entirely ruined her disposition with books

Spoilers, obvs.

lumon wants to control the human emotions—the four tempers (woe, frolic, dread, malice, etc.) they either want to balance them or isolate them or something. they’re trying to do this by creating versions of humans that feel only one of these things. so, like knowing you only exist to get painful dental work done—that essentially turns you into dread. this is what’s happening to gemma—she’s a human guinea pig.

somehow, the numbers and their auras on the microdata refinement screens are attached to what the guinea pigs are feeling. when a refiner completes one of these projects, that is evidence that the guinea pig has successfully been turned into one of the lumon tempers.

mark’s connection to his wife makes him best at this for gemma. when she reached dread (or woe?) behind the allentown door, he confirmed it by completing that project.

whatever cold harbor is, it’s the hardest emotion to isolate and the one they haven’t been successful with with any of the previous guinea pigs. but gemma and hence mark are really close.

meanwhile, lumon is making money off their project by pretending it’s about letting rich people skip over all the painful and unpleasant parts of life (labor, dentistry) by creating an innie who experiences it in their stead. but that’s not why they’re doing it—they’re scientologists with a pharmaceutical company and better p.r. it’s all about keir’s plan for creating perfect humans or something.

now how all this works is beyond me. how are the refiners the only ones who can feel what the guinea pigs feel and confirm the success of projects? why is dylan so good at it? what did gemma’s doctors find out about her while she was undergoing her fertility treatments that made them know she would be a good guinea pig? and what the hell are the goats about? i don’t know but i think i’m on the right track with some of this!

I am still enjoying My Journey To You the premise of which is: woman who was raised in an assassin ring since she was a child and has no choice but to do what they tell her because they also control her sister is sent on a mission to infiltrate a secretive cultivation family/sect. She has to pretend to be a potential bride and of course will inevitably fall in love with her mark. Good times!!!

But! I'm putting it on hold because I learned that the Korean drama The Guest is leaving Netflix at the end of the month, and I've been meaning to watch that one for a zillion years and so I've got to watch it now! And it is so good! Horror isn't really my thing, but I heard it praised so highly and I understand why. I watched four episodes this weekend, which is a lot for me these days.

A psychic, a detective, and a sexy, sexy exorcist Catholic priest had an (incredibly violent and traumatic) encounter with a demon when they were children. They're then parted, without ever knowing each other's identities. Fastforward 20 years, and that one encounter has shaped everything about their current lives. The psychic and the priest are both searching for the demon, wanting to destroy it. Of course they cross paths and end up also pulling the (skeptic) detective into their orbit. Together, they fight crime! Demonic crime! I love them!

This is OT3 territory, y'all! Such a good OT3 and I've only watched four episodes but I am so excited to watch them all fall in love with each other even though the show won't explicitly go there. Who cares? I can go there myself!


(x)

All three of them are messes in their own way:

Our psychic Hwapyung has done absolutely nothing with his life except work as a taxi driver and move from place to place, tracking down the demon. He is the flippant, annoying one. I love him.

Our detective Kilyoung is the human incarnation of (ง'̀-'́)ง. She is ready to fight anyone at any time. She spends most of the show pissing off her superiors, beating up bad guys, groaning about how much she doesn't want to deal with this demonic shit, and running (to catch bad guys). I am obsessed with her.

Our priest Yoon/Matthew is played by KIM JAEWOOK who I have only had a crush on since Coffee Prince and Antique in the early 2000s. This casting is an attack on me personally. Anyway! He is the cold, withdrawn one who has lost everyone he loves (actually, they've all lost almost everyone they love) who thinks he can handle all of this on his own and really wants the other two to go away. I am hopelessly devoted to him.

This show really Goes There with the demonic and the violent so if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, avoid it. But if you can handle that (or if it appeals to you), I recommend this so far and I have on good authority that it ends well.

My one critique is that even though the psychic comes from a family of shaman and the priest is...a priest and so we have a religious backdrop to everything, so far the show shows no inclination to actually explore the nature of faith, etc. A huge missed opportunity but a common one--people seem happy to use religion as a set-piece without ever actually grappling with it in any real way.


