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Monday Media Musings - 6/13/22
Hadestown: I've long been curious about this musical, and after a couple of postponements, it's finally come to San Francisco. I don't usually listen to album versions of musicals I don't know (Hamilton being the big exception), so I wasn't familiar with the music at all, and knew very little else beyond it being a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. It's a brilliant show -- strong cast, both acting and musically, excellent music, beautiful production values. It's interesting watching this so close on the heels of playing Hades, which isn't really an Orpheus and Eurydice retelling, but it does focus strongly on the romance between Hades and Persephone, which is the main secondary plot of Hadestown. To be honest, I think I prefer how the game set up their story and resolved it. In the musical, I thought Hades's redemption came a little too easily, especially since his sins were much worse -- forcing Persephone to come home before she was ready, setting all the souls to hard labor, luring Eurydice into his domain. But then Orpheus sings his song and it's all better? I'm not entirely convinced. Whereas in the game, Hades lets Persephone go, and when she does come back, it's clear that they're having a slow reconciliation with a lot of negotiation and compromise. I should do some reading on Hadestown and what the storytellers were intending their message to be, as well as other takes on how people read it.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: I've watched the first episode. It was good, and yet somehow I'm not compelled to pick up the next one. Am I done with purely episodic Trek? But I liked Lower Decks. I've heard so much positive buzz about this one that I'm sure I should just keep going. Anyone have thoughts (no spoilers please)? Not sure why I'm so uninspired by it. (I do know why I'm not super inspired by the first two episodes of Picard Season 2, but that's a different topic, and I'll get back to it later.)
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Some of my thoughts about it:
* I love the diversity of the main cast—includes only two white men, and one of those is only half human. (I mean, Discovery goes significantly further than that; but even so, I feel like SNW is doing a good job on that front.) Lots of good solid women in the main cast.
* Especially La'an Noonien-Singh; I find her fascinating, and I like her a lot.
* Also especially Christine Chapel, who is awesome.
* Also especially Number One/Una.
* Also especially Erica Ortegas, the hotshot pilot with the side of her head shaved—we haven’t seen enough of her yet, but I love what we’ve seen.
* Pike is sort of a kinder gentler Kirk figure. I was a little slow to warm to him in Discovery because I was worried they were going to trick us yet again, but at this point I like him a lot. He’s got a bit of the manly action thing going on, which usually doesn’t appeal to me, but he solidly trusts, and listens to, the women he’s surrounded by. And he cares about emotional health, and … I feel like TV has suddenly started showing us a spate of less-toxic white male leads (Pike, Ted Lasso, Clark in _Superman and Lois_, arguably Picard, etc), and I am totally here for that trend. (I’ve heard some criticism of SNW for putting yet another Manly White Man in the captain’s chair, and I get that. I get really tired of shows where the writers inexplicably think that the straight white man is the most interesting character. But for me, in this show, Pike is almost subversive in his level of untoxicity, and I think the writers are very willing to focus at least as much on the other characters as on Pike.)
* Spock is growing on me, and if I close my eyes he sounds a lot like Nimoy.
* I feel like Uhura is a little disappointing so far, but I expect they’ll do a lot more with her.
* I normally don’t like planet-of-the-week at all. But I feel like they’re doing it in a way that somehow works for me.
* Friends justifiably raised disability concerns about Pike’s “woe is me, the man I am will be dead” schtick in ep 1. Fortunately, the show has pretty much dropped that thread in subsequent episodes—I’m sure it’ll be back later, but they’re not harping on it as much as they did in ep 1.
* The writing, especially the dialogue, just feels nicely polished to me. I don’t know how better to describe it, except that Kam and I were really unhappy with _Picard_ s2, and we segued from that directly into SNW ep 1, and we were hugely relieved at how much better we both felt the writing on SNW was. It gave us a lot of trust in the SNW writers.
* Ep 3 of SNW didn’t really work for me, though I forget why at this point. But I’ve liked all the other eps so far.
* We particularly enjoyed ep 5, “Spock Amok,” which was almost a different genre from the rest of the series so far—mostly a fun comedy. I would absolutely not have predicted that I would enjoy a comedy episode focused on Spock, but I really did.
Anyway, I doubt that SNW will supplant Discovery as my favorite Trek; despite what I feel have been some missteps in DSC, it still does a bunch of things that I really love. But SNW could well end up being my second-favorite.
…But I’ve completely bounced off of Lower Decks twice now, so your Trek tastes and mine might just be very different.
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I meant to reply to this much longer ago -- apologies for the delay! I think I might have overstated my aversion to watching the rest of SNW; I did enjoy the first episode, but I wasn't prioritizing watching the next one. I think the real answer might have been Star Trek fatigue; I watched two seasons of Discovery in a couple of weeks, and T and I had watched all of Lower Decks in the space of about a month, and then the first three or four episodes of Picard S2, and so the idea of watching yet more Star Trek was not inspiring, no matter how good it might be.
I've now seen the first three episodes of SNW and liked them all, although I think I agree with you that the third one was the weakest of those. I do intend to watch the rest, but will probably go more slowly, in part because I think T and I may give up on Picard (which is not doing much for us) and switch to this.