holds a dying Ianto while the terrifyingly mysterious representative of the 456 looks on from its tank [2]

[3.6] Still, Jack loves Ianto. In Day Four, in a scene where Jack learns that the 456 have released a virus into the building that will kill everyone, including him and Ianto, as a demonstration of the aliens’ power, he capitulates completely. “I take it all back, but not him!” he begs. The alien remains implacable, of course: they expect delivery of 10% of the world’s children, as requested, the next day. This moment is a turning point for the darkness of the show: not only has a beloved character died, but he’s died just as he’s realized he’s in love, and the aliens will not negotiate. Torchwood’s plan has failed. They have gained nothing except a demonstration of the power of the 456, which has resulted in many deaths. Jack’s panicked initial reaction to the realization of Ianto’s impending death is the same panic we see on the faces of mothers in Day Five, when they realize their children are boarding buses, to be taken somewhere for some unknown purpose. They would do anything to ensure the safety of their children, just as Jack wants to take it all back, to soften his stance, to negotiate again.

[3.7] The emotional climax of T:COE is Ianto’s death in Jack’s arms; so often, of course, it has happened the other way around. However, Jack always comes back, and Ianto won’t. Ianto’s last words to Jack begin with the significant, “I love you.” He continues, “Hey. It was good, yeah? Don’t forget me. A thousand years’ time? You won’t remember me.” Jack promises that he will, and Ianto breathes his last. The scene ends with the two of them dead on the floor in front of the tank housing the 456. They took a last stand together, and they went down fighting. The revelations of Ianto’s sexuality were used in aid of this emotional impact. They also tell us something about Jack: he loves, but sometimes, that doesn’t matter. As he put it, he’s lived a long time and done a lot of things.

4. Annihilation

[4.1] The terrifying and implacable aliens, the absence of hope, and the destruction of an important, only recently acknowledged love relationship all render T:COE bleak, because it seems that this time, the world will end. Jack’s story isn’t over, of course. Torchwood saves the day, but at a high personal cost: Jack’s own grandson, Steven, a child, must be used as the fulcrum for the powerful transmission that ejects the 456, and it costs Steven his life—and Jack any hope of a continued relationship with his daughter.

[4.2] T:COE, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and any other number of TV shows and films, kills a gay character just after establishment of great intimacy: Ianto admits his love aloud to Jack, then dies; Tara dies right after having sex with Willow. In fact, it’s such a cliche, especially in the horror genre, that Brian Jurgens, on October 30, 2006, wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay about for in AfterElton.com: “The Gay Characters’ Guide to Surviving a Straight Horror Film.” And speaking of Buffy, Daniel Greenfield, in “Gay Characters, Mortality and Buffy,” notes that gay characters in popular culture become de facto role models. He argues that Tara did not play an important narrative role in Buffy and pretty much had to die, if only to provide a pretext for Willow to wig out and bring the season to its shocking climax. Yet Ianto certainly plays an important narrative role in Torchwood, with important skills and autonomy. Interestingly, in T:COE, he is also the voice of the 456 as he reads Lois’s scribbled shorthand notes aloud. He is a sort of mysterious alien himself. Rhiannon didn’t know him, and it seems Gwen didn’t know him either, as she learns when she tells Rhiannon of Ianto’s death. Who he is becomes synonymous with who he loves.

[4.3] Ianto may have been gayed up for T:COE, but it’s also made clear in the narrative, for those who haven’t seen the first two series, that he’s dated women, and this whole gay thing is new and inexplicable to him, a kind of label, like “couple,” that he’s not quite comfortable with. Jack, of course, is a space-traveling omnisexual: he’s taken both men and women as lovers, and it’s certainly implied that he’s had sex with all manner of aliens too. Clearly, within the past 30 or 40 years, he fell in love with a woman, married, and started a family. Ianto’s uneasy because this whole gay thing is new. Jack is uneasy because he’s not sure about this whole “couple” thing, so different from shenanigans in the dark.

