Have you missed me? Is anyone still there? I’m pondering something new.
Hey
29 Friday Apr 2022
Posted Announcements
in29 Friday Apr 2022
Posted Announcements
in23 Monday Mar 2015
Posted Geekery
inTags
books, Edith Nesbit, entertainment, Frances Hodgson Burnett, James Thurber, knowledge gaps, literature, movies, nerds, NPR, npr pchh, pop culture happy hour, popular culture, popular music, thinking, whimsy
My laptop died in December. For the past three months, I have been enjoying the benefits of having a laptop that isn’t ancient. For instance, I can now consistently open PDFs.
Even better, I can once again access the iTunes store, with its glorious array of free and bank-draining possibilities.
I can finally act on the repeated recommendation from a friend to check out a podcast from NPR called “Pop Culture Happy Hour.” And oh boy, do I love it.
Now, due to a quirk resulting from some kind of change to the technical aspects of NPR’s podcast distribution in the past few months, most of my NPR podcasts suddenly decided to download all or most of the past few years’ archives. That was a bit annoying when it came to Fresh Air (I enjoy it well enough, but not THAT much), but when it came to PCHH, it’s great fun.
One of the things I like about it is that they theme the episodes, which are usually divided into three acts. The final act is always the same – “What’s Making Us Happy This Week” – but the first two are sometimes both discussions, and sometimes one is a discussion and the second is a funny quiz.
Anyway, some of the archived episodes I’ve been listening to have me thinking about the subject of popular culture knowledge gaps.
There are things we take for granted, assuming that everyone knows them as well as we do. Often it’s heavily dependent on what popular culture we’re exposed to as children, and at some level, we are still those kids who think that this is what everyone sees, reads, and listens to, and then we’re startled when we encounter someone who doesn’t know those songs, stories, and characters.
In my way of thinking, these gaps fall into a few overlapping categories.
1. Lack of knowledge
If you simply aren’t aware of something, you will naturally have that as a gap. That happened (and still happens) to me a lot. I didn’t grow up in a tv-watching household, so when my friends talked about Nickelodeon, the Siimpsons, South Park, Friends, or Buffy (to name a few), I usually either stared blankly or went off into my happy place until they finished. There was a guy who sat near me in eighth grade history, though, who used to love to recount the entire plot of each week’s Simpsons episode to me in spite of my demonstrated lack of interest. Which leads me to…
2. Lack of interest
This manifests at a lot of levels. Sometimes it’s as simple as an individual production by an artist, or sometimes it’s the artist’s entire body of work. Sometimes it’s a genre or an entire category. For instance, keeping up with popular music has never been of particular interest to me. So I don’t. If I encounter a song that I like, I listen to it, but I don’t put any effort into finding new music. There’s so much entertainment and popular cultural works out there that it’s impossible to consume more than the tiniest fraction in our lifetimes – why spend your time and energy on something that just doesn’t capture your interest?
3. Lack of access
Sometimes there are things you would follow if you could, but maybe you don’t have the right channels on your TV, or the funds to expend on pursuing the cultural thread in question, or the rules of your family don’t allow it, like Lane Kim on Gilmore Girls being forbidden to listen to rock music. Then again, maybe that’s not a good example, because she finds a way to listen anyway.
4. Lack of time
Like I said earlier, there’s so much out there in the popular culture realm, created before, during, and likely to be produced after our lifetimes. Even if you spent all your time reading, you’d never read all the books in the world. Same goes for movies, or tv, or comics, or sporting events, or music, or live performances. We all have to pick and choose and accept the fact that we’re barely going to graze the surface of what’s out there.
The kinds of gaps I’m describing here are interlocking. For instance, my lack of interest in pursuing popular music means I have a distinct lack of knowledge in the area.
Here are some of my gaps, other than popular music, of which I am aware. At the moment, I’d say mostly my choices are determined by category 2 – most of my gaps are simply due to lack of interest. For the same reason, I am rarely able to categorize my interests by genre. I follow what interests me.
1. Superman franchise
2. Batman franchise
3. Basically anything from the DC Comics universe. I’ve got some on Marvel, thanks to the past decade’s films, but I never really got into comics.
4. Manga
5. Anime
6. Most sports. I get a kick out of watching the Olympics (winter and summer) and sometimes watching bits of the World Series, but the rest of it just doesn’t hold my attention.
