EPISODE 613: BAD PANDA
This is going to take a long time, and I wonder what's mine.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
So this was me writing this last week:
Yeah. 1000 kinds of yikes.
Someone I follow said later he wasn’t even bothered by Chadwick Boseman being overlooked, because he knew Boseman himself was a lot more interested in doing good than being recognized for it. Which is a much more solid takeaway than my rage panda.
All of which is to say, apologies. Let me know the cost of that keyboard, you guys.
Hopkins winning allowed us to get this video of him at home, which one tweeter aptly noted seems to indicate Hopkins actually lives in a postcard.
The New Yorker also did a very fine interview with Hopkins in anticipation of the Oscars. A quote from it:
As the years have gone by, I’ve thought, Drop the act. There’s nothing to be angry about. You’re lucky to be alive. It was just insecurity, fear, ambition. Misplaced paranoia, probably. But when you’re young that’s what you have to accept. I see young kids these days, and they try to be cool, but you can see beneath the mask that they’re not cool. They’re as scared as anyone else is. To admit that we are afraid is a wonderful freedom. Everything is important, but, finally, nothing is important. It’s all smoke. I look back on my life and think, Was it all a dream? Everyone I know is dead now. My parents are gone, and I think, Did they really exist? I’m going into metaphysics, in a way—the solipsistic universe we live in. But I look back over my life and think, The past is incomprehensible. I don’t grasp it at all.
Yeah, it’s marvelous.
(Note: If you haven’t seen The Father, and don’t want it to be spoiled, I highly recommending skipping from the question that begins “In ‘The Father,’ you play a man with advanced dementia…” to “So much of this movie is about the Olivia Colman character and the difficulty that she has caring for an older parent. Is that something that rang true to you as a son?”)
BURN.
I’ve mentioned many times in the last year that a main thing I’ve done to cope during the pandemic is watch old shows I loved. I started with The Wire and Parks & Rec (because it seemed like everyone was starting with The Wire and Parks & Rec). Then I went to Halt and Catch Fire, Happy Valley and the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who.
Along the way I was also folding in new shows that I’d heard about but never caught—Gentleman Jack, The Deuce and now Pose – and British detective shows (which I’ve written about here so much it really should be a drinking game).
Somewhere early on I had the idea that I’d start each night’s TV with an episode from one of two favorite scifi shows -- Babylon 5, which is sort of Deep Space Nine meets Lord of the Rings – and Fringe, which is basically The X-Files but with something different than aliens at the center, and a lot more discipline in the writing.
(I’d say what that different thing is, but I love that show so much that even now I would not want to ruin it.)
Both shows had five seasons, with actual real five year plans from the start —for realsies, not Lost-ies. And while both hit some bumps in their last seasons, their overall executions were super strong. It’s ridiculous how few episodes end up feeling like filler.
Sometimes I went back and forth between the two shows night to night. Sometimes I spent a week on one, or even worked through a big part of a season, then went to the other. My one rule was I only watched one episode per day. And so I ended up watching the shows pretty much every night for 210 days.
And as of Friday, when I finished Fringe, it’s all over.
I love that I put that on its own line, like it’s a big dramatic moment. That’s literally how I feel. Which is silly. It’s a TV show. Come on.
But I guess it feels like this every time I finish a great show, like I’m graduating from college and now I have to say goodbye to all my friends. Except if I ever went up to Joshua Jackson or Anna Torv and said how long it’s been and how’s Dr. Bishop and how happy I am to see them they would call security.
I love that about TV shows, really, I love that the characters become our friends and that we care about them and the actors within them that much. I think there’s something beautiful in that, about that sense of connection, this year the moreso.
Maybe in a show that we love we also get a taste of a life that we want. Although given that Fringe is a show about mad scientists, grief and EDITED SO AS NOT TO RUIN ANYTHING, not totally sure what that means for me….
(It’s a wonderful show about dealing with grief, actually. It doesn’t really play that card for a while, but once it does, wow does it come on strong. A show that asks you to appreciate the madness of grief and slowly you walks into a life beyond it.)
So what do you do after 210 days on the road with a couple shows? Do you take a beat, try to process the journeys you’ve taken and listen for what comes next?
Or do you jump right into the next thing (he says, having spent three hours tonight watching the pilot of Battlestar Galactica, it’s so good, you guys!)?
Can I also say how strange it is that these shows are coming to end at the same time a lot is changing and ending relative to the pandemic? It’s like everything is changing all together. Not a bad thing, but a whole lot to process.
What even is life now?
Speaking of Things You Do in College/To Avoid Impossible Existential Questions:
And also:
LIL SEBASTIAN LIVES!
At the end of the first episode of the last season of Fringe, as the team tries to reunite after some very crazy stuff has happened, one of the main characters can’t sleep. It’s a tough time for him.
He gets distracted by these flickering lights and goes outside to try and see what they are. What follows is for me a perfect moment of television, a great image of the last year. And also right now.
There’s beauty in the ruins. We just might need to take a little time to let it come into view.
See you next week.