FTH and Station Eleven

[przed]

In a moment of weakness, I have signed up for the Fandom Trumps Hate auction. Mostly because there's some really fantastic organizations being supported. So, if you'd like a 5-10K story from me (possibly longer if I get inspired) stay tuned for the auction details.

In TV news, I watched the first episode of Station Eleven on Thursday out of curiosity, and now three days later I've finished zipping through all ten episodes. Pre-Covid, I was rather fond of Pandemic Wipes Out Most of Humanity stories, but I have to say all the pandemic stuff in the beginning of the show now really stresses me the eff out.

Infectious disease stress aside, I thought the show was really beautifully made and constructed. The narrative jumps forward and backward in time, making you work a bit to keep up, but everything ties together in a very satisfying way in the final episode. And it's just full of brilliant performances, from the leads down to minor side characters. I was especially happy to see Lori Petty, playing the conductor of the Traveling Symphony, the nomadic theatre troupe keeping Shakespeare alive, post-pandemic.

Comments

[przed]

it's kind of one of those "litfic writer tries scifi" books

I have sooooo little patience when so-called literary writers deign to write SFF that I'm rather glad I've steered clear of the book. Miranda is quite possibly my favourite character. I was left wanting so much more of her in the show.

I took a look at the book on our library's app last night, and was amused to find the book takes place in Toronto, not Chicago. So the show it Toronto pretending to be Chicago, pretending to be Toronto. :D What makes that funnier is that a lot of the show is shot around Toronto. (The Severn City airport is the Ontario Science Centre, where I spent a lot of time when my daughter was younger.)

[kore]

Oh yeah, the showrunner changed it to Chicago, bc that was where he was from (which understandably pissed off Canadians), and they did some shooting in Chicago, and then actual plague actually happened! So they all quarantine for a while and then they had to go to Toronto to shoot and like you say, it got all INCEPTION BWWWAAANG about where the show is actually taking place.

Of course yours truly has a terminally crap grasp of spatial relations, while T is from the Midwest, so there were conversations that went like this: "Chicago is in Illinois...." "Right." "Which is under Michigan?" "No." "But Iowa is under Michigan?" "NO." "I thought Wisconsin was the catcher's mitt though!" "...."

[przed]

As a Canadian, that should probably irk me more than it does. But I did grad school in Wisconsin and spent a lot of time in Chicago while I was there, so I've also got a lot of affection for the city. Now I kind of want to know if Jeevan and Kirsten walked across Lake Ontario instead of Lake Michigan in the book. (Not enough to read the book, though. 😉)

I had NO IDEA about Midwest geography until I lived there. (I had more than one Michigan kid show me in the classes I taught where they were from using their hand as the Michigan catcher's mitt. 😆 The first time it happened, I had NO IDEA what the heck they were doing.)