7. Most in the paranormal/supernatural area of stories
Some gaps I’ve discovered in others that brought me up short, and that help me to understand my own quirks:
1. Dickens novels
2. 1930s/1940s Hollywood classics/memorable actors and their roles
3. James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks (nobody EVER gets my references, and it makes me sad)
4. Tudor history
5. Classic English children’s literature from around 100 years ago (think Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, etc.)
6. Original literature versions of things Disney has mangled into syrupy, sanitized animations
7. Lord of the Rings
15 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted Personal
inTags
comedy, dating, exasperation, hashtags, men, okcupid, online dating, personal, relationships, twitter, whimsy, women
I’ve been single for an embarrassingly long time. I’m not going to say how long, but I count it in years and I need more than one hand’s worth of fingers.
So about a year and a half ago, I joined OkCupid. I’d join something like Match.com, but I figured it was a good idea to test out this online dating thing for free, and also I’m not desperate enough to make online dating a necessary-expenditure budget line. Yet.
I’ve gone on a handful of first dates, I’ve gone on more than one date with a few people, and ended up dating one person for a few months. To those who would say that this contradicts my opening statement that I’ve been single for years, I’d just like to clarify that I define not-single as having had The Talk with one’s significant other in order to Define The Relationship. Specifically, the words boyfriend and girlfriend (or something along those lines) should enter common usage.
Anyway. Online dating is weird. On the one hand, I like it, because everyone understands the aim of the interactions. I’m kind of dense when it comes to such things – until the last year or so, my instinctive response to “Do you want to get a cup of coffee” would be to tell the guy that I don’t drink coffee. Not the point of the question.
I have a hard time telling when someone is interested in me. Usually I can only tell when the person gets interested to the point of making me uncomfortable, and that sends me running for the hills. I have nobody to blame for my single status other than myself, really.
The thing about online dating that made me nervous, though, is that one hears such horrifying stories of the creeps and pervy comments and all that.
Which leads me to a strange aspect of my experience.
I’ve had interactions that were odd, and a lot that left me distinctly underwhelmed, but none that were actually gross or creepy or pervy. I’m really not sure how to take this. A lot of me is relieved, of course, but it also has me wondering why I’ve been so lucky as to not experience that part of it. I have three theories.
1. Continuation of aforementioned cluelessness. Maybe I’m just not noticing. Though I think I would, based on some of the stories I’ve heard. Sounds pretty difficult to miss.
2. A lot of my friends, and my male friends in particular, STILL feel a need to “protect” me from bad language or dirty jokes. And to some extend I appreciate this, as excessive swearing is unappealing to me, but I’m no nun. I enjoy racy humor as much as the next person. But I think somehow I radiate a level of innocence that brings out a protective urge, I guess – I don’t tend to swear, and I don’t tell dirty jokes, so people don’t think I can take it. Maybe I’m doing that online, too.
3. Maybe I’m just not physically attractive enough to attract such attention, which is probably a good thing.
That said, I’m having fun using Twitter to comment on the encounters I do have. I call my intermittent series “Dear #okcupid guys,” and it’s kind of like Jon Stewart’s “come with me to Camera 3” thing. I amuse myself, at least!
I leave you with a selection (a.k.a. most of) my tweets from that series.
Dear #okcupid guys, the greeting “hi there” is really starting to get on my nerves. Be more creative.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) January 1, 2015
Im sick of #OKCupid… The Cupid that so many lonely people rely upon should at least be a #SlightlyBetterThanAverageCupid.
— bryan green (@GreeBry) December 26, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, here’s something to ponder – until we actually meet, your profile and your messages are your only chance to impress.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 27, 2014
dear @okcupid guys, here is an example of what NOT to write as your entire first message. “Hi. We have a good match percentage.”
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) November 7, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, today my 3.5yo niece asked when I’m getting married. So get it together. I’ve got a stubborn toddler expecting results.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 21, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, when you ask a question a) I already answered and b) my answer is the basis for our conversation, I delete your message.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 21, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PROOFREAD.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 19, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, you are not a 13 year old girl who is texting. Please spell out your words. Srsly.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 16, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, ending a single question with eleven question marks is excessive. I will delete your message.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 14, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, when curiosity is piqued, you’re expressing interest. When you are piqued, you’re annoyed. Proper word usage matters.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) December 6, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, the crotch shot is bad. the picture of you GRABBING your crotch is worse.
