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things i think about a lot:
scott reuniting with no-longer-mind-controlled robyn hanover
scott finding out what happened to the bogarts
#on the one hand scott finding out about this stuff does sort of undermine the narrative#but also canon has done worse y'know? let him have some closure 😔#scott summers#robyn hanover#the bogarts
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Long Way From Home: Chapter 7
Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Friendship Characters: Scott, Tracy Family
A little bit more spot the difference, but also some things that aren’t so different after all! Interestingly, there is some tech that’s stayed the same between TOS and TAG, as Scott is about to discover (unfortunately for Scott, that doesn’t make him any happier).
This is the last chapter I’ve already got prewritten, so this may be the last chapter for a while. I refuse to rush this just to fit to a schedule, and with uni work kicking in and now TAG Secret Santa, I have other things with more important deadlines, but I am still working on this one. Chapter 8 is partially written, but also throwing me for some wobblies, so I don’t know how long it’ll take to finish... Just a warning that the regular weekend updates may have come to an end for now.
<<<Chapter 6
“Tin-Tin!” Other-Alan was just emerging from what Scott vaguely recalled was his bedroom when they reached the landing, wearing an unbuttoned striped yellow shirt over a white rollneck. “Oh, it’s you.” Scott found himself on the receiving end of a glower from bright blue eyes, an expression his own Alan would never throw his way. He met it passively, not rising to the bait. “What are you doing with Tin-Tin?”
“Oh, we were just having a chat, Alan,” she assured him before Scott could answer. “Just some research for Brains.”
“Anything useful?” Other-Virgil emerged from further down the corridor, wearing some brown and yellow shirt and waistcoat combination and effectively shutting up Other-Alan before he could come up with another complaint. Did Other-Alan do anything except complain?
“I’m sure it will be,” she said. “But we should go and see your father; it’s time for the debrief and it wouldn’t do to keep him waiting.”
“You’re right, Tin-Tin,” Other-Virgil agreed. “We can talk about this later.” He walked through the doorway and Scott followed, to a scandalised noise from Other-Alan.
“You don’t mean he’s involved in the debrief?” the young man demanded. “What’s he got to do with any of this?”
“Alan!” Tin-Tin chided. Scott chose to ignore him. Other-Alan had made his opinions clear and he wasn’t particularly interested in putting in the effort to change his mind. He’d do it of his own accord or not at all. Other-Scott and Other-Gordon were where he’d left them, and he reclaimed his earlier chair, leaning back and ignoring the way Not-Dad zeroed in on his still-undone top buttons with a disapproving frown. In the corner, Other-John’s picture had been replaced with a video screen showing the man in real-time, judging by the way he was moving around.
Compared to his John’s hologram always materialising in the room, as though he was physically there, a simple screen on the wall made him seem excluded and more or less forgotten. That didn’t sit well with Scott, who thanks to EOS’ appearance was well aware how lonely it was to be stuck up on Thunderbird Five without any other company, even for someone as allergic to socialising as John. No-one had made any mention of an EOS or equivalent so far, and he wondered if the differing technology meant she didn’t exist.
He hadn’t seen any sign of MAX, either.
“Good, you’re all here,” Not-Dad said, looking up from his desk as the others found seats.
“Dad, we can’t seriously be having a debrief with him in the room?” Other-Alan demanded.
“Alan,” Other-Scott interjected before Not-Dad could reply. “If he wants to be here, he can.”
“Scott, how do we know we can even trust him? Where’s our proof he knows anything about International Rescue?” the blond demanded.
“Did you pay any attention to the clothes he arrived in, Alan?” Other-John asked, and the younger man frowned heavily.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he snapped defensively.
“I’ll be honest, I don’t think any of us paid much attention to his clothes,” Other-Virgil admitted. “What are you referring to, John?”
Scott realised what was coming and was already on his feet by the time the space monitor looked at him. The badge on his shoulder wasn’t obvious if they weren’t looking for it.
“See for yourself,” he said, striding out of the room to a hey from the irritable young man. One thing was for sure – Alan was not growing up to be that argumentative as an adult. He didn’t think he’d be able to stand it. Locating his uniform in the guest room that was currently his, and leaving everything except the flight suit in the closest where he’d stashed it, he strode back to the lounge and tossed it at Other-Alan. “Right shoulder.”
“Right-?” Other-Alan started, making a disgruntled face. “Urgh, it’s sweaty.”
Scott rolled his eyes. “I did just get back from a rescue.” The others crowded around the two of them; even Not-Dad left his desk to get a closer look as Other-Alan finally located the shoulder in question and froze.
“What’s this?”
“What does it look like?” Scott retorted, knowing full well what he was looking at.
“Thunderbird One… International Rescue,” Other-Virgil read out. “Well, I guess that settles it.” He turned to face Other-John’s image. “How did you know?”
“Brains saw it when he was looking at the equipment he had with him,” Other-John shrugged.
“What equipment?” Other-Alan sneered, lifting the flight suit and shaking it. “I don’t see any equipment.” Scott snatched it back.
“Aside from the built-in telemetry, it’s all still in my room,” he said. “My gear doesn’t seem like it works here, but I’m not taking chances. I think the last thing you want is Thunderbird One trying to launch itself.”
“What?” Other-Scott yelped, lunging for his lamps.
“You have built-in telemetry?” Other-John asked as the wall section swung around, taking Other-Scott with it. “And why would Thunderbird One launch itself?”
Scott shook his head.
“Different gear,” he reminded him. “All our uniforms are linked to Thunderbird Five – measuring things like pulse, blood pressure, body temperature. That sort of stuff, so John doesn’t have to wait for us to tell him if something’s gone wrong.”
“I want that,” Other-John said immediately. To Scott’s surprise, Other-Alan muttered something that sounded like agreement.
The wall rotated again and Other-Scott reappeared, looking calmer.
“She’s not going anywhere,” he reported, before narrowing his eyes at Scott. “What did you mean, she might launch herself?”
“I doubt it’ll happen,” Scott assured him, finding his chair again and sitting down, flight suit on his lap. “It’s coded to my Thunderbird One, so chances are the remote controls won’t do anything, especially as my communicator doesn’t work, but I’m keeping them locked away to be safe. I don’t want either Thunderbird One responding to them when yours is different tech and I can’t see mine.”
“Your Thunderbirds can be remote controlled?” Not-Dad frowned, and Scott sighed.
