sasha_feather: Kira Nerys from deep space nine (Kira)
[personal profile] sasha_feather
1. I'm very happy and proud of the now-former Tiptree committee for deciding to change the name of the award.

2. Apples are now in season!

3. Saw friends at the dog park today: Jazz and her human Steve.

4. I watched the first part (season) of the OA, and I have deeply mixed feelings about it.

The OA (sometimes known as Prairie Johnson) is a woman who shows up again after being gone for 7 years. She was formerly blind but has regained her sight. While living with her parents in suburbia, she assembles some misfits from her neighborhood and begins to tell them her story of being held captive with 4 other people.

It's beautifully shot, well-acted, and effectively creepy. There is some magic going on, and a mystery, which kept me hitting "next episode." However, the final episode of Part 1 was unsatisfying. The internet tells me that Part 2 ends on a cliffhanger, and that the show has been cancelled by Netflix. Well.

"The OA" is very thought-provoking, and deals a lot with captivity. The OA herself is held captive in a horrible situation, and survives, as she says, because she was not alone. She formed bonds with the other prisoners, particularly with a young man named Homer.

We see hints of other, less dire forms of captivity. One teenager in the show is a bully and troublemaker, and his parents want to ship him off to boot camp. They will use force in this attempt. The teenagers in the show are largely trapped by their circumstances: not being legal adults traps them with unsafe and unsupportive families. There's a reference to a character's brother who was forced to go to rehab, and died there. Late in the series, the OA is wearing an ankle monitor, which isn't explained.

It's nice to see original SF/F that is well-made, even if it isn't entirely successful. I could have done with 50% less creepiness, and 50% more found-family dynamics.

3 Star Trek alumnae are in this: Alice Krige (who played the Borg queen in first contact); Rosalind Chao (who played Keiko O'Brien); and Jason Isaacs (who is in ST: Discovery).

Date: 2019-09-13 12:57 am (UTC)
shopfront: Source: Teen Wolf. Close up of Lydia smiling with her chin raised. (Trek - [DISCO] at one with my fungi)
From: [personal profile] shopfront
If you want to know anything about part two's cliffhanger, feel free to hit me up! I really liked the second season, I felt like it explained a lot of things in season one that were unsuccessful for me (though obviously you might be bouncing hard off different aspects) and it feels a lot more complete to me as a show now despite the cliffhanger. But that might depend on what does and doesn't bug you about things not being wrapped up.

Date: 2019-09-14 08:09 pm (UTC)
shopfront: Source: Arrow. Laurel kicked back on her couch with a remote in her hand, watching tv. (Arrow - [Laurel] hooked on the tube)
From: [personal profile] shopfront
Yay, I'm glad, I hope you enjoy it more like I did! I don't want to accidentally mislead you though, it's definitely still got plenty of issues and I wouldn't say the themes are more positive or less heavy overall. But I found S2 less... confronting maybe? Or less personal/the characters felt less helpless, possibly. So that might be very much a YMMV issue, but for me it was diving a little harder into the sci-fi side of things while the first season was leaning hard on the 'was she right or is she imagining it' theme in a way that made the confronting things somehow more unpleasantly real for me. And I think it was getting more sci-fi specific info that made it feel more complete to me, so I can understand why others might have disliked the cliffhanger more than I did.

Date: 2019-09-13 03:51 pm (UTC)
lilysea: Serious (Default)
From: [personal profile] lilysea
1. I'm very happy and proud of the now-former Tiptree committee for deciding to change the name of the award.

Oh, hurray! ^_^

Your post was the first I'd heard that it was a done deal: the last I saw people were still debating.

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