[4.4] Both Ianto and Jack thus inhabit an ambiguous space that the narrative attempts to redefine as “couple in love,” to create an emotional center for the series, and to show the effects of the death of beloved people on Jack’s psyche, even as it shows the effect on Ianto and his relationship with others when he semipublicly admits to being in love with a man. And Jack is certainly affected: he screams at the 456 (“Not him!”); he cries when he places Steven on a pad and starts up the machinery that will kill the child while saving 10% of the world’s children from a hideous fate. In addition to all the physical pain and repeated deaths that Jack’s body takes, we have the emotional pain inflicted by overwhelming loss: “Steven, and Ianto, and Owen, and Tosh, and Suzie, and all of them. Because of me,” he says in Day Five as he prepares to leave.

[4.5] Of everyone we know from three seasons of Torchwood, all have died except Gwen and of course Jack. Gwen’s happy marriage to Rhys and her pregnancy offer a beam of hope: children, a family, mean life will go on. But it’s also closing a chapter for Jack’s character: “I have lived so many lives. It’s time to find another one,” he says in Day Five. The team is gone, Ianto is dead, the Hub has been destroyed, and Jack leaves Earth. For Torchwood, there is nothing left.

5. Photo credits

1. BBC America: http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/262/index.jsp.

2. BBC UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/torchwood/.

If you would like to comment…

This is copyrighted under Creative Commons, so it may be reposted freely. Thus, perhaps you are reading this at a site other than khellekson.wordpress.com. If you would like to leave a comment at the original source, where I might, you know, actually see it, the URL for the original page is http://khellekson.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/torchwood-children-of-earth/.

My previous post on LOM US is here.

1. Life on Mars US finale

[1.1] Several months after the April 1, 2009, finale of the US version of Life on Mars, I have finally gotten around to finishing out the season. Although I am a big fan of the UK version, the US version didn’t really catch me, and after the first midseason story arc wrapped up, I didn’t prioritize watching it—and I became even less concerned when I learned that the show had been canceled.

[1.2] Thus I didn’t watch the finale in a timely manner, and I couldn’t bring myself to care. Yet out of a sense of obligation, coupled with a friend writing and saying, “OMG, what did you think of the LOM US finale?”, I finally sat down to view it, after, perhaps shockingly, remaining totally spoiler-free. And oh my. The ending…sucked. I actually spoke to the screen: “No!” I screamed, rendered incoherent with betrayal. “You…you…you idiots! I cannot believe you did that!”

[1.3] Let me say it again: I cannot believe they did that. It would have been better if the entire team had died in a blaze of glory on Gauda Prime. Now that’s a series ending!

[1.4] After the jump, I’ll tell you exactly why I think the finale for the US version of Life on Mars betrayed the entire setup of the series. Obviously there are major spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.

2. A summary of the two series’ endings

Life on Mars cast [1]

[2.1] Let me briefly summarize the facts of the two series, stripped of unimportant details like plot elements and emotional context. First, the stats: LOM UK aired two series of eight episodes each, for a total of sixteen eps. Then, in a move totally unfamiliar to Americans (who will run a series forever if it has good ratings, even if it blows things like closure and narrative structure), the story was over, so they ended the series. In contrast, LOM US aired one series of seventeen episodes. Although the US version lasted only a single season, it aired one more ep than its British original. Early eps of LOM US relied heavily on rewritten scripts from the UK version, but as the show continued, the scripts moved further and further afield.

[2.2] In the original UK version, Sam Tyler gets back to 2006, only to find that he had been in a coma. He goes back to work as a cop but is unhappy. He jumps off a building. This returns him to 1973, where he’s just in time to save his friends. Presumably he will remain there in 1973 and live happily ever after.

