Saturday, May 24, 2014

Day 45 - A 2K Day (and a small rant about Castle)

If I were diligent I'd keep going and have a 3k day. I'm close enough, and as of this writing, it's early enough.

All the same, I satisfied; I wrote some really key scenes and my brain is tired.   So instead of trying to write 800 more words tonight, I will, instead, reward myself by reading the first chapter of The Tangled Cord

Today's Progress: 2272 words on In Flight.

Key scenes include: the first impact between Reef and Angela -- too early for there to be any romantic overtones, and Angela is in no mood to notice if there was, yet I think I managed to set it up.  Also the scene where Angela and June meet up to plot their escape, which is so tricky.  I need to let the audience read between the lines on a few things Angela will miss, while keeping everybody in the dark on other things.

Eating, Watching, Reading

I've been baking up a storm while the nights are cool.  By tomorrow night it is supposed to be too hot for me to even sleep.  So I made bread and tuna casserole by request, and also my "calico" cookies (peanut butter, pecans, oatmeal, chocolate chip).

Watched this season's last episode of Castle, finally, and I am utterly pissed.  Seriously, it was a good episode, but the nasty ending (which I saw coming as soon as he called her from the road) was gratuitous and stupid.  They imply he's dead, which he obviously isn't.  Which means it's unnecessary, and all it promises is more grueling, tiresome episodes of personal angst.  I hate those.  I stopped watching the show last time they did that. 

If they had ended the season with the previous episode, where Beckett finally closed off the annoying subplot about her mother's killer -- that was satisfying. I would be looking forward to next season. But now, I'm not sure I will watch it at all. I will certainly skip the next few episodes.

I am having much more fun reading right now -- books where the personal angst is contained and dealt with within the episode.

And, okay, I'm re-watching most of the episodes of Agents of SHIELD, where the personal angst is a steady background thing -- it's a soap opera.  Unlike Castle, the background mystery is intellectually intriguing.  With Castle, I just want Beckett to solve the case and am rooting for Castle to come up with some clever way to help her reach that conclusion.  With Agents, I'm actually involved in that puzzle myself. I'm at least as involved in it as the characters are.  After every show, I'm discussing the background stuff with my friends, trying to figure it out.

Furthermore, the characters of Agents of SHIELD live in a universe where everything is in upheaval.  There are freaking super villains and monsters and deep government conspiracies everywhere. There IS no normal life... and that's the whole point.  I watch Castle to for the banter and the light romance and to see how they solve their day to day problems and cases.  The occasional threat to that is fine, but I don't watch it to see the world torn apart.

Enough ranting.   

Off to do a little reading.

See you in the funny papers.

2 comments:

chacha1 said...

We were also not completely sold on the "Castle" season-ender.
:-) Not so much because of the heavily-telegraphed and immediately-torpedoed (by our local affiliate, anyway, with its coming-up-next-fall teaser showing Castle clearly alive) cliffhanger.

Rather because of my complete inability to suspend disbelief that Beckett would have forgotten that Las Vegas wedding. She has been wilfully blind to some things in the past, but all with regard to one specific psychological trigger that a drunken wedding would not have been associated with.

I could get over Castle having finalized the marriage license without having Beckett along, because even though ordinary people cannot pull that crap, rich famous people often can.

But the whole "oh that was a real wedding?" thing just didn't work, not least because a county clerk would never have pulled up that data. Marriage records are not nationalized.

Methinks the writers room was a little too loose when they put that mess together. But I don't care, I'll watch next season anyway. :-)

The Daring Novelist said...

I don't have as much problem with logic errors, because hefty suspension of disbelief is kind of a requisite for watching at all. It is, in some sense, a cartoon/comedy where reality gets shifted to set up punchlines.

And yeah, even if they sometimes have me banging my head over logic loops... I would still watch eagerly no matter what.

But... if you're going to shift reality at will for jokes, then you don't get to play reality cards for emotional effect. Reality cards depend on a universe where there is no god-writer pulling the strings. All it does is make the audience stop trusting the god-writer.