(no subject)

[vanessarama]

This was a filler episode, yes, and I expect it will be unpopular in the fandom due to the lack of the girls, the emphasis on the only cast member universally considered Not Hot, and the fact that all the Arthur-Merlin scenes involved what I know a lot of people perceive as Arthur bullying Merlin (personally I adored Arthur's emotionally stunted attempts to find out what was wrong with Merlin and cheer him up). But I still found stuff to enjoy. Colin was very pretty and got to do some Srs Acting, which is always of the good. More importantly, we got some background info about the Great Purge. We also got some nice bits about the nature of loyalty, about emotions, and a bit of character development.

It was lovely to see the banter between Merlin and Gaius as Merlin teases more information about Alice out of him; and also interesting that Merlin was so openly happy to meet Alice, but then it began going downhill from the moment Alice takes over his room. Can't say I blame Merlin there. He has happily given up his room for those who've truly needed it - to his mother, of course, but also to Gwaine when he was injured and Gwen when her father died - but Alice has somewhere to live in Camelot and there's no need for her to start living with them.

We got to see more of the way Gaius deals with problems and conflicts of interest, which is to cover up and pretend it's not happening while trying to fix it. Gaius' habit of not trusting people, one he has taught Merlin, backfires on him badly. If he'd said to Merlin in the corridor, "Yes, it was Alice, I'm going to make her put it right, wait here," then Merlin would never have dobbed Alice in to Arthur. Mind you, Arthur is obviously working it out while he sits by Uther's bedside, and Merlin's face at that point is an open book of OMG I KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON AND I AM AFRAID AND ANGRY, it wouldn't have taken long for Gaius to have been implicated.

A bit of a hint to the darker side of Merlin's nature - or rather, to his absolute impacability when someone he cares about is threatened. He's absolutely right when he says to Gaius, "It was her or you". Would Gaius have tried to sacrifice himself for Alice as he tried to do for Merlin last season? This time, Merlin certainly would not have let him.

Pauline Collins is always a highlight. She may be 70 but she still has charisma and the genuine unforced feistiness-under-the-surface that made her so watchable all the way back in the Upstairs Downstairs days. Actually, all the way back in her first appearance in Doctor Who, and I still think she would've made a far better companion than Victoria. I like to think there was some crossover between her episode and Simon Williams' one, so they could get to hang out and remenisce a bit :)

The antibiotics and puffer are working already - my coughing is much, much less than it was although it is still very bad at night. I went on a cooking spree on Friday, making salade nicoise for lunch, spring lamb soup for dinner, and a nommy citrus yogurt cake with orange syrup. SO GOOD. Making more salade nicoise today - I'm trying to keep up healthy eating.

I watched a doco on the History Channel last night called 'Firestorm' about the Black Saturday fires. It was obviously made for overseas sale, since A) they called them "forest fires" and B) they spent a lot of time explaining where Melbourne was, what eucalypts were, what the Stay or Go policy entails, etc. It was actually very interesting learning (from what they had to explain) where our fires differ from everywhere else in the world (such as that spotting doesn't happen anywhere near as much in other countries, or that radiant heat is a bigger killer here).

Anyway, while they did a good job of explaining the background, and included much of the most compelling footage from the day (including the film taken by Daryl Hull, who they also interviewed, as Marysville burned around him), there were some big flaws in the program. First is that it seemed truncated. They spent so much time leading up to it, showing footage of CFA volunteers getting their gear on and stuff like that, but they didn't mention, for example, that 90% of Marysville was destroyed. They didn't mention the number of deaths - surprising considering how much they talked about the "terrible toll" and " the state will never be the same again", etc. And worst of all they only mentioned the Murrundindi and Kilmore East fires - which, ok, they were the biggest and worst, but the Churchill, Beechworth and Bendigo complexes also killed people.

Lastly, and most insultingly, they said that "In rural Victoria, most residents went about their day oblivious to the looming danger..." Erm, NO.

Some people were oblivious, I'm sure - I have always been a bit peeved at the guy whose wife died, who was really critical of the government and emergency services and who said that "...my wife was very simple. She just listened to CDs on the way to work, she never read a newspaper, she didn't watch television news..." because if you live anywhere in a civilized country, where you depend on public emergency services, you have a duty to keep yourself informed. And if you live in a rural area where you know the fire risk is high in summer, you should bloody well inform yourself in summer of how the situation is going. You can't expect your own personal notification of danger.

However, I don't think that attitude was typical. I knew it was going to be an unprecedentedly bad day. I'm sure most people *did* know. Some people were cautious but had seen fire before and figured that if they were well-prepared they'd be OK. Some people were very conscientious and did everything they were advised to do, and some of them, no matter how well-prepared they were, still died. This was an event on a scale we have never seen before. But we'll be seeing them again, so we'd better bloody well learn from it, and vague generalisations about how oblivious "most" people were do not help.