Alpha Centauri's always nice this time of year

I'm trying to picture what it would have been like to be on the GO3 writing team. Given the 90 minute constraints, and whatever they inherited from NG, and whatever "terry would've wanted x" they had in the back of their head... I do appreciate it's a lot of pressure.

But, stepping back from that pressure, I'm trying to think how I would approach it as a writer. Here's what I'd do.

FIRST: I'd look at what's come before. What did s1 and s2 set up, in terms of plot, character arcs and emotions?

SECOND: I'd write a list of all the strands of the above that need paying off in the finale. If the first two seasons are an unresolved chord, what's the musical resolution?

THIRD: I'd think of some cool set pieces, because I love a cool set piece, eg Crowley's fall. They did a swing and a miss with the war in heaven scene. I'm MUCH more interested in how it started than the aftermath. When thinking about drama, I need to think: what's the most exciting part of the story to enter? What's the part that will create the most tension that needs resolving over the next 90 minutes?

FOURTH: I'd think of symmetry and shape - how does s3 balance out s1, and how does it follow from s2 in a three act structure? How does the Ritz scene in s1 balance the final 15 of s2 and whatever comes in s3?

FIVE: This is a comedy, at heart, at least to me. I'd think, not just what's the most emotionally satisfying resolution....also, what's the funniest, cleverest resolution? What's the most delightful, even if there's sadness and difficulty before the delight?

SIX: I'd delve deeper into the characters - Aziraphale and Crowley of course, but then also thinking about who are my other key characters. What are THEIR arcs?

SEVEN: I'd think about the theology and ethics of it all. Throughout the first two series, we've seen big discussions about free will, the ineffable plan vs the great plan, the role of heaven and hell vs humanity. The role of prophecy/destiny vs improvisation/free will. What is the ethical core of this show? Where do the debates, from Crowley complaining about the Noah situation killing kids to the resurrectionists and Job. What is the role of Crowley Asking Questions vs Aziraphale trying to argue why the answer is "God is good, actually".

EIGHT: I'd ask, "who do we NEED to see?" Which characters add to the story? If we're gonna have random gangsters, justify them!

NINE: Finally, what is the overall theme of all three seasons? What note do I want to leave everyone on? What kind of universe are we talking about here?

I'm thinking about writing a s3 fic at some point, so this is on my mind a lot. Including my final note to self while writing: don't fucking murder everyone in the universe then replace them with uncanny valley clones.

I don't think i'm ready to write it yet. But I think I need to, to purge the finale from my system.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

Rest in Peace, Tony.

I'll always remember your smile.

I’m not trying to see the ending as bad on purpose - I desperately wanted it to be good and would have happily settled for mediocre.

It’s not that I don’t get what they were trying to do - I see it perfectly, and also how they failed to achieve it or understand the implications of their own narrative choices.

Hey, so many of you are familiar with fix-it fanfiction, the superglue which holds together the hearts canon has shattered, right? Well, I have a point to make. As of right now (1-28-2020), there are 6,659 fanfictions in the Leverage category on AO3. You know how many of those are fix-it fics? 25. A measly 0.38% of Leverage fanfiction is tagged as fix-it. For comparison, 2.20% of MCU fanfiction and 1.25% of Supernatural fanfiction are fix-its.

So yeah, Leverage is so amazing that hardly anything needs to be fixed. But we already knew that. No, it gets better. Of those 25 fix-it fanfictions, 16 (64%) of them are actually fix-its for OTHER fandoms. Leverage has been used in fix-its for White Collar, The Walking Dead, Coupling (UK), The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Kings, Person of Interest, Pacific Rim, Once Upon a Time, The Losers, Merlin, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the actual 2016 US election (yeah, that).

In the Leverage (US TV 2008) fandom only (so not including US TV 2008 & Related Fandoms or Redemption) there are currently 12,309 fics. (Nearly double Jan 2020, go us).

Filtering for “Fix-it” brings us down to 85 or 0.69% (noice).

Excluding Crossovers puts us down to 27 fics total. That means that out of the 85 fix-its, only 32% are to fix the Leverage Canon itself and out of all 12k Leverage fics, only 0.22% are to fix Leverage Canon itself.

Meanwhile, Supernatural is sitting at 8,657/320,089 or 2.70% and the MCU is 13,675/635,920 or 2.15%.

Obviously we all have different opinions/tastes/attitudes, but I am also a finale hater, and s2 is far superior to s1 for me.

S1 is lovely, but:

1) it’s not enough of an adaptation

I love the book, it’s been one of my favourites since I was a teen and I’ve read it probably 20 times. But it is a book. TV is a different medium and more changes were needed to make it work well in that format.

2) some modernisation was needed. The Them end up feeling really silly and artificial at times, because whilst it was believable that a very sheltered British child might scoff at 39 flavours of ice cream in the 80s or even the 90s, that just seems ridiculous now, when Ben and jerrys is in every supermarket. Yes the village was supposed to be held in some perfect ideal of childhood but there were a few bits that truly stretched believability.

3) some modern sensibilities were needed. The treatment of Miss Tracy, and Shadwell’s entire character, really do not age well. Their romance ends up feeling quite tragic. Newt comes off as a mild-mannered incel in our current cultural context. More thought was needed to go into all these characters to make them work for a 2019 audience.