“I thought we were here for a debrief, not another round of twenty questions,” he said pointedly, filing away the titbit that this universe’s Thunderbirds didn’t have built in remote control under ‘technological differences’. The look he got in return informed him that Not-Dad didn’t appreciate his authority being undermined, but the older man returned to his desk and steepled his fingers together.
That appeared to be the signal for the rest of them to stop standing around and re-find their seats. Remembering Other-Gordon’s words from earlier, Scott settled back comfortably and reminded himself that he didn’t know enough about their technology to interrupt. Clutching his flight suit in his hands, the material familiar under his fingers all he had left of home, he turned to glance at Other-Scott, who acknowledged him with a faint nod before directing his own attention to his father.
Scott followed suit.
“John called in an issue with Shackleton Power Plant,” Not-Dad began, and Scott started, clenching his flight suit tightly in his fist. That was a nuclear facility – hadn’t it blown several years ago? “The report stated two workers trapped inside – Scott?” For a split second, Scott thought Not-Dad was addressing him and his reaction, before Other-Scott started talking.
That was going to get very confusing.
“I arrived at the danger zone at eleven thirty two, Island time. The contact was a Cameron Agnew, the site’s Superior Safety Engineer, who informed me that the temperature had reached critical levels inside the building. Two operators had failed to get out before the blast doors closed, sealing them in, and while the external control tower could be used to lower the temperature, the method was not safe for human exposure and so couldn’t be used until the two men were evacuated. I set up Mobile Control by Thunderbird One as there wasn’t enough security around to leave the ship secure and analysed the building schematics Mr Agnew supplied,” Other-Scott began.
It took all of Scott’s self-control not to interrupt, wondering why Other-John on Thunderbird Five hadn’t got access to the building schematics long before Thunderbird One had arrived at the danger zone. Mobile Control was a brand new term to him – Other-Scott had mentioned it back on the trail, but hadn’t explained what it was then, and it seemed there was no explanation coming now, either. Different technology, he reminded himself, looking down at his lap, where his flight suit – not sweaty, thank you Other-Alan – was firmly clamped between his fingers.
Other-Scott was still talking, describing how they’d had radio contact with the two trapped workers and the plan he’d devised to get them out, based on the schematics he’d had at his disposal. Other-Gordon had said it had to have been a simple mission, for them to have been back so quickly, and Scott could appreciate that as his counterpart described the obedience of the operators do to as they were told, and how everything was organised and in position even before Thunderbird Two arrived with the bulk of their gear.
Scott found himself impressed with how smoothly the rescue had gone as Other-Virgil took up the narrative, describing how he’d landed where Other-Scott had instructed and had piloted the Mole – which had to be their version of a Mole Pod – to dig its way underneath the blast doors while Other-Alan had used a ‘Domo’ – Scott had no idea what that was supposed to be – to support them from collapsing while they were tunnelled under.
Two operators rescued successfully, temperature supressed remotely as soon as they were safe, and the structural integrity of the building was maintained after they filled the Mole’s track back in. Practically a textbook rescue, and Not-Dad seemed pleased with the outcome. Even though he had no personal stake in it – this wasn’t his International Rescue – Scott found himself similarly pleased. There was no better rush than a rescue that went smoothly, without complications. In Scott’s experience, those were rare.
“Well done, boys,” Not-Dad said after the recounting was done and Other-Alan and Other-John made their own contributions. “A successful rescue once again; I’m proud of you.” Scott flinched involuntarily at the words, having made the mistake of looking at the older man just as he said it. Just one more thing he’d never hear his father say again.
“Are you okay?” Other-Virgil asked, and when he turned to face him he realised they were all watching him.
“Fine,” he snapped defensively, not enjoying being scrutinised. Other-Gordon had a look that was almost pitying, and Scott realised he had enough of the story to realise what had caused that reaction. None of the others did, although Other-John looked calculating and if he was anything like John, as Scott suspected he was, he was well on the way to drawing the right conclusions. The others all looked to be varying levels of confused – except Other-Alan, who was frowning. Again. Did he do anything other than frown?
“You don’t look fine,” the young man pointed out waspishly. Scott scowled at him.
“Alan.” Once again it was Other-Scott chiding his brother, drawing out the name warningly. Other-Alan huffed.
“I’m just saying he’s lying,” the blond muttered petulantly. Scott couldn’t quite believe he was supposed to be twenty – Alan had outgrown those sorts of remarks at least a year ago, for the most part at least. He was still a teenager, after all.
“And how do you suppose you would be if you found yourself in another universe?” Other-Virgil pointed out reasonably. “Give the fella some slack, Alan.”
Other-Alan grumbled but fell quiet.
“Does anyone else have anything to say about the mission?” Not-Dad asked, dragging them back on topic.
“No, father,” the four brothers involved chorused, and he nodded his head, satisfied.
“In that case,” Not-Dad continued, “the next thing to be dealt with is clothing for Scott. As has been pointed out, he cannot continue wearing our Scott’s clothes.”
“Or the same underwear,” Other-Gordon muttered, just loud enough to be heard by the room. Scott gave him a half-hearted glare as Other-Virgil reached across to cuff him lightly. Other-Alan made a noise of disgust but Scott ignored him, as did his brothers.
“Someone will need take him to the mainland for shopping,” Not-Dad continued, with only a disapproving glare directed at Other-Gordon to acknowledge the interruption. “Normally, I would say Scott, but that would prompt too many awkward questions. Virgil, you go.”
“Yes, father,” Other-Virgil said, making to stand.
“No,” Scott said, mouth moving before his brain realised what it was saying. “I’ll go with Gordon.” A look of surprise crossed Other-Virgil’s face, and something Scott didn’t want to analyse too closely. Offence? Disappointment?
No, Scott didn’t what to know what he was thinking.
“You realise we’re not letting you pilot, right?” Other-Scott asked, eyebrow raised. Scott sighed, finding his way to his feet.
“Different technology,” he said blandly. “I know. Are you telling me he can’t pilot a plane?” He didn’t want to go with any of them – enforced one-on-one time was begging for an interrogation – but at least he’d already got the worst of it out of the way with Other-Gordon.
“Not as well as I can,” Other-Virgil hedged, although he was already sinking back down into his chair as though he could tell Scott wouldn’t be changing his mind. Maybe he could.