If you're thinking (literally no one but me is thinking this), "Lauren, don't you have another OT3 from a Kdrama about childhood trauma and solving mysterious violent deaths?" you are correct. Mawang (Lucifer) gave me so many feelings back when I watched it especially because a) that cast! (Uhm Taewoong, Shin Mina and Ju Jihoon? THANK YOU KDRAMA GODS!) and b) the psychic was a librarian!!! But I suspect it would not hold up as well as I would wish. Maybe one day I'll revisit it.

I've gotten back into my World's Slowest Star Trek rewatch and finished season 1 of The Next Generation last night.

It's the first time I've ever watched the show straight through, which is interesting. I've seen SO many episodes of this show since my dad was always watching it when I was a kid, but I never watched it in any kind of order. Here are some random thoughts:


+ Nothing gets me hyped like the opening theme for this show. I love all the Trek themes, but TNG's theme is mine. It sends me directly back to childhood. This show started airing when I was a little less than a year old, and I was 7 when it ended. I'm pretty sure it immediately went into syndication and it was always my dad's favorite, so it was just...always on when I was growing up. (Heck, it's frequently on when I visit them now!)

+ EVERYONE IS SO YOUNG. I realize that's a dumb thing to say when this show started airing 34 years ago, but even in my memories of the show itself, everyone is quite a bit older.

+ It's so funny being back in the world of monster-of-the-week television because a plotline that would be an entire season in a show being made today is wrapped up in a single episode and this tickles me.

+ I'm also very struck by the...space in the show. By which I mean: it moves slowly--it breathes in a way that TV shows don't do anymore and sometimes it breaks too much--and there is so much visual empty space. Television has changed SO much since this show was airing. Today the production design is much slicker, the camera angles are so dynamic, the pacing is so tight. It just feels like a different medium.

+ I had totally forgotten that Q is in the very first episode. Ridiculous.

+ I had also forgotten that Bones makes a one-minute cameo with DeForest Kelley in full age makeup. And of course he's bitching about Vulcans again. I know the show seems to think that it's haha endearing old crotchety guy stuff, but I have always super hated that Bones is such a xenophobe--it's the thing that keeps me from loving him wholeheartedly. Not fun to be reminded here.

+ Patrick Stewart was super beautiful. So was Marina Sirtis. So was LeVar Burton.

+ They clearly haven't really worked out the characters' personalities yet. Picard, especially, seems all over the place.

+ Data, on the other hand, is just so immediately lovable. As a kid, Deanna was my favorite because I thought she was pretty and had good hair and I wanted to be her when I grew up. (She got to be on a starship without having any science or military function! The dream!) But on this watch, Data is my fave and I am side-eying everyone who is being passive-aggressive towards him.

+ I hate that the very third episode has everybody getting drunk. Like...those kinds of storylines are only funny after we get to know all the characters. That way, we can see the contrast between their behavior in the episode and how we know they usually behave. It was far far far too early to do that in this show.

And the fact that it made everybody act sexually??? INCLUDING DATA???? Sure, some of the characters would act that way, but not everybody becomes immediately horny when they're drunk and also it makes zero sense for Data to be programmed to have any sort of sexuality at all. I guess this is just me being ace, but I hate it.

+ Because I adore Dawn Summers, the second most hated teenage character in genre TV history, I was willing to give Wesley a chance this time. I kind of expected to find him pretty neutral. But no...he really is that annoying. It's not actually him, it's how much space he takes up in the narrative in the first half of the season. Have a very talented, smart kid on the show. But don't make him some kind of super genius who can do everything the adults can do. It's just a bad, bad writing choice.

He's always right, often at the expense of adults. And then we have the textual "He's one of the most important people in human history!" bit and I'm just like...no. No one wants this.

And that's disappointing because the chance is there to explore the family/domestic lives of officers. But I guess we get DS9 for that.

I really tried to like him, but I simply cannot!

+ It makes zero sense for Deanna to be on the bridge all the time, but I like her so much that I don't care.

+ Minidress guy showed up not only in the pilot but also in episode 5!

+ I had forgotten how early in the series Data-the-Sherlock-Holmes-fanboy shows up. I love it so much.