[2.3] The ending for the US version is far different: it turns out that Sam Tyler isn’t a cop; he’s an astronaut in 2035. He and his team have finally arrived at their destination, Mars, after 2 years in some kind of suspended animation. A machine had been generating fake immersive worlds to keep their minds active, but Tyler’s experience glitched: he was supposed to be a cop in 2008, but instead, the machine sent him to 1973 with his (fake) 2008 memories intact. In a Wizard of Oz–like moment (“And you were there…and you…and you…”), we discover that his astronaut crewmates were his fellow cops on the force. Most importantly, Gene Hunt isn’t Gene Hunt: he’s Tyler’s father, and wouldn’t you know it—they don’t get along.

3. LOM US ending as literal

[3.1] The LOM US ending fails because it is literal. Tyler is from Hyde? The ship’s name is Hyde 125! Tyler sees inexplicable robots? They have one just like it in their spaceship! Where are they going? Mars! What are they looking for? Life! It’s a “gene hunt”! Get it? Life on Mars? Gene Hunt? Ha ha ha!

[3.2] And then my laughter turns into tears. To discover that the entire thing, all of Tyler’s struggles, were absolutely meaningless…words just fail me. What makes it even worse is the total lack of emotional resonance. I could have handled this bizarre, out-of-nowhere ending that makes literal all the things I’d been furiously interpreting as metaphorical (for example, I was half sure his neighbor, Windy, didn’t actually exist and that she represented…something, I wasn’t sure what) if something had happened that would have transformed the story into an emotional arc for Tyler.

[3.3] Instead, all we get is a sense that Tyler and his dad don’t get along. And that’s pretty much it. I guess I can work with that—lord knows that I’ve filled in bigger gaps when writing fan fiction—but at the end of seventeen long eps, I was presented with a story that had narrative closure that undermined the narrative itself, and that also lacked emotional closure. The story was just that: a story meant to amuse Tyler during transit. We didn’t see Tyler and his colleagues interact enough to know why their recasting in this past world was amusing, or sad, or resonant. We don’t know what they’re really like, so we don’t know how close their “true” selves are to the 1973 bodies. We aren’t provided with enough about Tyler’s relationship with them to assess why this ending might be clever. Tyler himself seems to view the whole thing as one big film, where he was a spectator only, further undermining the emotional distress we saw during the course of the series when he received strange messages from 2008 or saw odd robots about. He merely scoffs at the whole experience. It doesn’t seem to have affected him in his “real” 2035 world. All those odd, distressing happenings were merely glitches in the machine, and they meant…nothing.

[3.4] Admittedly the LOM US writers didn’t have much time to craft something lovely for us to send the show off right: they had to rewrite a season-ending script into a series-ending script while getting ready to shoot the darn thing, but from I can tell from gleanings on the Internet, the big reveal of the ending was known and the writers were salting eps with clues. This means that had the show run more seasons, I would have been even more incoherently angry, because they would have taken beloved characters with whom I would have much more history, instead of characters I was really just getting to know, and then negating their very existence.

[3.5] Regarding the finale’s sense of closure, check out this remark:

[3.6] “We’re not only answering the why of 1973 but more importantly, it’s what this whole journey was about for Sam—why it was these particular characters and this emotional landscape,” [exec producer Scott] Rosenberg says. “It’s his emotional heroes journey that is answered by the end.” [source]

[3.7] I’m not sure what to say about this, other than that the producers really seemed to think that the why of the characters was answered (it wasn’t), or the meaning of the emotional landscape (also a no). But it could be that they’re answering these same questions very literally, just as they do for the show. Why these characters? Because they’re in space together. Why this emotional landscape? Because Tyler is in a spaceship being mentally stimulated by a computer. (Writing this down and rereading it, I just can’t believe the paucity of the thought here. They sold out the entire emotional context of the show for a flip ending, and they don’t even seem to realize why this might be insulting.)