–Elspeth (@lunabrd) November 27, 2014
Dear #okcupid guys, if you live in a different country from me and your opening message is “hey there,” I’m not going to answer. Ever.
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) November 15, 2014
dear okcupid guys: messages of 10 words or less involving no questions do not make me want you. #onlinedating #thissucks
— Elspeth (@lunabrd) November 4, 2014
08 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted Bloggy Book Club
inTags
bloggy book club, books, comedy, diaries, entertainment, Maggie Smith, Mel Brooks, Michael Palin, Monty Python, movies, reading for fun, whimsy
Wednesday, October 17, 1981
…Give the manager one of my complimentary tickets to Mel Brooks’ History of the World, which is having a glossy preview at 11.30.
Find myself sitting next to Harold Evans, editor of the Times. He seems to be very anxious to please asking me what I’m doing, as if he knows me. Make some jokes about the SDP, then he admits that he does think they are a very sensible lot. This, together with a propensity to do the right thing by clapping whenever Mel Brooks appears on the screen, makes me suspect him. Surely Times editors should be made of harder stuff?
The film is dreadful. Having dispensed early on with any claim to historical accuracy or authenticity and any exceptional attention to visual detail, the whole thing depends on the quality of the gags. And the quality is poor. It’s like a huge, expensive, grotesquely-inflated stand-up act. A night club act with elephantiasis.
I return from my book reporting hiatus to tell you a little about the first 200 pages of the book I’ve chosen to start 2015. Halfway to Hollywood: Michael Palin’s Diaries, 1980-1988 is exactly what it sounds like.
Comedian, writer, actor, and traveler extraordinaire Michael Palin has, over the last few years, started publishing (presumably edited) collections of his diaries from different parts of his life. I own the first section, which covers the bulk of the Monty Python years, but hadn’t realized more were available until a search for something else at my local library brought this up by accident.
The diaries aren’t scandalous, and the gossip is actually kept to a relatively low level. In the first volume of his diaries, Palin records that he took up a daily diary entry as one way of helping himself break a smoking habit not long before filming of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” began. And these really have a daily diary kind of feel – he often records when he got up, where he went on his daily running excursions, and how various meetings with colleagues, business managers, and medical professionals went. A lot of it is very everyday information, which reassures me that he hasn’t done much, or any, after-the-fact editing to hype up the excitement level.
When I was in middle school, “Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail” was the cool movie. Some kids had their favorite member of a band, or a favorite member of a sports team. I had a favorite Python.
I thought John Cleese was screamingly funny. I was fascinated by his seeming ability to flip a switch and go from calm, even supercilious, to apoplectic fury in an instant. I loved his look-down-one’s-nose biting sarcasm.
I still like Cleese’s style, and indeed I can’t really say I dislike any of the Pythons (though I also can’t say I’ve ever really “gotten” Terry Gilliam’s bizarre cartoons). The older I get, though, the more I find I prefer the gentler style of Michael Palin.
When I think over the “Flying Circus” show, most of the sketches I like best involve Palin, from the Argument Clinic to Blackmail. I like his subsequent work, too, especially the travel shows.
I think one of the reasons I enjoy Palin’s diaries so much is because I like getting a view into the process of entertainment, the gears and cogs that work behind the scenes to make what we enjoy. I’m up to the middle of 1982 in this volume, and Palin has just finished filming “The Missionary,” a quirky film for which he wrote the screenplay AND filled the lead role (Maggie Smith, of all people, plays the female lead). I think it’s interesting to get a peek at how a movie gets made, from initial idea to presentation in cinemas. Of course this is an extremely simplified view, but it’s still interesting.
The diaries read a little like those travel shows’ narrations, actually. Palin is factual and interested in everything. He genuinely enjoys himself and is sorry to leave a place or a project, but he’s also eager to see what’s coming around the bend. And I like his sense of humor, which is quirky and rarely offends, but has an occasional bite to it. And I like that he seems to slip it in there and move quickly on to the next thing, before you’ve entirely realized the depth of the joke.
It’s no wonder that some people call him “Britain’s Nicest Man.” Of all the Pythons, he seems like someone who’d be genuinely fun and not at all stressful to know.
And as regards the above quotation, I have to say I feel totally vindicated. I didn’t much like “History of the World, Part One” either.
