I don't know why. We had snow a couple of weeks ago. Proper blizzardy snow that turned to ice and hung around for days afterward. It's gone fairly mild now. That, coupled with the fact that the days are shorter than they've ever seemed to be (yeah, I'm aware that today is the winter solstice, but I'm talking about in the grand scheme of things; it's dark by about half three now - it was never that dark when I was a kid).
I've spent the morning writing out Christmas cards and wrapping presents and it still doesn't feel like Christmas (to add insult to injury, I've been listening to Christmas songs on 4Music, including all three versions of 'Do They Know It's Christmas' which should put me in a Christmassy mood at least).
So why? Well, I've been pondering the last year a lot this month. That's traditional, isn't it, you come up to a New Year, you reflect on where this year has taken you. And in my case, it's been overall a pretty bad year.
Pretty Good Year
You see, because although there was that six weeks or so or pure bliss when I was with Debra, the rest of the year has been unremittingly awful. I've had the Barley Mow Moving Debacle and the whole resultant fallout from that, my hideous relationship with Anne and the fallout from that and since Debra dumped me (unceremoniously by text, what is it with women dumping me by text?) I've just been plodding along with very little to keep me going. I'm going to be honest with you here; since Debra dumped me, my thoughts have been erring towards suicide again and nothing that has happened since has given me any pause to reconsider. Every girl (four or five of them) who I've contacted or been contacted by have either stopped emailing after a couple of times or have been so sporadic and such hard work that I have to stop and ask myself if it's worth the trouble (and that's before I go into the dozens of girls I've sent messages to who never even deigned to reply). The thing with Debra was that it was never hard work. If anything, everything came too easily between us. We clicked, very quickly on a very deep level. We understood each other on a sheer emotional basis. But then she dumps me. Either she never saw that in me or it was purely a one sided thing. I don't know.
But I think that might be the reason why Christmas is weighing so heavily on me this year. When we were going out, I thought that everything was falling into place and I did start thinking about what I was going to do for her for Christmas. I even went online to find out how much it would be to take her to London for a weekend break to see Les Miserables, her favourite musical. There was the expectation that we would be together at Christmas and for me at least, with my hapless record at relationships, it would have been my first Christmas with someone. (The same applies to New Year, I was fully expecting me and Debra to be sharing a New Year's kiss come midnight on the 31st.) As it is, I'll be spending it alone again. Yeah, alone. You see, although my mam will be there and Terry, and our Clare and Richie, I'll be alone. Florence and Terry will be off doing there own thing, Clare and Richie will come over, have lunch, hang around for a bit and then go off and do their own thing. I'll be left alone. I'll most likely spend the vast majority of the day in my bedroom, watching DVD's. Which is how I spend most of my days off anyway. So where's the specialness?
I'll be fucked if I know.
To be honest with you, I'm more looking forward to Christmas Eve again. This year our continuum, celebrating (well, the Inner Circle are anyway) something like twelve years of solid friendship. Emma and Haz will be have been seeing each other for ten years on Boxing Day. An entire decade. My longest relationship didn't even make it to the six week mark. I've had longer holidays.
But it's nice to see everyone again. And it's nice to just be able to chill out and get drunk. Sometimes, when I'm out like that, I can just forget myself.
"What A Rush!"
Some movies and TV shows and books and songs you have an opinion of and then later on, years sometimes, you go back to them and find your opinion has been completely changed. Other times you find that your opinion was perfectly sound the first time.
For instance; I never really loved TNG the first time round. Sure, I liked it. Some of it was even great. But mostly it was just incredibly beige. Worf's Klingon politics arc was dull, Picard wasn't a match for Captain Kirk and Wesley Crusher was just an annoyingly precocious little knob. Now? Picard is a far better captain than Kirk ever was (but Kirk is a much better character, perversely) - I found myself catching the end of The Wounded the other day, the fourth season TNG episode that introduced the Cardassians, one of the few new races TNG introduced that went on to bigger and better things (you can count the other on the fingers of one hand; the Bajorans, the Borg, Q). The plot goes thusly; a Starfleet captain has gone rogue, blowing up Cardassian ships here there and everywhere. Picard is assigned to go and track him down and stop him. The rogue captain, Maxwell, claims that the Cardassians are building up arms in violation of treaty. Nevertheless, Picard brings him in, ending Maxwell's career. So far so simple. But the end of the episode has one of the most audacious twists ever and casts a much darker light on Picard than you ever could with Kirk: Maxwell was right; the Cardassians are violating the treaty. But Picard just did his job (Kirk would have done the 'right' thing, Starfleet be damned). And the Klingon political storyline? It's brilliant; Ron Moore, who was responsible for most of those episodes, is quite possibly the best writer TNG had. And Wesley? Well, yeah, he's still an annoying knob (and brings up a whole load of questions about how hard it is to get into Starfleet Academy? I mean, the little fucker's a genius and he fails the entrance exam!).