+ The way Tasha Yar was treated is just egregious. They clearly couldn't figure out what to do with her, which is a shame because I can think of a ton of different things they could have done with her. And then they try to give her a big emotional sendoff episode, but it isn't earned. It's just a messy situation and Denise Crosby deserved better.

+ The quality ranges, but there aren't actually many terrible episodes. I had kind of expected there to be, but mostly the worst ones are just sort of mediocre and slow and boring-ish (though there's some sexism that shows up in quite jarring ways). Otoh, there aren't any outstanding episodes either. It's very much a show that doesn't exactly know what it's doing yet. And it's not nearly as good as the original series was at exploring ideas. TOS just had loftier aims: even when it failed at attaining them, it aimed really high. TNG sometimes tries but never aims very high.

+ Still, watching it is its own kind of comforting. This is my childhood. But I feel like it's going to take soooo looooong to get through the other 6 seasons when all I really want to do is watch DS9!

Having a Mastodon conversation about CQL. There's a post getting reblogged (or boosted, as they call it there) by a lot of people about being sooooo confused at the beginning of the show.

And someone else responded to it with a (very good faith!) reaction of "Huh? Aren't you used to having worldbuilding/character stuff revealed as you move through the story?"

And I wrote this:

I think when you're brand new to an entire genre (as many, many CQL watchers were), you're unsure of how much you need to understand from the get-go. "X is confusing and Y is confusing--is this because it's the beginning and this will be revealed later? Or is it because I'm just not fluent in this genre? Am I missing something? Do I need to know what this means right now?" Which I don't think is an entirely unreasonable reaction.

I had had a similar experience years before when I first started watching Korean dramas & found that a lot of stuff that the narratives takes for granted, I didn't have any knowledge of. It took watching several shows to pick up on how the education system works or the different honorifics, things that gave nuance & color to a show. I was watching those early shows on a much shallower level than I have watched later shows--I'm picking up on so much more with later shows.

So when I came to CQL, my first Chinese drama, I was prepared for there to be a lot of cultural stuff that I'd have to learn & I had some idea of what those things might be.

But if I hadn't had a previous experience, I think I would have found it a lot more stressful trying to differentiate between "thing I don't understand because I'm encountering new characters & worldbuilding, but all will be revealed eventually" and "thing I don't understand because I'm watching something from a different culture."

There's a special kind of confusion that arises when you can't tell those two kinds of confusion apart, which I think was a lot of people's experience.

And I didnt say this over there, but:

I think this is one of the reasons the best foreign shows reward so much rewatching. Because when I rewatch CQL now, I know soooooooooo much more about the culture and the genre than I did on first rewatch, so I'm picking up all these hues of color that were totally invisible to me the first time through. And that's one of the great joys of encountering art from other cultures! You get to learn all that stuff, then go back and have an even deeper experience with the art!

I'm going to make periodic Healer posts as I rewatch and if any of y'all watch it later, you can come back here and yell at me about it!

I have a lot of thoughts for this first one, but some of these will probably just be quick and informal--maybe a bulleted list of things I noticed or feelings I'm having.

But not this one!

Jung-hoo

I had forgotten how hard the show leans into "Jung-hoo is anti-social and not very likeable" in the first episode. Our first shots of him are him (essentially) sexually harassing the video game tennis player he's playing against. Which is just an interesting way to introduce your hero, but I think this actually works? Because when we meet Young-shin, she is the opposite of that kind of computer-generated woman--she's dressed down and a bit messy and just not at all glam or caring about her appearance. And Jung-hoo is immediately fascinated by her, even if he won't admit that to himself. Over the course of the show, we see him figure out how to relate to a woman, which he's clearly never, ever done before.

He isolates himself completely, and even though Ji Changwook is ADORABLE puttering around in his big empty warehouse apartment in his at-home clothes (also: COLLARBONES) he's just not all that likeable of a character at the beginning. Sure, he's a badass, as he proves in our first big action sequence. But there doesn't seem to be much to him at all beside his desire to save up enough money to buy his own private island. He explicitly tells us in episode 2 that he doesn't care about the morals of his clients or what they're up to--anything short of murder, he's up for. Other than the fact that he's hot and competent, he has nothing going for him as a character at the beginning.