25 Thursday Dec 2014
Tags
ancestry, ancestry.com, complications, family, family history, history, in brief, nerds, research, so cool, whimsy
When I was little, I went to an elementary school that was pretty diverse. It’s actually MORE diverse now – something like 20 languages represented – but it was pretty diverse when I went there.
Once a year, we had a special day called International Day. There were performances of music and dance from around the world, and parents representing different home cultures gave presentations to the classes on where they came from. I remember the Japanese and Indian parents always looked nicest in their outfits, but the Persian moms had the best treats. Students and staff were encouraged to wear outfits representing their heritage, from traditional ethnic costumes to the librarian’s dress made to look like she was wearing a giant Union Jack.
My brother and I didn’t have traditional outfits on hand, and it would have been hard to choose which of our ancestral branches to represent, so our mother made us t-shirts that looked roughly like this:
It was a cute t-shirt, a creative idea, and it got the point across – we are Northern European mutts.
As it turns out, it’s a bit more complicated.
This year for my birthday, my parents gave me six months’ access to ancestry.com. From what I’ve found so far, the t-shirt should have been modified a little…
Mom’s side should include:
Dad’s side should include:
01 Monday Sep 2014
Posted Bloggy Book Club
inTags
austen, bloggy book club, books, chaucer, dickens, entertainment, in brief, literature, nerds, poll, trollope, whimsy
19 Saturday Jul 2014
Posted Bloggy Book Club
inTags
bloggy book club, book review, books, carpe diem, devan sipher, entertainment, literature, romance, the scenic route, whimsy
She wanted Austin to feel better and come back to school. She missed seeing him on the bus. She missed Mandy too. But she missed Austin more. The first time she ever saw him was at the bus stop, and she thought he was the cutest boy she had ever seen. She thought he was even cuter than Ricky Schroder. Mandy said she needed new glasses.
But Mandy had still given her one of Austin’s school pictures. Naomi had taped it on the face of her Ken doll, and she put on a poolside wedding for Barbie and Austin/Ken. But the photo kept falling off, and Naomi was worried it was going to fall into the pool. So Naomi had taped the photo above the fireplace in her Barbie Dreamhouse.
I picked an uncorrected proof of The Scenic Route at ALA a few weeks ago. I should start by saying that this is not a deep book. It is fluffy fun. It has “rom-com film” written all over it.
That said, it has more depth, more sorrow, than I had anticipated.
The basic premise is this: Naomi Bloom had a crush on her friend Mandy Gittleman’s elder brother Austin in elementary school. When Austin and Mandy’s father died suddenly in a surfing accident and their family moved away, Naomi lost touch with them both. Naomi and Austin reconnect years later at the wedding of mutual friends. At first they bicker. In an argument clearly staged by author Devan Sipher to Set Things Up, the two characters argue over philosophical differences about whether or not wrong turns exist. Naomi and Austin end up hooking up that night.
Then there follow years of missed connections and missed opportunities. I haven’t done the math on how much time the book actually covers, but it has to be at least four years, if not more.
The secondary story follows Austin’s sister Mandy, who starts the book as a doctoral candidate in anthropology studying sexual coercion in primates. She struggles academically and wanders in and out of what I think could be described as dysfunctional codependent romantic relationships, and ends in a crisis that spreads to her brother and many other characters. I can’t say more without giving away crucial plot points.
Author Devan Sipher is apparently also the author of the New York Times “Vows” wedding column, so the world of romance and marriage is clearly not strange to him.
So it’s like I said earlier. This is not Great Literature, but rather a fun and easy read that still provokes some thought about wrong turns, the road not travelled, and the consquences of choices we make. Impulse control – the danger of having too much or not having enough – is also a recurring theme.
Sipher has a gift for clear, visual writing. His descriptions are easy to imagine, such as a funny scene in which Austin, impulsively deciding he ought to follow Naomi back to Miami instead of flying back home to Detroit after their one night together, cannot do so because the door of the airport men’s room stall jams. He tries climbing over, and he tries crawling under, only to get stuck halfway through.
Sipher writes romance without being sappy, speckled with appealing glints of humor like a quick wink across a banquet table. I appreciate any story I can’t predict – I knew that the genre meant a certain end for Austin and Naomi, but the twists and turns along the way took me by surprise.
