Felicia Day on SPN was great. It's best she doesn't stay so she doesn't die. But still, an enjoyable visit. And hey, Dean flirted with a guy! Like a pro.

1. Jersualem Artichoke Syrup tastes like molasses.
However, just because you turn  into does not mean that it changes the gaseous effects. Ahem.

It also tastes a little funny when you cook with it. Don't cook with it.

2. Oogave Cola rocks.

3. Oskri makes a Fig Bar that is 100% dried figs, and therefore is like having a fig newton without the newton. This makes me want to learn to cook with real figs. And possibly make a mixed drink with fig liquor.

That is all.

I don't see that much theater--even less art house theater--so I'm unfamiliar with the language, both in terms of tropes and lingo. Still, I shall try to communicate something of what I've seen.

Mission Drift is not a character-driven drama. I'm not even sure it is "a drama." It's an impressionist painting of the anthropomorphitization of the American psyche through time. It is the vision quest of an unemployed Las Vegas waitress named Joan.

This vision is narrated and directed by Miss Atomic, a Puckish, sarcastic, and silly spirit guide played by Heather Christian. She's a showgirl and a blues singer, and pretty phenomenal at both. I could see her carrying a big time Broadway musical. The whole cast actually does a great job with the music, although it's not the kind of music that comes in showstopper variety. Like most of the dance and physical action, it's about atmosphere.

Joan's story is shot through with the story of Joris and Catalina, personifications of the American spirit. Their tale covers landing in New Amsterdam, expanding west, conquering and searching and building until there is nowhere left to go. The most surprising aspect of the whole play how positively their drive is portrayed. You could characterize our history as one of selfishness, unrelenting greed, celebrated avarice, and downright maliciousness toward anyone in our way. Instead, they are children, perpetually young and free, hoping, wanting, fucking, loving, striving because they are alive and it's exhilarating and they are wildfire.

And yet wildfire and arson leave the same ashes.

When they ran out of west, they settled in the desert, in Las Vegas, where they built and consumed and built and consumed. Turned sand into grass and trees. Then hotels, casinos, skyscrapers. More money, more people, more glass. They imported the sun into neon signs and rose up pyramids and mock monuments to wealth, until Joris built the world's biggest boat in the desert, and beneath it he'd have a whole wide forest and a roller coaster and an indoor ocean and a robot crying Indian girl to remind you what it's like to be human. Manufactured pathos, paid for and delivered.

And then there's Joan, who just wanted a job. And just wanted to believe in the dream of the boat in the desert, confronted by a cowboy named Chris, who's leaving this joint because you can't even find the night time in Vegas anymore. Amber Gray's Joan is wounded and angry, and her portrayal the most dramatic and moving. Why can't things be good again here? Like they were?

For a play that is fundamentally philosophical and political, so much so that it is about metaphors, having Chris ask straight up why anyone has the right to eternal expansion did strike me as a bit on the nose. It's not like Manifest Destiny was subtext that you might have missed. It was the text. And our current state of affairs is, in part, a result of our collective inability to see any other possibility. Has all that capitalism got you down? Buy yourself something nice... you'll feel better.

Catalina eventually has enough. After so many places built and burned, the yin-yang duo that have thus far made up the American spirit, fall apart.

New York Times reviewer Charles Isherwood's reaction to the ending was this:

By the time the Catalina character has fled Las Vegas to head back East and has met herself (another Dutch Pioneer Woman from centuries before) heading the other way, the idea that the American story keeps recycling itself provoked mostly anxiety. I was afraid that “Mission Drift” was going to keep going in circles indefinitely.

Anxiety seems, to me, to be precisely the point. Catalina entered into the desert uninitiated, and she should emerge from the desert wise. (This is the function of deserts, after all.) But her wisdom is non-transferable. The fresh, hopeful face of the pioneer woman tells us that she, too, will run like a wildfire, because children will never listen, and America as a nation does not know what else to do or to be.

This play definitely falls under Not For Everyone, but it's frenetic and interesting and asking the right questions.