It was the look Not-Dad shot Other-Gordon that cemented it. So far, all he’d had was Other-John’s vague word and some less-hidden reactions from Other-Gordon to bring him to the conclusion that he was being treated like glass, but that look was all too much like the ones he’d seen on his own face in the immediate aftermath of his own Gordon’s crash. The same look he had to fight whenever he sent Alan out in Thunderbird Three without him. The I don’t want to let you out of my sight in case you get hurt look.
“Virgil-”
“I’ll go, Father,” Other-Gordon cut in, voice hard. “Virgil’s just got back from a rescue. Let him rest.”
“I can-”
Other-Gordon ignored his older brother, turning to face Scott with the faint ghost of a grin on his face. “No backseat piloting from you.”
It had been a very long time since anyone had piloted Scott anywhere – occasional trips in Thunderbirds Two and Three notwithstanding. He couldn’t say he was looking forwards to the experience, especially as he was asking the aquanaut to get behind the plane’s controls.
“No promises,” he offered, finding a small grin on his face. Other-Gordon groaned.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said. “Hey, Scott, you got a hat for him to wear? Otherwise the world’s going to think you’re going grey.”
Other-Scott had been reclining in the chair, but at Other-Gordon’s words shot to his feet, glowering at his younger brother before turning to face Scott.
“Come on.” He gestured towards the door. “If the world’s going to think you’re me, you are not ruining my image.”
“I still don’t see the problem,” Scott shrugged, but followed. He could at least appreciate the sort of damage paparazzi could do, and despite everything he wasn’t about to throw Other-Scott under the press bus if he could help it.
“The problem is that you’re wrecking my shirts and my image,” Other-Scott muttered, pushing open his bedroom door. “The former we’re dealing with by getting you your own, but there’s not much we can do about the latter; seeing how the world knows I don’t have a twin and doesn’t know about your visit from an alternate universe, anyone who sees you will think you’re me.”
Scott sat down on the end of the bed as Other-Scott rummaged through his closet, scowling as a dark brown waistcoat was thrust in front of him.
“So what do I need to know?” he asked, picking up the offending item of clothing dubiously.
“More than I’ve got time to tell you if you want your own clothes today,” Other-Scott retorted. “Put that on, and do those buttons up.”
Scott grumbled, muttering under his breath about stupid fashions, but obeyed.
“Follow Gordon’s lead, don’t talk to anyone – Gordon can talk enough for both of you and won’t say anything irreparable – and ignore anyone with a camera,” Other-Scott told him; Scott would have bristled if it didn’t all make sense. “I’m not sure why you wanted Gordon over Virgil, but I’d say it was the right call. Virgil’s not great with the paparazzi, but Gordon can handle them.”
“What are my chances of avoiding them?” Scott asked dryly, aware that if it was anything like home, practically nil. Other-Scott sent him a sympathetic look.
“Our cover is that we’re all lazy playboys living off of Dad’s fortune,” he informed him, and that was useful information to know, even if Scott didn’t like where it was headed. “It works wonders – even visitors to the island have never suspected we’re International Rescue – but for it to work, we need the papers. They’ll scrutinise everything they see you buy, too. What are you planning?”
“You’re not telling me what I can and can’t buy,” Scott bristled. “Casual shirts, jeans, sneakers. Seriously, how do you not have sneakers?”
“I have sneakers,” Other-Scott said, amused. “Just not in my room.” Scott groaned and glared at the shoes he was currently wearing.
“You mean I didn’t have to wear these?” he complained. “Where are they?”
“You are not wearing sneakers to the mainland,” Other-Scott rebuked, before sighing himself. “Look, I know you want your own clothes, and it sounds a lot like your universe has different standards, but while I won’t say a word about what you wear on the island, whenever you’re on the mainland you might as well be me. If you must get jeans, at least get the expensive ones.” He withdrew a fedora and eyed it critically before handing it to him. “That should hide the differences in our hair.”
Feeling suffocated, Scott reluctantly put it on his head. He hadn’t worn a hat in a long time, and definitely not a fedora.
“Sunglasses,” Other-Scott said, brandishing a pair of square-rimmed ones. “That should do enough.” Scott put them on, squinting as the room went a few shades darker.
“Are you ladies done in here?” Other-Gordon asked, leaning against the doorway. Other-Scott rolled his eyes.
“I’m holding you personally accountable for anything that ends up in the papers,” he told his younger brother firmly. Other-Gordon grinned.
“Which of us don’t you trust?” he asked rhetorically – Scott knew full well the answer was ‘neither’ – before shifting his attention to Scott. “Come on, Scott. Sooner we leave, sooner you get to change your underpants.”
“Do you have to keep bringing that up?” Scott demanded.
“He’s Gordon,” Other-Scott said, as though that explained it. It did. “I do appreciate you not borrowing mine, though.” Scott rolled his eyes.
“Let me just put my flight suit away and then I’m ready,” he replied, brushing past Other-Gordon and heading for his designated room. Other-Gordon followed him, but to his relief Other-Scott stayed where he was.
“You look respectable, now,” the aquanaut commented, although Scott wasn’t so sure that was a compliment. He chose not to respond as he carefully folded up his flight suit and put it back with the rest of his gear, out of sight. “Ready?”
“You’ll have to show me another hangar now,” Scott informed him dryly, and Other-Gordon laughed.
“As if keeping any Scott Tracy from planes for any length of time is possible,” he grinned. “Come on then, and remember you’re not piloting.”
“I know, I know,” Scott grumbled, but followed the younger man from his designated room, past Other-Scott’s still open door and then past the stairs – much to his consternation – and into the elevator, which clanged shut ominously behind him. He didn’t jump, but it was a close thing, and Other-Gordon eyed him as he punched in a button.
“Claustrophobic?”
Scott choked back a laugh, thinking of his launch tube, which was both smaller and faster than the elevator they were currently travelling down in – and then down again, past the ground floor and into darkness. “Hardly.”
Artificial light streamed in through the metal, and Scott watched an impressive array of planes come into sight – all civilian. No sign of the other Thunderbirds, and there was a large part of him disappointed by that revelation. Then again, if they were keeping International Rescue secret, he supposed keeping their public craft in the same hangar would raise some awkward questions.
“Is that a Tiger Moth?” he asked, spying a plane that seemed mid-restoration. “I haven’t seen one of those in years!” Other-Gordon shrugged.