The Scenic Route is a new release, and for a fun read, I thoroughly recommend it.
Next up: Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
25 Wednesday Jun 2014
Posted Announcements, Bloggy Book Club, books, writing
inTags
announcements, audiobooks, blog project, bloggy book club, books, elspeth huxley, post-college recovery, reading, the flame trees of thika, thinking, whimsy, writing
A blog project is coming to its end!
To my great relief, my attempt at a year in photos has only one week left. I admit, I’ve fudged dates a bit here and there, but it has always been at least seven photos a week, even if I sometimes missed a few days. And it’s nearly over. Huzzah!
But then, of course, I’m going to need a new project. If I don’t have something focusing my thoughts, I forget to post.
I’ve done the Best Picture Project. I’ve done week-in-photos (the final week will feature photographs from the ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas, for which I leave tomorrow morning). What to do next?
In the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of time to listen to audiobooks while working or while chasing squirrels away from the apricot tree – the latter is a WHOLE other tangent I’m not going to follow right now – and I found a lecture series at the library that was quite interesting.
Created by The Teaching Company, the 84 lectures of “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition” start with the epic of Gilgamesh and end with “Waiting for Godot,” by Samuel Beckett. The professors delivering the lectures place the authors and the literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, examining elements of a master-work by the author, and showing how it fits into the Western literary tradition. They’re half-hour lectures, so it’s not like these are definitive, and it’s only about 80 authors over a few thousand years, so many are left out.
But it was interesting to me and it got me thinking – why not make a concerted effort to write about reading over the next year?
As soon as I learned to read, I was one of those kids who would devour books. I read the Harry Potter books the first day they came out, often within the first 24 hours. I couldn’t get enough. In college and grad school, so much of my schoolwork involved reading, hours upon hours of reading, that in my down time I couldn’t face the prospect of more printed text. I started watching more videos, listening to more audiobooks, and so on.
While I have no intention of ceasing to watch videos or listen to audiobooks, I am a year out of
grad school and I am working on trying to reincorporate leisure reading into my daily life.
So this year, I’m setting myself a blog project of writing about reading. There will be at least one book per month that I’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t read yet. There may be a few that I’m re-reading for the first time in a while. And I’ll write about it. I doubt I’ll go deep into literary or historical analysis (though there may be a little – after eight years of college-level education, I can’t give up ALL my academic leanings). I expect I’ll write more about my reactions to the books, and my thoughts on the experience.
Before I start each new book, I’ll make sure to announce it, in case you’d like to read along with it. Indeed, I hope you do, and post your thoughts in the comments here. It could be like a bloggy book club. Wouldn’t that be fun?
The first book will be Elspeth Huxley’s memoir The Flame Trees of Thika. It was a BBC adaptation of this book, back in the 1980s, that provided my parents with my name.
15 Sunday Jun 2014
Posted Week in Photos
inTags
apricots, books, crafting, entertainment, flowers, garden, home, lavender wands, photos, television, television history, week in photos, whimsy
This gallery contains 7 photos.
04 Wednesday Jun 2014
Posted Geekery, television
inTags
dramedy, ending, entertainment, finales, imagination, nerds, sad, television, Warehouse 13, whimsy
I’ve been avoiding writing about the final episodes of WAREHOUSE 13, mostly because that means accepting that it has ended. It seems the show ended because of budget, not because of poor ratings. I believe this, if only because of the expense of props and costumes alone. Add in the other production costs in on top of that, and their budget must have been astronomical.
Then again, quality shows. The care and attention to detail shown in each episode, in each item that appears, even if it’s not featured in the episode, is remarkable. The actors have said in interviews that the physical Warehouse sets were lined with artifacts on shelves, each with its own label with fully fleshed-out identification, from the provenance of the artifact to its effects, both good and bad. Some of the props were truly works of art, like Rheticus’ compass, or the Farnsworth communication devices, or the Tesla guns.
This show has hit home for me in a way I didn’t expect or even notice, at first. I’m trained as a historian and an archival librarian – I initially fell in love with this show because it’s the science fiction version of my line of work. In ensemble shows, there’s usually a character who’s annoying, whose plotlines hold your attention less than others. For me, WAREHOUSE 13 did not have anyone who fit that description.
