Rachel and I talk about how sci fi deals with strange creatures growing inside some of its characters.
Topics Discussed and/or Spoiled:
Muppet Babies, Superman, Deep Space Nine, Farscape, BSG, Angel, Vorkosigan Saga, Sharing Knife series, the future of the Kessler household.
Friends of the Show
Are You Just Watching? — http://areyoujustwatching.com
Faith Hope and Nerds — http://faithhopeandnerds.com
Gamestore Prophets — http://gamestoreprophets.com
Geek This! podcast — http://geekthispodcast.com
Holy Worlds Podcast — http://holyworlds.posterous.
The Sci-Fi Christian — http://thescifichristian.com
Storymen — http://storymen.us
Strangers and Aliens — http://strangersandaliens.com
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Interesting use of your “delicate condition”. I think you just might find a way around those child labour laws.
My understanding is that child labor laws do not apply to family businesses, although that may just be in the states.
My sister has had two of those parasites. Pair a parasites.
One of my favorite bits from Farscape was where Aeryn was in labor and John tells her on Earth labor sometimes lasts days, and she responds by saying she has killed for less. And at the risk of sounding sexist, Claudia Black is a strikingly attractive women, though not one beautiful by Hollywood standards.
Hey, you can be sexist about Claudia Black all you like, as long as I am allowed to say that Ben Browder is an exceptionally attractive man. We’re equal opportunity here at Geekually Yoked. –Rachel
Wait, who am I gonna be sexist about? Rygel? Pilot? Stupid Farscape…
My sister wanted to go natural child birth for both of her. Unfortunately the first was two week over due and so the doctor used a standard hospital birth for the first. The second involved a hospice, midwife and a tub of warm water and went very well.
Longer comment when I’m not typing with one hand and nursing with the other:
AAAAH, being treated like a piece of china! When I was two months with Liza, Someone wouldn’t let me carry a plastic lawn chair. They weigh, what, ten pounds? Don’t tell me what I can’t do, indeed!
AAAAH, DS9! I think my new least favorite part of that story is the one where the baby’s actually born, because Shakaar and O’Brien get into that (believable) peeing contest about the baby daddy role and it just highlights how Kira and Keiko never had anything like that. Because they have vaginas.
Coming when I have two hands: thoughts on Aliens and Angel. (Charisma Carpenter did NOT want to leave, and there was epic drama. EPIC.)
OK, I finally have a long enough stretch where I’m not taking care of my own parasites for me to write this!
I haven’t seen the end of Farscape, but that moment with Aeryn sounds a lot like one of my very favorite maternal images in all of spec fic: Ellen Ripley with Newt on one hip and a pulse rifle on the other. I absolutely love the way the themes of femininity come out in “Aliens.” It’s Ripley’s maternal tendencies and femininity that allow her to survive and to defeat the aliens, whereas more women like Vasquez and Dietrich (who I’ve heard described as “men with lips, hips and tits”) get killed along with all the other Marines. And yet she manages to triumph through her femininity without being at all weak, simpering or stereotypically female; she doesn’t cry and hide behind Hicks while he kills the alien queen, she kills the alien queen herself. Man, I love “Aliens.” Good thing there was never a sequel, because it had a perfect ending.
“Angel” had, as mentioned, EPIC drama. From what I’ve heard, Charisma Carpenter took forever to tell Joss Whedon that she was pregnant (I don’t know if she was trying to decide whether or not to keep the baby, if she was afraid he’d fire her and hoping that somehow things would miraculously resolve themselves, or what), and he got really mad at her when she told him and started treating her horribly on set–insulting her, deliberately doing things with Cordy that he knew would make her mad, that kind of thing. I haven’t heard any of those specific rumors confirmed, but what I HAVE heard confirmed is that she didn’t find out that she wasn’t coming back for season five until a reporter called her and asked her about it. You can hear her getting VERY dishy about it at DragonCon here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_igTbXKPck
Buffy did a pregnancy storyline in the season 9 comic. It was terrible (but then, it happened in the comic, so of course it was terrible). Buffy got pregnant in a one-night stand and decided to have an abortion, only to find out that she was really a Buffy-bot who was covering for things while the real Buffy was in magical stasis and something about being a Buffy-bot . . . made it so she had HCG in her urine? It was a very weird cop-out. Joss came right out and said in interviews that the only reason he was doing the storyline was to make a political point about defunding Planned Parenthood, and shoehorning political rants into stories is ALWAYS a great storytelling choice! (He really ended up undercutting his own point, though; my brother, who I believe is tentatively pro-life but fairly on the fence, ended up rage-quitting the comic after that because every single one of the Scoobies was telling Buffy that they’d do everything she needed to help her raise the baby or give it up for adoption and that she could send all the other Slayers out to do whatever Slayer business she needed doing, and Principal Wood came right out and said that if she got an abortion she would pretty much be saying he never should have been born, and Buffy decided to get one anyway. And my mom, who’s more on the tentatively pro-choice side, had a conniption when she heard about this story because having an abortion is so wildly out of character for Buffy. It was deeply stupid.)
Also, one last thought on spec fic pregnancies: Amy Pond. This was one of my biggest beefs with season six. I can swallow some of the silliness connected to River Song, but one thing I absolutely CANNOT believe is that Amy and Rory would happily gallivant around time and space with the doctor after their daughter was kidnapped just because they knew she was going to grow up fine. I can absolutely believe the Doctor taking that perspective and not understanding why Amy and Rory keep insisting that they stop messing around and start looking for Melody. I can even buy Amy taking the Doctor’s side because she’s trying to convince herself that he’s right and trying to numb her own grief about the kidnapping, and Rory going utterly ballistic on them. What I can’t believe is that Amy and Rory’s actions and dialogue in all the post-“Good Man Goes to War” stand-alone episodes could just as easily have happened in any pre-“Good Man Goes to War” stand-alone episode. Amy had a few lines about it in the finale, and it FINALLY had some sort of effect on their marriage in “Asylum of the Daleks,” but that was much, much too little, too late.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot in my spare time. Could you tell?
Yowzers. Fair enough.
To paraphrase something a friend quotd once about the army and democracy- Joss Whedonist fights for feminism. He doesn’t practice it.
(That was Tom. He forgot to change my name.)
It seemed a little bearded…