“Alan’s pet project,” he explained. “If he’s not tinkering with cars, he’s playing with that.” Scott couldn’t blame him – it looked like a beauty. “Scott’s banned from touching it, by the way.” Other-Gordon sounded amused. “We’ll take Tin-Tin’s girl – Ladybird.”
Scott tore his eyes away from the Tiger Moth to see Other-Gordon pointing at a small plane, positioned near the hangar door. Compared to many of the other craft, it didn’t look particularly special, or fast, and he sent a longing glance over at a sleek blue plane that looked designed for speed. Other-Gordon followed his gaze and laughed.
“That’s Scott’s baby,” he told him. “Well, the one that isn’t Thunderbird One. I’m banned from so much as breathing on it under pain of very painful death, so no matter what you say, we’re not taking her. I have clearance to take the Ladybird, and only the Ladybird, so the Ladybird it is.”
The elevator came to a smooth stop, and Scott followed Other-Gordon as he made a beeline for the Ladybird, despite wanting to stop and explore the planes some more. They looked familiar in a way so much hadn’t since he’d woken up in the infirmary, and he stopped dead at the top of the steps into the Ladybird’s cockpit.
He knew those controls. He’d flown planes with those controls. While none of his current planes – Thunderbirds or Tracy Jets – used those, they were just like his old training plane. Their old training plane, the one Grandma had taught Dad to fly in, and in turn Dad had taught him – and he’d taught Gordon and Alan. His chest stuttered, nostalgia crushing his lungs, and without thinking he stepped towards the pilot chair.
A hand jabbed him in the back.
“The passenger seat is the one on the right,” Other-Gordon reminded him. Scott sent a longing look at the controls, but the hand jabbed him again and he reluctantly moved, allowing Other-Gordon to slither past him into the pilot seat and begin pre-flight checks. Resigned to being a reluctant passenger, and realising that not doing any backseat piloting was going to be a lot harder now he could see that this technology was the same, Scott slid into the passenger seat and clipped himself in.
It was obvious that Other-Gordon wasn’t quite as used to piloting than his Gordon, or at least not this particular jet, and Scott bit his lip to stop himself from offering unwelcome advice as the younger man haltingly pulled them through the pre-flight checks. Other-Gordon glanced at him out of the corner of his eye as he finished fuel checks and groaned.
“I knew you’d be a terrible passenger. Remember – no backseat piloting.”
“I know,” Scott sighed, tearing his eyes away from the control panel and instead looking out of the cockpit window at the other planes in an attempt to distract himself. Behind them, the engine purred into life, familiar vibrations passing through his seat, and he forced himself to stay relaxed as the hangar door swung open to reveal the runway he’d seen from the narrow corridor in the villa.
The palm trees that lined it on either side didn’t move as Other-Gordon taxied them out, but the Ladybird was relatively small as far as jets went. Scott had no doubt that Thunderbird Two also used this runway – although he couldn’t look back to see what hid the entrance – and that the trees did need to somehow lean back out of the way for International Rescue’s behemoth to pass by. At home, the palm trees were more of a reminder of their old legacy – Operation Cover-Up, as it was called here – than any real camouflage. It would be simple enough to remove them – the only hidden entrance that was possible to remove, as Gordon would murder him if he even considered getting rid of the pool, and the round house disguising Thunderbird Three’s launch was just as integral – but they all liked the bowing trees, and it was always fun to watch people’s confusion as they wondered how Thunderbird Two fit on the runway. More than one person had theorised that Thunderbird Two had a hidden, VTOL launch, just as they assumed Thunderbird One did.
Scott never knew if he should be insulted that everyone thought his ‘bird could only do VTOL, or quietly smug that no-one else could figure out his girl.
“Ladybird to Base, requesting clearance for take-off,” Other-Gordon said suddenly. The radio crackled temporarily, before Not-Dad’s voice emerged in response.
“Base to Ladybird, clearance granted. Fly safe, Gordon. Scott, keep your head down and remember you’re a Tracy.”
“F.A.B.,” Other-Gordon chirped, before Scott could formulate a response to that. Remember you’re a Tracy? Scott couldn’t forget that even if he wanted to, but he wasn’t part of this Tracy family. Was Not-Dad giving him an unnecessary reminder that he was effectively pretending to be this universe’s Scott Tracy, or did he mean something else by it?
What else could he mean by it? He didn’t belong here, with this other Tracy family. There was no place for him here, and a gaping hole in his family, where he should be.
Analysing Not-Dad’s intentions, along with everything else to do with the man, gave him an uncomfortable taste in his mouth and he shunted it all into a box in the back of his mind to be analysed later, or preferably never. He was going to buy – or rather, Other-Gordon was going to buy, because he certainly hadn’t been given any money – what he wanted, and not conform to expectations. Other-Scott hadn’t seemed too opposed to his brief shopping list, so Scott was taking that as permission.
“Here we go,” Other-Gordon said, and Scott felt the familiar g-force of a jet picking up speed. Nothing like a Thunderbird, but he hadn’t expected that. It was still a solid kick, though, more so than he had expected from that sort of jet. Either that was a standard universe difference, or Brains had done some tinkering. Whichever it was, Scott wasn’t complaining.
Out of the window, he watched the land fall away. As they were travelling directly away from the island in what seemed to be a south westerly direction, from the position of the clouds and the dials on the dashboard, he couldn’t see much of the island even if he twisted around.
“You’ll see it when we come back,” Other-Gordon pointed out, sounding amused, and feeling like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Scott slowly turned back around to face forwards again, casting an eye over the instrumentation panel out of habit. “Gee, you’re insatiable, aren’t you? Fine, go stare out the window, if that stops you judging my piloting.”
“I don’t need to judge your piloting,” Scott retorted, although he did concede to looking out at the thin cloud layer they were approaching rather than what Other-Gordon was doing. “You’re an aquanaut, not a pilot.”
“I still have a pilot’s license,” Other-Gordon reminded him, a little sulkily. “If you wanted a pilot, you should have gone with Virg, or even Alan. I’m sure we could have pulled some strings to miraculously give Scott a twin and you two could have spent some quality time bonding over speed if you’d really wanted. I really don’t have the foggiest why you insisted on me.”
Scott looked at him out of the corner of his eye, eyebrow raised.
“You don’t?”
Other-Gordon grumbled.