[3.8] I want the answers to be multilayered and metaphorical, rich with character-driven content. Instead, in the finale’s only attempt at emotional engagement, Tyler asks his dad if they could just work harder to get along. I, the viewer, don’t care about this Tyler. I’ve never met him before. I can’t bring myself to care.

[3.9] Interestingly, the title of Charlie Jane Anders’s March 31 interview at io9 with the exec producers, “Life On Mars Ending Will Make Science Fiction Fans Happy,” implies that just because there is a SF element—here, space travel—I, an SF fan, will be happy. Um, not so much. It’s true that I liked the premise of the show, and I even consider it science fictional: the element of time travel makes it so, along with the special-knowledge disconnect between our world (that of Tyler’s 2009 self) and that of 1973. Plus there’s a wacky inner-space component as he sees and hears things that other people do not. But I don’t need a spaceship or a red planet to flag something as SF.

[3.10] What we have here is a high-concept ending that does not grow organically out of the narrative and my understanding of the main character, but instead descends, deus ex machina, to change the whole game. And you know what? I am not amused.

Image credit

1. Nix, “ABC cancels Life on Mars,” March 3, 2009, SciFi Cool, http://www.scificool.com/abc-cancels-life-on-mars/.

1. British TV

[1.1] At the SFRA 2009 meeting the weekend of June 11, I was on a panel moderated by my fearless coeditor, Craig Jacobsen, about what to watch for SF TV. The panel was quite large, so Craig held us to a strict 2-minute time limit. He asked us to prepare remarks about which shows were must-watch shows, and why. Here, I present my choices and briefly explain what I find interesting and worthy about the shows.

[1.2] Because I am particularly interested in British TV, I staked out this area as my own, leaving the usual suspects—Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Heroes—to others. But during our panel’s conversation, I was able to articulate why I had specifically earmarked certain shows as being of interest. Sadly, it wasn’t because of the shows’ uniform excellence: some are virtually unwatchable. Rather, what I found interesting had to do with intersections of these texts with other texts. This makes sense. I am, after all, interested in shared worlds and fan artifacts, and these pro texts feel like fan works: derivative crack that says something about the originary text.

[1.3] After the jump is my roundup of fun-to-think-about shows (if not fun-to-watch shows, unless you like things that are so bad, they’re good). Several haven’t aired in the United States yet. I discuss the following: Demons, Spooks Code 9, Merlin, Ashes to Ashes, and Primeval. And I briefly mention the Doctor Who franchise: Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures.

2. Demons

Demons’s blind pianist Mina Harker (Zoe Tapper) and demon hunter Luke Rutherford/Van Helsing (Christian Cooke) [1]

[2.1] I can’t say that Demons is the finest six-part miniseries in the history of TV, and in fact I’ve only seen it halfway through because I simply couldn’t bear it. But if you want to talk about popular culture’s reaction to vampires and continuing Bram Stoker’s universe, then it becomes interesting. Mina Harker appears as a blind pianist, and the boy hero, Luke Rutherford/Van Helsing, discovers to his surprise that he’s a demon-killing descendant of Stoker’s famed vampire hunter.

[2.2] This show can interestingly be read as part of the current vampire craze, spawned by Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight series, and part of the youth craze, with shows focusing on young adults, in the style of Skins. The miniseries takes Stoker’s universe as read and expands on it, creating more backstory, and in general fleshing out a world inspired by and following on from Stoker’s classic novel. The show expands beyond vampires and into demons, and it posits a whole infrastructure of evil-fighting folks destined to save the world. Horror (demons exist!) and fantasy (a chosen one with heretofore unknown special powers will save the day!) combine to create an alternate reality positing Stoker’s text as the literal truth.

3. Spooks Code 9

[3.1] The six eps that comprise series 1 of Spooks Code 9 provide a SF sequel to stylish, of-the-moment spy drama Spooks, which appears in the United States as MI5. SC9 is targeted to a younger demographic and is clearly lower budget. It’s set a few years in the future, after a nuclear device is detonated by terrorists in London. The British government moves to Manchester, and MI5 recruits a bunch of early 20-something youths, on the premise that their youth will permit them to obtain better intelligence.

