I finished reading Other People We Married by Emma Straub this morning. Very well written literary stories, mostly about unhappy people in bad relationships who are on the verge of making decisions about how to change their situations. Reminded me a lot of Owen King’s collection, We’re All in This Together, mostly in the way the stories ended. Like French films where the credits start rolling before you’re ready for the story to end.
Next up: The Snowman by Jo Nesbø. I also finished reading the first round of stories for the contest I’m judging and submitted my top ten. Number one was an easy choice. Then there were a few good stores, and a handful of okay stories. Once all the other top ten lists are in, I’ll get to read their selections as well and formulate a new top ten list. Presumably this will be harder.
We watched Country Strong on Friday evening. I’m not a big fan of country music, but I like Gwyneth Paltrow and had heard decent things about the film. It’s not a bad story. The usual down-and-out recovery tale with a slightly surprising conclusion. I had a few questions after the movie was over. It was no mystery why Kelly Canter (cantor: a person who leads a choir or the musical part of a service) was drinking heavily in the present part of the story, but there was no explanation what caused her to be such a raging alcoholic earlier that she fell off the stage during a concert, with a blood alcohol level of nearly 0.2. Were we meant to infer from her final conversation with the young ingénue that she recognized the girl’s secrets because they weren’t so far from her own? Her childhood looked idyllic, but many people’s do. To my mind, the character who was “country strong” and the backbone of the film was really Beau. However, we knew absolutely nothing about him other than the fact that he liked playing in small joints and worked as an orderly in a rehab clinic, presumably to pay the bills. Tim McGraw (Faith Hill’s real-life husband) acquitted himself well as Canter’s husband, though his character was difficult to like most of the time. I wasn’t surprised by Kelly’s decision at the end, but I was surprised to see Chiles Stanton show up in the country bar because I was sure that once she experienced all that adulation on the stage in Dallas there was no way she’d be able to give that up. I like it when characters surprise me like that.
Season three of Fringe came to a rollicking conclusion the other night. We discovered more about Sam Weiss (Samwise, i.e. Sam Gamgee?) the previous week, and got to see his bowling skills in use when he stopped the security door in the museum (where he was a patron member since 1982. This week, the machine kicked in and we were shown a vision of our world fifteen years in the future where, apparently, young people age but adults like Olivia and Peter don’t. Olivia’s niece was old enough to be a rookie Fringe agent but Olivia and Peter, now husband and wife, looked identical to the way we knew them in 2011. Astrid, now a full-fledged Fringe agent (Walter: “Now that she no longer has to care for me, she’s able to spread her wings”) was rocking a new hair style and Broyles, now a senator, had a funky eye, perhaps as a result of “what we lost in Detroit.”
Turns out that you can’t destroy the alternate world without wreaking havoc on our own. “That was the day we died.” The End of Dayers were hoping to speed this along. The nominal leader was Moreau, played by Brad Dourif (Deadwood, Lord of the Rings), though he didn’t get much screen time and was actually working for Walternate, who escaped to our world at the last minute on a mission of peace only to be trapped here when the other side was swallowed by a worm hole. Now he’s determined to make sure the same thing happens here. Walter is back in confinement (“I didn’t realize how much I missed swivel chairs. I’ve also missed swiveling.”), the most reviled man in the universe because his actions caused the tumult that will bring about the end of existence. Olivia doesn’t want to have a child with Peter because of the world they would bring that child into. However, she has learned to master her telekinetic skills and is now the head of Fringe Division.
Most of the episode, though, turns out to be Walter’s message back to Peter in 2011 about the implications of the choice he is about to make. Walter is revealed to be one of the “first people,” possibly along with the other Fringe folk. He sends the machine back through the worm hole in Central Park to the Paleozoic era. Walternate is determined to make Peter pay for causing the end of his own universe, but slowly, by taking away all the things he loves, starting with…yikes. What a shot. The ensuing funeral reminded me of something straight out of Lost. The lighting, the camera angles, the flickering torches, even the score. “There aren’t any happy endings nowadays, are there?”
And then there’s the mind and time twisting deeds of the final few moments, when Peter gets Walter’s message and makes a new decision that brings both factions together. Walter faces Walternate. Olivia meets Fauxlivia. And Peter…huh? The observers explained what happened, and it was very last-season-Doctor Who. What does that mean for Fauxlivia’s son? How can they bring him back if no one knows to look for him? I sure hope the creators have some good answers up their sleeves for what they’ve wrought! A compelling cliff hanger leading to months of anguish as we wait for the resolution.
I wasn’t a huge fan of this week’s Doctor Who. It was okay, and I liked swashbuckling Amy, but I’d rather find out about the little girl we saw at the end of last week’s episode. I thought it was a big of a cheat to have the Doctor say (last week), we could either find out more about her or go off on some completely unrelated adventure. Also thought it was a little unfair to undo the fates of all those characters in this episode. I thought they were going all Torchwood on us and then took it all back. Creepy woman with robotic eyepatch is creepy though. During the Insider bit, Moffat said that having a villain who was both scary and sexy was a bonus. Lily Cole, the model who played the siren, has an otherworldly look about her. Next week, it’s the episode written by Neil Gaiman, which is supposed to have a lot to do with the TARDIS, I hear. The Graham Norton episode afterward with David Tennant and Catherine Tate was amusing.