“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say you didn’t want to be trapped with someone you hadn’t already sworn to silence, and as that leaves me and John, there’s not much of a choice,” he pointed out. “You know, none of the fellas would ask questions if you asked them not to?”
“And have them stewing in curiosity the whole time instead?” Scott asked dubiously. “That would be worse.”
“I suppose you have a point,” Other-Gordon conceded. “But this is the only time I fly you anywhere. You want my company so badly next time, we go by boat.”
That was such a Gordon response that it should have hurt, like all those times Other-Alan had felt like his Alan, but somehow, it didn’t. Instead, Scott just laughed.
Chapter 8>>>
#thunderbirds are go#thunderbirds are go fanfiction#thunderbirds#thunderbirds fanfiction#tsari writes fanfiction#scott tracy#long way from home#tin-tin kyrano#alan tracy#virgil tracy#john tracy#gordon tracy#jeff tracy
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Movie Odyssey Retrospective
Bambi (1942)
In the early 1920s, Austrian Felix Salten began working on his best-known novel. Salten, a prominent Jewish author, was an avid outdoorsman who closely observed the habits of wildlife in the Viennese countryside. His experiences led him to write Bambi, a Life in the Woods, which became a bestseller in Europe. It was a bestseller in the United States, too, but Salten’s work had somehow been recategorized as a children’s book when exported across the Atlantic. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) producer Sidney Franklin (1942’s Mrs. Miniver, 1942’s Random Harvest) purchased the film rights, but he experimented and failed to find a satisfactory way to adapt Salten’s novel. Frustrated, Franklin handed the reins to Walt Disney. While Disney took on this new project, the Nazi Party banned Salten’s novel – claiming it to be, “a political allegory of the treatment of Jews in Germany.”
Salten, who soon fled for neutral Switzerland (never to return home to annexed Austria), may have inserted some such allegories, but that is not his novel’s primary intention. In one of the novel’s most memorable passages not present in the Disney adaptation, Bambi’s father shows his son a poacher’s corpse – another human has shot this poacher. In realizing humanity’s fragility and its sameness to the animals of the forest, a frightened Bambi, while examining the poacher’s body, declares, “‘There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him.’” Salten’s novel and the 1942 Disney adaptation directed by David Hand are about the inevitability and universality of death – subject matter not exclusive to children.
Bambi was slated to be the second animated feature by Walt Disney Productions (now Walt Disney Animation Studios). Due to production delays, narrative confusion, aesthetic difficulties, and especially the Disney animators’ strike of 1941, it is the fifth and last entry of the studio’s Golden Age. Whether because of or despite these delays, Bambi seems an outlier in the Disney animated canon. It bears scant artistic resemblance to any of its predecessors or successors. To the bewilderment of viewers who believe that a great movie requires plot, Bambi dispenses of such notions. If conflict appears, it is resolved immediately – with one continuous exception. As Walt Disney insisted on the animation being as realistic as possible while retaining anthropomorphic qualities, the True-Life Adventures series (1948-1960; fourteen innovative nature documentaries that continue to influence the subgenre’s narrative and visual grammar) remains Bambi’s closest cousin in the studio’s filmography. Bambi – wildly innovative, underappreciated upon release and today – completes a consecutive run of five animated features for a Golden Age. Rarely matched today are the standards set by those five films.
This film is a coming-of-age tale; more specifically, it is about a male fawn’s experiences and observations on the natural life cycle. It begins with Bambi’s birth and concludes as Bambi inherits his father’s role as Great Prince of the Forest. This animated Bambi is less pedantic than Salten’s book, which focuses on Bambi’s survival lessons from the other woodland creatures. Instead, story director Perce Pearce (1940’s Fantasia, 1943’s Victory Through Air Power) and screenwriter Larry Morey (primarily a lyricist; 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) adopt a free-flowing episodic structure where Bambi lives life innocently, with violence puncturing through the idyll rather than being omnipresent. We see him befriend the rabbit Thumper and skunk Flower, learn to observe his surroundings before grazing in the open meadow, and play in the snow and on the ice come his first winter. There are comic misunderstandings and warnings about men, neither of which dominate the film.
Bambi also takes time, for a minute or a few, to avert its concentration from its protagonist to other animals. In a less disciplined film, these decisions might undermine the film’s goals – in this case, to portray nature as faithfully as possible within the bounds of a loose narrative. But each of these scenes focused away from Bambi either strengthen Bambi’s characterization, the liveliness of the forest, or the film’s messaging.
A handful of scenes including the elderly Friend Owl introduce us to Bambi and his mother as well as those adolescent, animalistic romantic tinglings he calls “twitterpation”. Friend Owl moves the film forward in ways that abided by the censors at the time, as well as introducing concepts to Bambi and friends in just enough time that is necessary. The most graphic moment during the first scene featuring the hunters (who are never depicted, aurally or visually) does not concern Bambi and his mother, but a few nameless pheasants. Covered in shadow by the long grasses, one of these pheasants speaks of the impending danger, and the audience hears the terror in her tremulous voice. Flying out of the underbrush in a desperate attempt to flee, she is shot by the hunters, and drops to the ground. The frame shows the pheasant’s corpse, but does not linger. This is the only depiction of a dead animal in the film – contrary to the recollections of many viewers. For younger and older viewers alike, this scene emphatically communicates the dangers that Bambi’s mother has warned about, priming the audience for what is to come, and doing so without sensation.
It leads directly to a scene that has become a sort of childhood rite of passage. The death of Bambi’s mother in a later scene has traumatized multiple generations of viewers – intrepid, timeless cinema. As Bambi and his mother are grazing on early Spring grass in the meadow, the latter senses movement and pokes her head up, turning her head realistically as if on a swivel. Her eyes are wide, unnerving. She looks straight at the audience; this would be the stuff of fourth wall-breaking comedy in any other context, but here it is almost inquisitive. Bambi is one of the few Disney canonical films in which what is happening off-screen is equally (if not more) important than what the audience is seeing – something most evident here. The film stubbornly fixes its perspective on the deer and the snow-blanketed backgrounds that emphasize how exposed they are. They flee. There is no cover as the editing becomes more frantic, closing in on the deer’s terrified faces as they rush back to the thicket. A shot rings out. The film’s score – a constant presence throughout Bambi until now – decrescendos from broadening string lines to a chorus vocalizing pianissimo (mimicking the wind-blown snow drifts), and disappears completely when the Great Prince of the Forest appears.