[3.2] Of interest to me are the generic intersection between this show and the uniformly excellent Spooks (although sadly, there is no character overlap); the notion of terrorism as pushed forward into the near future; and the social changes that might occur after an attack of this magnitude. The latter in particular is underdone: a few security checkpoints don’t convince me that the world is wholly different, and although some futuristicically cool technology appears, mostly it’s about strikingly attractive young people going undercover in discos while wearing outrageous outfits, then chasing bad guys in exciting foot races. Still, this text is relevant in a post-9/11 world as a 20-minutes-into-the-future thought experiment, even if it doesn’t think very much.

3. Merlin

Merlin’s Arthur (Bradley James, second from left) and Merlin (Colin Morgan, third from left) [2]

[3.1] Merlin, which is currently airing in the United States on NBC, riffs interestingly on Sir Thomas Malory’s epic text, Le Morte DArthur (1485), about the sixth-century King Arthur, who may or may not have literally existed. Malory is of course just one writer who has dealt with King Arthur, and many, many other popular texts, both ancient and modern, revisit the story of Camelot. Although the literary corpus is vast, the show doesn’t really deal with it. Rather, it relies on our half-remembered knowledge of tales of Arthur and Camelot, and then turns these remembrances on their head.

[3.2] In the BBC version, Merlin and Guinevere are both servants, Morgana is an orphan and a ward of Uther, and the youthful Merlin’s magical abilities are kept secret upon pain of his death. A dragon chained in some caves delivers timely advice. The show mixes magic and science: Merlin works with the learned physician-scientist Gaius, who is in on the secret of Merlin’s powerful magic. The show’s deliberate anachronisms are part of its charm and help update the program for contemporary viewers. This is not a historical text but a derivative romantic riff on our shared rememberings of the stories: the sword in the stone; Guinevere and Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, and Arthur and Lancelot; Morgana’s incestuous ancestry; the secret of Uther’s winning of his wife; and so on, all lurking in the background, undiscussed.

[3.3] The discontinuity of what we know to be true versus what we see on the screen keeps my interest: how will the show end up making Gwen, a blacksmith’s daughter and servant to Morgana, Arthur’s queen? If Morgana is canonically pure evil, why does she have empathy and do nice things for people? If Arthur is to become a good and noble king, why is he such an arrogant brat? Delicious hints delight us because of our foreknowledge of events: in 1.05 “Lancelot,” Lancelot, a commoner and thus not worthy to join the noble-born knights, comes and goes, little realizing what his fate will be, even as Gwen laughs at the idea of ever having the opportunity to choose between him and Arthur.

4. Ashes to Ashes

Ashes to Ashes time traveler DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) and her new boss, DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) [3]

[4.1] The single show I discussed at the panel that I adore unreservedly and applaud as a text worth watching (as opposed to a text worth thinking about, which is an entirely different thing) is Ashes to Ashes. Series 2 finished airing in the UK on June 8. This sequel to the (original) British version of Life on Mars follows Alex Drake, a detective from 2008 who is shot and ends up in 1981, where she fights crime even as she struggles to find her way home.

[4.2] Alternative realities, time travel, dual consciousness, and the immersive evocation of a past time—these are the SFnal central concerns behind the LOM/AA franchise. The questions of identity, time, and the nature of consciousness parallel those of LOM, but AA’s Alex has read Sam Tyler’s reports and thus feels better equipped to handle her predicament. With a background in psychology, she is more thoughtful and introspective than Tyler was, and with someone to go home to—her daughter—she is particularly motivated to figure out how to get back. The lingering question behind the two series may be answered in AA series 3, which the BBC has green-lighted: it will focus on Gene Hunt, and it promises to some closure to the AA series 2 finale as well as the status of Sam Tyler in LOM:

“Fans have theorised since Life On Mars and throughout Ashes To Ashes about who Gene Hunt actually is and what his alternative world really means,” said a spokesperson for the show. “The climax of series three will finally reveal all in a stunning finale.” [source]

[4.3] I won’t spoil the ending of AA series 2, except to say that that the closure isn’t really closure because the present–past hauntings occur in both directions.