Which could be off-putting, but I like it. It makes his transformation into an actual person so much more interesting.

Young-shin

Young-shin, on the other hand, is the opposite right off the bat. She's warm and goofy and has all the determination in the world. She's got relationships, specifically with her wonderful dad and her dad's partner Chul-Min. Her family life is teasing and fun and if you haven't already fallen in love with her in the first episode, you absolutely absolutely will in episode 2 when we see her goofing off and dancing with her dad in the coffee shop, totally uncaring of how she might appear to random customers (and Jung-hoo's immediate reaction of "This guy definitely never did anything but love this girl," is just so perfect). I love her more than life.

Tiny little Young-shin surrounded by ex-cons who are teaching her how to pick locks and open safes and pick pockets...is just the most glorious thing in the world. And it's so important to the world of the story that her dad is a defense attorney who is heavily invested in the lives of his clients after they leave jail, assisting them with finding jobs, etc. and also staying close enough to them that they hang around with his daughter. I just love this backstory more than I can ever say.

I had forgotten that she starts out as a celebrity "journalist" of a kind that was so specific to Korean pop culture at the time this show was made. It's an interesting choice--we know that she wants to be the kind of reporter than Moon-ho is, but here she is playing gotcha with a celebrity, trying to capture proof of a relationship for the scandal pages. And she's treating it with all the seriousness that she would a real scoop. I see this mostly as a kind of immaturity--she thinks this is just a step on the way to her real career and doesn't seem much interested in critiquing it.

But we see her fundamental goodness and compassion when she encounters the lady at the apartment building. Here is Young-shin's chance to get her scoop! She's so close! And yet she rushes up to the roof to make sure that a stranger is okay. Some things are more important.

We then get the heartbreaking scene where she tells us what happened to her before she was adopted. Park Min-young is really good in this scene--she starts out just trying anything she can to make a connection with this desperate woman, and then she gets pulled into her own heartbreaking memories. Of course it works. Her vulnerability and authenticity are probably the only thing that could have talked that woman down from the ledge. If someone who had broken ribs from abuse at the age of seven can tell you that things get better...you can believe it.

And of course she takes Sad Lady home to appa! This family clearly does this sort of thing all the time--they have toothbrushes and even new underwear tucked away just waiting for the needy. It says so much about who they are and the kind of lives they live. (Speaking of the kind of lives they live, I love appa's advice to do your second favorite thing for a living and keep your very favorite thing as a hobby. That's smart!)

I also want to touch on the scene in the bathroom with Jung-hoo. Young-shin comes across as a fearless person--she doesn't hesitate to chase down this guy who stole her bag. And she knows how to fight back! (Certainly a skill taught by one of the many criminal ahjussis in her life.) But when it becomes clear that she's outmatched, that even her hard-won skills aren't going to get her out of this, that she is physically vulnerable to this man, her terror is so real and relatable. That is a horrifying situation to be in. We as the audience know that Jung-hoo isn't going to actually hurt her, but she has no idea. Of course she thinks something terrible is going to happen! Especially when he freaking punches the mirror! I feel so much for her in that scene! (And there's some really, really interesting parallels to later, iconic scenes from this show that I will be sure to revisit then!)

I just think you have to give Young-shin your whole heart immediately. I can't imagine not falling in love with her as a character. She's the loveliest.

Moon-ho, Myung-hee and the flashbacks

And then we get to Moon-ho, long-suffering Min-jae (this woman deserves better) and LOVE OF MY LIFE MYUNG-HEE!!!!!!!!!!

Moon-ho feels opaque at this point in the narrative to me. We know he's a hot-shot journalist (I'm guessing he's kind of got Anderson Cooper level fame, but he's investigative), we know he's feeling kind of jaded about life, but we also know that he still fundamentally cares about using the power of journalism for good. The jadedness and the desire to help people are in interesting contrast--he's clearly at the point where he doesn't care about his career anymore--he'll do whatever the hell he wants, even violate direct orders. But at least he's doing it in order to tell the stories of the oppressed? Min-jae believes he's just in it for the fame at this point, but that's clearly not entirely true. It's complicated and we don't really know why he feels the way he does.