The Great Prince is obscured by the falling snow.
“Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”
Silence. Stillness.
Bambi sheds but a single tear. He walks away with his father and, mirroring his deceased mother, looks towards the audience – this time, not in accusation or inquiry, but faint hope. Cynical viewers label this scene as anticlimactic due to Bambi’s lack of expression. But the filmmaking preceding it – a combination of the editing by Thomas Scott (1939’s Beau Geste, 1948’s So Dear to My Heart); the compositional decisions by composers Frank Churchill (Snow White, 1941’s Dumbo) and Edward H. Plumb (1944’s The Three Caballeros); the attentive character animation by artists too numerous to single out here; and the moody lighting and brushstroke textures to the backgrounds set by Tyrus Wong (1956’s Giant, 1969’s The Wild Bunch) – helps justify Bambi’s reaction. Some of the most important, at times traumatic, moments in life are silent and still. There is just enough pathos here without being anticlimactic or maudlin, or to be patronizing towards young viewers.
And yet the next scene shows Bambi grown up, in the middle of Spring, at play. There is no allusion to the tragedy on-screen a few minutes prior. The filmmakers are not minimizing Bambi’s trauma or nature’s violence, but saying that life nevertheless continues. There is growth, the acceptance of grown-up responsibilities, romance, love, child-rearing. Stags – like Bambi and the Great Prince – mate with does, but do not participate in the lives of their fawns. Unlike other Disney films where animals assume greater anthropomorphized qualities (1967’s The Jungle Book, 2016’s Zootopia), Bambi’s naturalistic approach contradicts any application of human norms and values onto its animals.
For years, this meant struggling to animate wildlife – especially deer. Rendering deer in appealing ways is difficult, due to the shape of their face and the positioning of their eyes on either side of the face. In the end, the animators went with character designer Marc Davis’ (Davis also led the character design of Thumper, Flower, and Cruella de Vil from 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians) outlines: maintaining realistic deer anatomy, but exaggerating the face with a shorter snout and larger eyes. The Great Prince’s antlers proved most infuriating due to the intricate perspectives in animating them. When the animators resolved that they could not animate antlers from scratch, a plaster mold of deer antlers were made and was Rotoscoped (projecting live-action film onto an image for an animator to trace it) the film’s animation cels.
But the most remarkable contribution to Bambi comes from Tyrus Wong. Wong, a Chinese-born American artist, established the look of Bambi’s painterly backgrounds. Based on landscape paintings from the Song dynasty (960-1279; a Chinese historical period when landscape painting was in vogue), Wong’s concept art caught the eye of colleague Maurice “Jake” Day. Day, a photographer, illustrator, and naturalist, spent weeks in Vermont and Maine, sketching and photographing deer and the woods surrounding them. His sketches, however, were deemed too “busy”. By comparison, Wong’s concept art – using pastels and watercolors – is impressionistic, deeply atmospheric. Disney, impressed by Wong’s work, appointed him to be lead production illustrator, and instructed the other background animators to take inspiration from Wong’s concept art. Wong’s lush backgrounds have graceful dimension (a hallmark of Song dynasty landscapes), seemingly extending the forest beyond the frame. A brushstroke implies dimensions to the forest unseen. Wong’s sense of lighting – whether soaking in sun-bathed greens or foreboding black-and-white, blues, or reds – helps Bambi smoothen otherwise abrupt tonal shifts.
Nevertheless, history downplayed Wong’s enormous contribution to one of the greatest animated films ever made. The studio fired Wong shortly after Bambi’s completion as collateral damage from the aftermath of the Disney animators’ strike – by the terms of the agreement with the strikers, Disney recognized the animators’ union but would lay off a union-approved equal ratio of strikers and non-strikers. Wong later found work as a Hallmark greeting card designer and a production illustrator for Warner Bros. Retiring in 1968, Wong was contacted by Disney to serve as a sketch artist for Mulan (1998) – Wong declined, stating that animated films were no longer a part of his life. Only within the last decade has Wong, who passed away in December 2016 at 106 years old, received due recognition for his contributions that his on-screen credit does not reveal.
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Perhaps inspired by his meetings and collaboration with conductor Leopold Stokowski and music critic Deems Taylor for Fantasia, Walt insisted on a film score to be present across Bambi’s runtime. Composers Frank Churchill and Ed Plumb take inspiration from the Silly Symphony shorts made prior to Snow White – Bambi’s score and soundtrack occasionally blends with the sound mix and it liberally uses “Mickey Mousing” (the synchronization of music with actions, most notably footsteps, on-screen). With the writing team periodically revising Bambi, Churchill and Plumb waited until the final structure of the story was set before composing the music. Transcripts from the Disney Archives also reveal an emboldened Walt – again, perhaps inspired by his experiences from Fantasia – to insert his own preferences in how the music should sound. Walt, a man who once professed that he, “[didn’t] know beans about music,” was more musically articulate than he had been before Fantasia, and was unusually influential in the film’s orchestration. In the end, the Churchill and Plumb score is largely framed by the opening credits number, “Love is a Song”.
Love is a song that never ends. Life may be swift and fleeting. Hope may die, yet love's beautiful music Comes each day like the dawn.
In a few short stanzas, the composers begin a score that falls silent only two times: when Bambi’s mother mentions “man was in the forest and when the Great Prince of the Forest appears shrouded in snow. If one did not already associate it with the actions of the film’s characters, Bambi’s fully-orchestrated score sounds like a lengthy, motif-filled tone poem that can be heard in a concert hall. Listen to the string harmonies supporting the “Love is a Song”-vocalizing chorus during “Sleep Morning in the Woods/The Young Prince/Learning to Walk” beginning from 4:19-5:20. That sort of harmonic density would not be out of place in a late Romantic-era concert hall. Occasionally, that tone poem of a score gives way for the limited musical soundtrack like “Little April Shower” – the film’s best song, and one where instruments and vocalizing humans serve to simulate the sound of rain and wind. Bambi contains some of the tenderest music, reflecting the film’s thematic content, in the Disney canon.