5. Primeval

Primeval series 3 cast standing in front of an anomaly: Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearitt), Connor Temple (Andrew Lee-Potts), Sarah Page (Laila Rouass), Danny Quinn (Jason Flemyng), and Captain Becker (Ben Mansfield) [4]

[5.1] Another British program of interest is ITV’s uneven, CGI-heavy action-adventure show Primeval, which just finished showing series 3 and then was abruptly canceled, despite a nail-biting cliffhanger. (The TV show has been optioned as a full-length film feature, and an American version of the TV show may or may not be in the works.) I find the show interesting for its time-travel element: the show assumes the existence of temporary rifts in the space-time continuum, and creatures from the eras like the Cretaceous or Jurassic, plus genetically engineered creatures from the future!, accidentally wander through these rifts into our present time and wreak havoc. Series 3 moved in an interesting direction with the inclusion of an archaeologist/historian on the team and the acknowledgment of the existence of these rifts in the past as well as the present. Despite the interesting premise, the characters spend most of their time with weaponry, attempting to take down various rapacious dinosaurs while keeping the whole thing from the public.

[5.2] The program’s soft reboots intrigue me. Series 2 rebooted from series 1 by putting Nick Cutter (played by Douglas Henshall) in a slightly different alternate reality. Not only is his world different, with a sudden expansion of the team’s offices, power, and tactical support, but the woman he has just realized he loves, Claudia Brown, is now named Jenny Lewis, and she has no memory of him (both characters are played by Lucy Brown). He has to play along to fit in. The reboot meant a character change, if not a cast change—the cast change happens in series 3.

[5.3] The best thing about the reboot is the character’s memory of it. It’s not like a Dallas reboot, for example, when everything was revealed to be a dream, or a Star Trek–type reboot, where life-changing events can be unwritten because it was a holofantasy, or because alien technology removes the characters’ memories. What are the repercussions of suddenly moving into a new reality? And what does this say about the nature of world? Unfortunately the show doesn’t deal with these intriguing questions in any real depth, but I have respect for the attempts to present the possibility in terms of the show’s established logic. Not only do we have different times, both past and future, but we have different worlds, as well as a rogue character attempting to change the past.

6. Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sarah Jane Adventures

[6.1] Although in my remarks I mentioned Doctor Who and its two spinoffs, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures, as shows that should be on everybody’s must-watch list, I didn’t talk about them at length because none of them is currently airing regular series eps. DW and TW are both showing five specials this year, and although a season 3 for SJA is planned, as far as I can tell, it won’t air until 2010.

[6.2] These three texts form an interesting metatext: the Doctor unites all these shows, even though he doesn’t appear in TW and SJA. The shows share the same universe and presumably the same canon, and events that occur in one series may reverberate into another. These shows are particularly successful at creating stand-alone worlds of their own, so it’s not necessary, for example, to see SJA to understand Sarah Jane’s presence in DW 4.13 “Journey’s End.” But if you’ve seen SJA, the DW ep has a particular piquancy. DW was my first fandom, and I’m delighted that it takes three shows, with three very different sensibilities, to explore the DW universe’s rich metatext.

7. Image credits

1. Demons image from the show’s Web site: http://www.itv.com/drama/cult/demons/.

2. Merlin image from the show’s Web site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/merlin/.

3. Ashes to Ashes image from the show’s Web site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ashestoashes/.

4. Primeval image from TV.com: http://www.tv.com/primeval/show/68346/viewer.html?ii=1&grti=101&gri=68346&flag=1