But we know he is bent on finding someone and we know that he loves his sister-in-law Myung-hee. And how could he not? Myung-hee is sunshine incarnate. I love her so much in both the present and the past. She's just so lovely and kind and warm. We really feel that Moon-ho must be a person worth loving since she loves him so much and he appreciates her completely. I love that he just calls her noona instead of addressing her as his sister-in-law.

It's heartbreaking to see her mourning her dead daughter and begging her dead husband to look after her. I am so sad already!!!!

I adore the flashbacks. These reckless and idealistic young people in the back of a van outrunning the police so that they can promote democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's the best! I don't have much to say about it except that Moon-sik bringing his baby brother along but making sure he's got his seatbelt on tells you so much about these characters' backgrounds--they clearly don't have real adults looking out for them.

Random other things

+ Min-ja is fun from the first episode but her true awesomeness will only be revealed later. I find her hilarious and wonderful and a kind of older female character you never, ever, ever see on television. <3<3<3<3 Min-ja!!!

+ LET DAE-YONG DO SOMETHING MORE THAN DELIVERY!!!! Gee, hyung, it's not that hard!

+ The action scenes are the least interesting of the show for me but they're still pretty fun. This first one sets up the players pretty well.

+ Jung-hoo has been able to ignore the moral ramifications of his job so far, but the murder of the train guy makes that impossible. We see from his reaction that, for all his protestations of not caring about anything, he genuinely feels regret at dismissing the warnings. And of course with Detective Dong-won showing up, things are about to get real.

+ Jung-hoo's wig. I will say no more.

I have been absent from DW while I'm living in the post-Christmas pre-New Year liminal space of my parents' house, but I will be back soon to catch up with y'all.

In the meantime, I'm going to use the last day of 2022 to beg you to watch old media!

In a post from a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the Korean drama Healer and how I was certain that certain friends of mine would enjoy it. Actually, I'm pretty sure that all of you will enjoy it, so let me sell you.

A decades-old incident involving a group of five friends who ran an illegal pro-democracy broadcasting station during the Fifth Republic in South Korea brings together three different people—an illegal "night courier" with the codename "Healer" (Ji Chang-wook) who possesses top-notch fighting skills, a reporter from a second-rate tabloid news website (Park Min-young), and a famous journalist at a major broadcast station (Yoo Ji-tae).[9][10][11] While trying to uncover the truth from that 1992 incident and a series of present day murders, they grow into honest reporters who try to blur the lines of conflict between truth and reality, even if that means fighting media honchos.

It's one of those double-timeline stories, but thankfully both of the timelines are so engaging. In 1992, we've got a group of idealistic young people running a PRO-DEMOCRACY MOBILE PIRATE RADIO PROGRAM. (I would commit murder for a show that delves more deeply into this, but I don't think it's ever going to happen.)

In 2014, we're following a group of INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS SEARCHING FOR THE TRUTH AT ALL COSTS!

In typical kdrama fashion, these two timelines are way, way more intertwined than anyone knows at the beginning. Secrets will be revealed! Identities will be shattered and put back together again! And truth in journalism will prevail!

I like to say that if City Hunter is Korean-Batman-without-superpowers, then Healer is absolutely Korean-Superman-without-superpowers.

Young-shin is one of the Lois Lane-est Lois Lanes to ever Lois Lane--intrepid young reporter just brimming over with integrity! Raised by gay dads who are a defense lawyer and an ex-con! With a smile that can outshine the sun! And mental health stuff she's learning to deal with! She's absolutely fearless and weird and adorable and I love her so much!

Jung-hoo has a double life--a bumbling, socially awkward aspiring journalist by day, a total badass "night courier" bringing you the competence porn by night. Basically, he's a freelance spy-for-hire who just wants to save up enough money to buy his own island and get away from people...until he meets Young-shin and all of his priorities are upended.

Young-shin is mentored by Munho, a star reporter with ~secrets~. Jung-hoo also has a team helping him in his courier business made up of Min-ja (played by Kim Mi-kyung, one of my absolute fave character actors), an middle-aged lady hacker!!! Who likes to call Jung-hoo oppa*! And Dae-young, a teenage girl who's kind of his apprentice who likes to call him hyung*!