Upon release, many critics and audiences found Bambi a step backward for Disney, caring not that the studio’s namesake and its animators agonized over its realism. Disney had upended the moviegoing world’s expectations with Snow White and spawned competing studios looking to replicate that alchemy. But in doing so, the studio also coded audience and critic expectations that animated film should only be fantastical. To strive for realistic animation to reflect nature was, “boring” and “entirely unpleasant” – for these critics (who say nothing about how animation can guide emotion), animated fantasy was innovative because it bent reality in ways live-action cannot portray. Echoing the most vehement criticisms hurled towards Fantasia, Bambi’s then-contemporary naysayers implied that even attempting to animate nature realistically and ignoring fantasy would be a pretentious exercise. In columns and tabloids, the American media also devolved into a mud-slinging debate over whether Bambi – because of its off-screen portrayal of humanity – defamed hunters.
By similarly contradictory logic, animated film in 1942 was mostly perceived as children’s entertainment – an attitude that has been dominant ever since, and one that yours truly tries to discredit with exasperating frequency. With no other rival animation studios attempting anything as ambitious as a Fantasia or Bambi, gag-heavy short films from Disney and its competitors contributed to these widely-held views. With World War II underway, the dissonance of expectations would only escalate. American moviegoers, though wishing to escape from the terrible headlines emerging from Europe, North Africa, and Asia, believed animated films too juvenile for their attention. Bambi – a dramatic film intended for children and adults – faltered under the burden of these wartime contradictions. It would not make back its production costs during its initial run.
This commercial failure, on the heels of the animators’ strike, cast a shadow over Disney’s Burbank studio and on Walt himself. Walt would never publicly admit this, but he believed he had been too focused on animated features. So much of his creative soul and experimental mind had been dedicated to the Golden Age films, but at what cost? The critical and commercial triumphs of Snow White and Dumbo were offset by Pinocchio’s (1940) budgetary overruns and the headline-grabbing negativity (by music and film critics) that financially drowned Fantasia and Bambi. Internal divisions that led to the animators’ strike nearly destroyed the studio; heavy borrowing from Bank of America resulted in runaway debt. Walt – spiritually and physically – would not be present for the rounds of layoffs (mandated by the agreement with the striking animators) that almost halved the studio’s staff after Bambi’s release. He accepted a long-standing offer from the Office for Inter-American Affairs to embark on a goodwill tour of South America to help improve relations with Latin American nations (as well as collect ideas for future animated films).
Bambi remains a sterling example of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ artistic daring. The film pushes realistic animation as far as the technology of its time can. It does so not only for the sake of visual realism, but to reinforce the profound emotions it has evoked for decades. The film’s tragic dimensions are legendary, oft-parodied; yet this does not (and should not) define it. Almost eighty years since its debut, Bambi’s reputation continues to be mired in the contradictions that first greeted its release. There are some who still believe that animated cinema, by its nature, is specifically for children. And by an extension of that thought, some believe tragedy has no place in animated cinema. What a limited view of art that is, an underestimation of humanity’s capacity for understanding.
Bambi concludes the Golden Age of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Since its departure from theaters, moviegoers have rarely been treated to animated cinema of equal or greater maturity – let alone from Disney itself. The artistic cavalcade of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942) resulted in five consecutive films resembling nothing like the other, but all united in ferocious innovation. The central figure of this Golden Age, Walt Disney, was personally involved in each of these works; the end of this so-called Golden Age comes as he stops dedicating himself so completely to the studio’s animated features. In their own ways, each film helped define what animated cinema can be and who it is for. That debate remains fluid, one where the principal interlocutors learn from or disregard the lessons of this Golden Age.
My rating: 10/10
^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).
For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.
This is the seventeenth Movie Odyssey Retrospective. Movie Odyssey Retrospectives are reviews on films I had seen in their entirety before this blog’s creation or films I failed to give a full-length write-up to following the blog’s creation. Previous Retrospectives include The Wizard of Oz (1939), Mary Poppins (1964), and Oliver! (1968).
#Bambi#Walt Disney#David Hand#Perce Pearce#Larry Morey#Jake Day#Tyrus Wong#Frank Churchill#Edward H. Plumb#Felix Salten#Disney#My Movie Odyssey
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September- Viv and Andy part 2
On my previous trip to New Zealand in 2008, I and my friends spent a crazy month driving around the whole country with multiple stops and lots of road time, this time round I wanted to spend less time in the car and more time doing things. Top of Viv and Andy’s list was Whale watching in Kaikoura which is on the South Island near Christchurch. With our base in Auckland we decided to fly down meaning maximum time doing stuff and no long days hauling ass down the country. Domestic travel is super easy in NZ so I booked us some last minute fights to Christchurch for the Monday and with no plans till the next day we were able to take our time and minimise travel stress.
We got in mid-afternoon and with google maps in hand tried to work out where our hostel was in relation to the airport, fairly typically I remember it being the opposite side of town, but decent buses and small bags meant it wasn’t too much of a hardship. We stayed at a youth hostel near the botanical gardens in a 3 person room, I guess meant for a family with one child, Viv and I hadn’t shared a room for a good few years so that was a bit weird; but it was comfy enough and we were going to be out most of the time anyway. After a quick freshen up, and a mini google, we headed back out to find somewhere to eat, Monday night in a big city, shouldn’t be too hard eh?
The town centre was absolutely dead. The shopping streets were clean and well-kept with big high street brands, wide streets with multiple pedestrian crossings and yet no people around except us. There didn’t appear to be any little bars dotted around, no bustling restaurants, the only place we found that had a few restaurants/bars in one location was dark and shut up. Perhaps this is different at the weekend, but it gave a slightly abandoned vibe, since the 2011 earthquake it seems lot of people left town for safety/work/the ability to drive on roads that hadn’t collapsed; and really you can’t blame them. We eventually found a small place that was one of those airstream caravans with a heated outdoor seating area that did burgers and pints of beer, by this point we were pretty hungry so it would have been good but honestly, I remember it being particularly good. On the way back to the hostel we passed a giant old school joystick controller mounted in the pavement which was linked with a large screen on the side of a building, with this you could play a giant game of space invaders. Again, we were the only people around in the streets so we played undisturbed for some time; although Andy was the only one good at it so after a while we gave up.