Am now up to Season 4. I wish I hadn't been spoiled on the end of Season 3 reveal. I bet that would have been epic.

I am amused that Beckett's dad intervened just the same way Castle did with his daughter.

Pursuant to the last post... Damn can Steve take a shank to the belly like a champ. Doctors? Internal bleeding? Pfff....

And how not sneaky are you being show, with cutting back on the slashiness and adding new women and telling Steve every five minutes how he and new girl Are Made For Each Other OMG. Really? This is necessary?

And it's not that I ship Steve and Danny. Cause I don't. I don't think either of them would really go for that, even though the show was doing its best to make sure we were thinking about it. It's just that they're so obviously trying to backpedal it's a bit silly.

Wasn't Kono going out with Fong?

And why have they entirely dropped her Bad Cop storyline? I still don't understand how she went from people telling her she couldn't do anything because she wasn't on HPD to stealing Chin's login to now doing research again like normal. Their implication had been that she couldn't look up records because her HPD access was gone. Wasn't it?

In other news... Max is awesome. So glad to see him getting more airtime this season. And I'm enjoying Joe, even if he is a lying bastard.

So awhile ago I started recapping some of the TV I was watching. I started mostly because I was in Scotland and bored and thought it might be fun. And it can be. But I got back home and got a job and it turns out that I have zero time. But because I was supposed to be recapping things as I watched them (to capture the live reactions, you see) I was just getting this huge backlog of TV. Actively avoiding it even.

There is something wrong with my entertainment strategy if I'm avoiding my entertainment because it's work and then being sad about it.

So... I decided that I'd rather watch Hawaii Five-O and Covert Affairs and Castle than pile them in a corner on my hard drive and avoid them. I still actually plan to do SPN, but only because I feel completionist about it. And Sherlock, because there aren't that many episodes to do.

So yeah.

I've actually seen H5O!

Jenna you manipulative bitch. You are also next in line after Lois Lane for stupidest woman ever.

And HOLY SHIT I can't believe that just happened! Actual gasp moment. Shot! Just like that!

This was, however, a pretty cool episode. We should go on field trips more often.

So I'm giving up on recapping Hawaii Five-O, simply because I don't have the time to recap nearly anything anymore. And since I wasn't recapping it, I was avoiding watching it at all and that is great sadness.

Having given up that job, then, I watched about 7 episodes in a row yesterday while laid up in bed sick.

Observations:

• Apparently we needed reminding that Steve and Danny aren't gay, despite all the slashy things they do and say, because Show has added a new female character and insisted with great insistence that she and Steve ARE PERFECT. Which is weird, if only because Catherine and Steve were already awesome for each other. 
• WTF with not kissing Catherine, Steven? See previous point.
• So, Kono is now in the same situation that Chin had been in? Because they made it sound originally like she was off HPD AND off 5-O. But she's clearly still running around doing 5-O stuff.
• Do not like how we got a little bit on Kono going dark side and then nothing at all to follow up on that.
• What was so wrong with Rachel that she had to be dumped entirely? Was Danny being married not enough reminder of the Not Gay? Whatever. So Danny dates.
• I thought Kono and Charlie were going out? Because... she should be going out with him.
• Max has gotten 1000% more awesome!!! I love that he bought a copy of Danny's car.
• WTF the analyst girl is working with Wo Fat??!?!?!?! Since when? Surely not this WHOLE TIME.
• I kinda love that Locke is now on H5O as Steve's teacher.

Have now set up a dreamwidth account and will be posting there with cross-posting set up here. LJ's contempt for their users makes me not particularly interested in giving them more money.

If any of you have a DW account, let me know!

So, since this is the Christmas Special, it really doesn't matter where we last left our intrepid heroes. Suffice to say the ep "takes place some time in season 2" before any of the important stuff really happens.

My Tivo seems to have missed the first few minutes, sadly. It started in the middle of the intro...

However it looks to be a new intro? I don't recall having seen a lot of these shots before.

Anyway, on to the episode...

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