(There are some other characters I won't get into, including another middle aged woman who I adore with all my heart and would happily die on a battlefield for.)

Young-shin and Jung-hoo's worlds collide and they have one of my favorite TV romances. They are so wonderful and adorable and they work so well together and Young-shin makes Jung-hu a better person just by existing and inspiring him with her integrity.

They discover corruption all around them and drag it into the light! Jung-hoo learns to care about people and devotes himself to Young-shin's mission to make the world better! They discover that the past has unbelievable repercussions for them in the present! The truth is uncovered! The corrupt are destroyed! Through the power of journalism and hacking and Jung-hoo's ability to kick ass!

Listen, I just love this show so much. It's easily one of my top 5 kdramas and I would love for more of y'all to discover it.

The last episode is kiiiind of anticlimactic but everything else about it is so wonderful. It's 20 episodes of an hour each, so it is a commitment, but not a crazy intense one. And listen--if some of y'all want to watch it, I am VERY open to rewatching in community!

It is also hard to hunt down at the moment. But you can stream it here or, if you'd rather download it, tell me in the comments, and I will send you a link to a Google drive folder for you to download.


*"Oppa" is what you call your big brother (or a big brother-like figure in your life or, sometimes, if you're wanting to be flirty--this word does a lot of heavy-lifting) if you are a girl. "Hyung" is what you call your big brother (ditto) if you are a guy. Gender!

I know I've made a post about this before, but I always get such fun answers that I'm revisiting it.

1. Tell me which book/book series you'd like to see made into a television show. Assume that the showrunners understand exactly what you love about the original, the casting is perfect, it's not too long or too short. Everything goes as perfectly as an adaptation could. What would you most like to see as a show?

I'm asking specifically about shows as opposed to movies. I'm interested in what you think could make either a limited series (let's say at least 3 episodes) or an open-ended one, something that needs more space to breathe than a film can provide.

2. Alternatively, tell me about a book/book series that has been adapted to TV, but that didn't do it very well and you wish someone who really got the heart of the text could take another shot at it. (TV, please! I'll ask about bad film adaptations in another post!)

3. And/or tell me about a book/series that you think should not be adapted to TV or film because you just can't imagine it actually working! The stuff you love most about it just wouldn't translate to a visual media!



For question one, my answers always include the Benjamin January series, which could easily do a short season (say, 6 or 8 episodes) for each book. Mara: Daughter of the Nile would make a great limited series of 6ish episodes, imo, and so would Robin McKinley's Sunshine. When the Radiant Emperor duology is finished, it should get the full C-drama treatment! (It will not.)

I would love to see a really good Queen's Thief adaptation, but I do not think the one currently in development for Disney has a snowball's chance in hell of satisfying me.

For question two, the obvious answer for me is the sequels to Ken Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables. The original 1987 one based on the first book is so close to perfect! I love it so! And then the second two just abandon the canon! (Well, they steal some stuff from Anne of Windy Poplars, which is one of the weakest of all the books! I find it inexplicable!) I would give anything for a really good adaptation of, say, Anne of the Island--Anne and her girlfriends at college!!!!! I want it!!!!

I am also tempted to put the Dublin Murder Squad series on here. The first book was adapted, and I really liked who they cast as Cassie, but...I got bored with it? And didn't finish it? And yet I would looooove to see The Likeness as a mini-series! But only made by the right team!

For question three, the most obvious answer is most of Faulkner. People keep trying to adapt his most stream-of-consciousness novels, and...it doesn't work! Sorry! You can't make The Sound and the Fury or Absalom! Absalom! work! You miiiiight get away with something like Sanctuary, but even that would be a stretch.

Till We Have Faces also wouldn't work! I just don't think Orual's thoughts, which are the whole book, would translate to voice-over. It would feel heavy-handed and clunky.

I think mostly Code Name Verity would make a fantastic short series, but the central "twist" would be almost impossible to pull off in a visual format, so I'm not sure it would actually work, though I'm interested in whether y'all think it would.

Finally watched it.

( spoilers )