4) there are too many characters that are not Aziraphale and Crowley. Now this one is not really a quality thing, it’s just that i fundamentally don’t care about the other characters as much as I do about a&c. When my wife and I rewatched in anticipation of the finale (🤮), we ended up fast forwarding all the sections with newt, and many of the Shadwell bits, because we were struggling to get though it otherwise.

Whereas, season 2 for me was a joy. I loved the humour, I loved the build up of their romance. Plus, the introduction of Whickber street and especially Maggie and Nina, meant a lot to me. It was so fun and interesting to see our angel and demon interacting with and engaging with normal, every day humans.

But most of all I loved the flashbacks! Job and Edinburgh in particular are some of my favourite moments in all of good omens. They deepened our understanding of our characters, and raised philosophical and theological questions that challenge the whole celestial system.

Yes, the shit kiss was shit and the finale fifteen were very painful. But as I was watching it, I expected/understood that to be a third act break up in a romance. The point where the fundamental conflict between the characters is finally articulated in full, so that it can subsequently be resolved satisfactorily. Narratively and pacing wise, that is honestly what it should have been. The fact we were left with the rubbishness of the finale is a failure to properly resolve that conflict - not a failure of the original conflict.

When I first watched GO, it was a couple of months after S2 came out. I enjoyed S1, it was funny and interesting and I loved Aziraphale and Crowley. But it was S2 that hooked me, and changed it from something nice I’d watched to something I obsessed over and fell (joyously), down the rabbit hole of fanfiction and fandom for. It was the Final Fifteen that broke my heart and made me fall utterly in love.

My own writing has always been set post a hypothetical (good), S3, and includes S2 as the big emotional conflict at the end of the second act of their canon story, and it will stay that way, even if the mystery of what that third act was will remain forever (because the finale is NOT canon to me), or be imagined differently by every one of us who chooses our favourite fanfic version.

Rest in peace to the incredible Anthony Stewart Head (20th February 1954 - 1st June 2026)

Obviously we all have different opinions/tastes/attitudes, but I am also a finale hater, and s2 is far superior to s1 for me.

S1 is lovely, but:

1) it’s not enough of an adaptation

I love the book, it’s been one of my favourites since I was a teen and I’ve read it probably 20 times. But it is a book. TV is a different medium and more changes were needed to make it work well in that format.

2) some modernisation was needed. The Them end up feeling really silly and artificial at times, because whilst it was believable that a very sheltered British child might scoff at 39 flavours of ice cream in the 80s or even the 90s, that just seems ridiculous now, when Ben and jerrys is in every supermarket. Yes the village was supposed to be held in some perfect ideal of childhood but there were a few bits that truly stretched believability.

3) some modern sensibilities were needed. The treatment of Miss Tracy, and Shadwell’s entire character, really do not age well. Their romance ends up feeling quite tragic. Newt comes off as a mild-mannered incel in our current cultural context. More thought was needed to go into all these characters to make them work for a 2019 audience.

4) there are too many characters that are not Aziraphale and Crowley. Now this one is not really a quality thing, it’s just that i fundamentally don’t care about the other characters as much as I do about a&c. When my wife and I rewatched in anticipation of the finale (🤮), we ended up fast forwarding all the sections with newt, and many of the Shadwell bits, because we were struggling to get though it otherwise.

Whereas, season 2 for me was a joy. I loved the humour, I loved the build up of their romance. Plus, the introduction of Whickber street and especially Maggie and Nina, meant a lot to me. It was so fun and interesting to see our angel and demon interacting with and engaging with normal, every day humans.

But most of all I loved the flashbacks! Job and Edinburgh in particular are some of my favourite moments in all of good omens. They deepened our understanding of our characters, and raised philosophical and theological questions that challenge the whole celestial system.

Yes, the shit kiss was shit and the finale fifteen were very painful. But as I was watching it, I expected/understood that to be a third act break up in a romance. The point where the fundamental conflict between the characters is finally articulated in full, so that it can subsequently be resolved satisfactorily. Narratively and pacing wise, that is honestly what it should have been. The fact we were left with the rubbishness of the finale is a failure to properly resolve that conflict - not a failure of the original conflict.

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:

Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.

Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.

Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

It's the same beef I have with Fallout. I know they excuse humans being so slow to redevelop society with all "knowledge being lost in the war" but that's just...not how things work. Humans figured out construction and farming very early. There's no way for humans to truly forget how to do this stuff, especially since people survived and could preserve and share what they know. But I just cannot fathom how in 300 years no one's figured out construction or fiber arts or soap making or anything humans have historically figured out super early in the process of being human.

And the only way I can see someone write a world like that is if they either didn't care (fine, it's not real and I get digging the apocalypse vibe) or were so divorced from the process of labor and creation that they actually think those things are way too hard for someone to figure out on their own.

If you think humans couldn't do these things without being taught or helped you have a very warped idea of technological progress and human ingenuity. No one taught humans how to build and create, we figured it out on our own, and it was not just smacking rocks together until something clicked either, ancient humans were just as intelligent as modern ones, they could use logic and reasoning to figure out how to do something new based on what they already know.

Archeology educator Milo Rossi in his Ancient Aliens debunked video (link under the cut)