But what I want to talk about today is Stargate and its spin-off, Stargate SG-1. Because, in an attempt to cheer myself up (see above) I've been watching copious amounts of SG-1. In fact in the past three weeks I've watched the best part of three seasons of it and I'm not planning on stopping anytime soon (well, I'm waiting for the last DVD of Season 5 to be delivered as we speak as Ib ought a copy second hand ages ago and when I finally get round to watching it, it has the wrong DVD in, so I have to buy another copy off Amazon, luckily for me someone was selling a second hand copy for less than two quid including P&P) as it is quite frankly brilliant.
It's the longest running American SF show, it started in 1997, just as Babylon 5 was wrapping up and it was bought by Channel 4 and promoted in much the ame way. I remember coming home from university and getting in just as it started because it was on at six in the evening. I remember having cable at the house in Gateshead and watching Season 5 and 6 which were being repeated on Sky 1 at ten in the morning; at the time I was working at Global and never started before 5 in the afternoon, I was going to bed late, setting my alarm for Stargate and watching it first thing in the morning.
But I never loved it. It was a solid also-ran. It never had the passion that Farscape did. In fact, I have not yet seen anything beyond the end of that season 6 that I saw living in Gateshead. I bought the DVD's when I could pick them up cheap and pretty soon arrived at an almost full collection more by accident than design. But I never loved it. It was just one of those shows that I liked and would buy if there wasn't something more important (a Star Trek box set, a Doctor Who DVD, whatever). I made a concerted effort to own all of the Farscape DVD's; SG-1 slowly built up. It wasn't until they announced that Season 10 would be the last that I started thinking I should perhaps make an effort to both buy them and watch them. The fact that I had also completed my Star Trek collection had little to do with it.
But it is brilliant. The first couple of seasons are fairly shaky, but then very few shows can say they hit the ground running (Farscape didn't find its feet until the second half of the first season, TNG took till the third season - only the original Trek, in my opinion, hit the ground running). By the third season, however, it has become something so wonderful and - amazingly - real (which is a masterful achievement when the main premise of your show is about a bunch of people going to other planets through a wormhole). It has perhaps one of the fairest and most authentic representations of the military in the genre (a fact no doubt helped by the massive assistance the US Air Force supplies). The four main characters have clearly defined roles and agendas.
I don't know how much of this has come out of watching episodes in huge chunks of six and eight - enjoying it like that brings out a lot of the subtle themes and arcs that might otherwise be lost, like Daniel's uncomfortable position of being a pacifist with a gun and Sam's dichotomy of being equal parts soldier and scientist - but it works.
The Stargate movie however, is an entirely different story. I was never overly keen on it when I first saw it (and it's something of a sobering thought to think that next year will be it's 15th anniversary year, which also applies to Generations - god I feel old). I thought it was a moderately enjoyable action movie, the most memorable thing about it being Kurt Russell's gravity defying buzz-cut. And, in addition to my marathon-esque viewing of SG-1, I purchased myself a copy of the movie on Blu-Ray. And why the hell not? (Annoyingly, it doesn't have some of the extras from the standard DVD release on it, a crime that the Terminator 2 and Total Recall Blu-Rays are also guilty of). And my opinion of it hasn't changed. It's still a moderately enjoyable action movie. It does have a star turn (at least in the first half) by James Spader (completely overshadowed by what Michael Shanks does in the TV series, much like what Richard Dean Anderson does to the unfortunately coiffured Kurt Russell) and some enjoyable action sequences. But by and large it's been completely outshone by the TV series. In fact, one of the most enjoyable things you can do with the movie is spot what they changed for the TV series. It does have a great comedy decapitation though.
Peace Out.