But it’s more than that. In a post a while back, I tried to describe visiting the ruins of Kenilworth, while on an overseas studies trip in college. I felt that if I closed my eyes and listened hard enough, I might be able to hear faint whispers of the people and animals who had once lived there. WAREHOUSE 13 is built on a similar premise. The idea is that objects – some famous, some everyday – become imbued with an energy sort of power by people and moments of great emotion. The object can then influence people who subsequently use or possess the item. It can give them paranormal capabilities, like telekinesis, or enhance normal qualities, like strength or charisma. It can influence behavior, magnify emotions, and frequently, cause great harm. Using Magellan’s astrolabe can turn back time 24 hours, but it causes a psychotic break in the user. Carlo Collodi’s bracelet can give movement back to someone who’s paralyzed, but it slowly drains away their humanity.
Science fiction, of course, but I sometimes think that the archival materials I handle are a little like that. It’s this sense of connection to all the people who’ve owned it or handled it before me. Handling the journals of Denise Levertov or a letter by John Steinbeck in which he mentions a dog eating part of a manuscript of OF MICE AND MEN gives the finished products of those minds more solidity to me. It’s no longer words on a page and books on a shelf. It’s a person, a three-dimensional person, who’s speaking to me through them. Sarah Vowell writes about this phenomenon in ASSASSINATION VACATION, in which she visits a museum to see an exhibit featuring items from one of the assassinated presidents she studied, and says she suddenly feels crowded in the empty room as she thinks about the president, the killer, the witnesses, police, museum curators, carpenters, interns, and so forth, who have all played a role in making the exhibit available. WAREHOUSE 13 takes it one step further and says, what if it wasn’t just my romanticizing tendencies? What if it wasn’t just my imagination?
Finale seasons and finale episodes are tricky. No matter what you do to resolve the story, someone’s going to be annoyed. Some times are worse than others – look at all the yelling online about the HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER series finale, or the epilogue to HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS.
There are different types of finales, just as there are different types of pilot episodes. There’s the apocalyptic crisis with main character deaths, as in ENTERPRISE. There’s the option to come full circle, back to an issue from the pilot, as in STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION or HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER. There’s the end of a journey or the closing of a major chapter in a life, such as a long-time love affair or the changing of a job – three examples of these are STAR TREK: VOYAGER, CHEERS, and THE WEST WING. Statistical outliers are shows like THE SOPRANOS, which famously just, well, ended. Screen went black, leaving thousands to wonder if their cable had cut out.
I expected WAREHOUSE 13 to take the apocalyptic route. The next-to-last episode showed the warehouse beginning to move to its new location, to create Warehouse 14 under the direction of the alternate-universe and morally bankrupt Benedict Valda, who was in turn telepathic puppet-master to the Warehouse 14 Caretaker Claire Donovan. The agents stopped it, banished Valda back to his timeline and freed Claire from the influence of all artifacts, but the artifacts that move the warehouse had not returned to dormancy.
I expected at least one main character to die. I hoped that they would be deaths with a purpose, rather than a gratuitous, shock-value death (I still resent the death of Wash in SERENITY, and I’m not alone in that). I expected destruction and mayhem and that the series would end with the beginnings of rebuilding once again.
What I got, instead, was something quietly, beautifully powerful. There was no big apocalypse, no world-imperiling artifact to snag, bag, and tag. That story’s in the penultimate episode. The finale brought the scope back home, to the main characters, as the mysterious Caretaker Mrs. Frederic asked each of the agents to contribute memories to the Warehouse time capsule. Each character got a moment to show a “best moment” in Warehouse service. Claudia’s doubts about her destiny, Mrs. Frederic’s promise to Leena, Artie’s and Pete’s fears that this home that brings out the best of them is about to be forcibly removed, Myka’s and Pete’s developing relationship, and Steve’s finally finding inner peace all had a place, and all were handled well. Even the relationship between Myka and Pete, which I’m not totally sure was necessary, worked well, and wasn’t overdone.
Some of the characters in the show mentioned a smell of apples when the Warehouse truly accepted them and welcomed them home. The finale was like that smell – delicate and almost fragile, but simple and comforting all the same. You have to handle it gently so that it doesn’t break or slip away.
I’m going to miss WAREHOUSE 13 and I anticipate revisiting it frequently. It spoke to me in a way that other shows, even ones that I’ve liked tremendously, haven’t. It was, in truth, a world of endless wonder.