We were picked up Tuesday morning by a local man with a van who drove us all the way up to Kaikoura for the day, it’s about a 3 hour journey so a lot of driving for a day trip, but if you wanna see whales, Kaikoura is where you need to be. It was also really great to have a local drive us as we didn’t know much about the earthquake, save what had been on the news, so getting his insight and experience was sobering but important. On the way out the city, he pointed out some of the local sights that were no longer there, including the CTV building that completely collapsed leading to 115 of the 185 deaths in the disaster. The roads up the coast were also all twisted and broken having been fixed up slowly over the previous 7 years, at one point completely undriveable due to landslides and collapse. They took a long time to be fixed to the point of everyday use partly due to the extensive damage but also lack of money in region (Canterbury is quite a large area to share a budget).
Looking into the earthquake, the reason it was so devastating was three fold:
1) It measured 6.3 on the Richter scale, the epicentre was only 6 and half km from the city centre and it was shallow. This meant there was simultaneous vertical and horizontal ground movement, with eye witness accounts describing people being ‘tossed in the air’ as well as increased liquefaction causing more ground movement, undermining many building foundations.
2) There had been 2 large quakes in 2010, one measuring 7.1, which had already weakened some buildings and infrastructure in and around the city.
3) It was midday so the city centre were full
We made our way fairly slowly up the coast with a bit of chat and narration, over the last 7 years despite the money problems, a lot of work had been done to make these roads passable. Highways in New Zealand are pretty much all single lane and in most places it’s the only road, so with highway 1 out of commission there is no way north from Christchurch without going across to the west coast and back again (a 400km dogleg.) We were booked on a whale tour in the early afternoon and arrived with just enough time to have a loo stop and a quick drink before heading out; we had to watch a health and safety video first which was basically, boat go fast/sit down. The company then took us the last bit of the way to the harbour and onto the boats which were catamaran style and set up inside with swish bucket seats. The boat was pretty full with what seemed to be one large group of Chinese tourists so if we had any hope of getting 3 seats together and by the window we needed to be quick; I knew from experience that I get a bit sick so having somewhere to sit inside where you can still see the sea is useful. After another small health and safety talk (boat fast/sit) we were on our way; most of these tours have the ‘if we don’t see anything we’ll book you on another tour’ policy which isn’t always great coz people don’t tend to hang around Kaikoura for more than the day they’re booked, but it does mean the company would lose money so they really want to see something as much as we do.
Sick as a dog, I spent the whole time sitting outside on the back staring at the horizon coz I was told staring at a stationary line can help (it didn’t) but I made it through without spewing so I call that a win. We didn’t see much to begin with but these boats are set up with all sorts of underwater gadgets so they can try to identify where whales can be located. Kaikoura sits at the southern end of the Hikurangi trench which has depths of 3km very close to shore which has led to a large number of deep sea species ending up here; this food source is pretty irresistible to whales and so unlike a lot of places they can regularly be seen within a short distance of the coast. The boat sent out a pulse thing and the responding squeaks gave us a heading and eventually we came upon some sperm whales; the sickness subsided for a few minutes so I could watch and take some pics. To be honest, the whales were great, but even just being on the sea and looking back across the southern alps was amazing enough to justify the days travel, I’ve never heard my sister exclaim as much as our drive up once we got near the mountains. We returned to the harbour and were met by our driver who took us into Kaikoura for our included fish supper, having felt sick for the last few hours a giant pile of chips with decent ketchup was literally the best.
On our journey back we went at our own pace stopping for photos across Kaikoura, the southern alps and the pacific ocean; every one suitable for display like most of the south island. We also came across roughly a billion seals lying on spits of rock right next to the coastal road who were totally unfazed by our proximity and were, I swear, posing. The main bulk of the journey back we spent listening to our own things, I’m pretty sure I had the newest episode of ‘My dad wrote a porno’ which I was trying to get through without disturbing the driver or laugh so hard he asked what I was listening to. Having consulted my guests, we cannot remember what we did that night so it was clearly super important but having had a long day I’m sure we just flopped into bed.
Our flight back wasn’t until the evening so we had the whole day to play with in Christchurch; I wanted to go to the earthquake memorial which was a short walk through town. I had been the CHCH briefly in 2008 but only stayed for a half day due to time constraints so I don’t really remember what it looked like; I only really have a picture in my head of an old cathedral with a spire on a square. This, as it turns out, was the famous Christchurch cathedral who’s spire fell in 2011 and still wasn’t safe for visitors so they had built a ‘transitional cathedral’ while they fixed up the original. This was right next to the earthquake memorial so we were able to see both; the memorial ‘185 empty white chairs’ is a sombre little patch of grass on a junction with a bunch of chairs all painted white to represent the 185 people that lost their lives. The chairs are all different and range from wicker to kitchen to office to wheelchair, there’s even a baby carrier as sadly there were some children who died. There is discussion of how to make this memorial permanent as the chairs are just made of normal chair material and have required some upkeep and painting since 2012; I think it’s totally worthwhile as it’s a poignant reminder of the 5th worst disaster in NZ history.
After lunch we still had some time so we headed to the Canterbury museum in the botanical gardens, here there was a large exhibition on Antarctic exploration as a number of famous expeditions have taken off from CHCH. Now people tend to travel from Chile or Argentina as it’s a shorter journey by sea and they come to the Antarctic Peninsula which has a lot of wildlife, however, what’s-his-name Scott and thingy Shackleton didn’t know this in advance so left from NZ on a few trips. I don’t remember what else was in the museum but we did head to the café for a cuppa and large piece of cake before retracing our steps from a few days earlier and heading to the airport. I was really hoping for us to get back in time for my regular Wednesday night pub quiz at Zac’s bar; we just about made it only missing the first round. As we were 3 extra we had to form our own team so Canterbury UNT were not the same size as all the other teams put together; I don’t remember how we did but I’m sure we won. Right?
#newzealand#travelling#christchurch#earthquake#kaikoura#whale watching#wildllife#fish and chips#canterbury museum#pub quiz
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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight
Illustrations by Chris Gash
Science is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
In a move ostensibly meant to reduce conflicts of interest, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has removed a number of scientists from advisory panels and replaced some of them with representatives from industries that the agency regulates. Like many in the Trump administration, Pruitt has also cast doubt on the reliability of climate science. For instance, in an interview with CNBC, Pruitt said that “measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do.” Similarly, Trump’s pick to head NASA, an agency that oversees a large portion the nation’s climate research, has insisted that research into human influence on climate lacks certainty, and he falsely claimed that “global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago.” Kathleen Hartnett White, Trump’s nominee to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a Senate hearing last month that she thinks we “need to have more precise explanations of the human role and the natural role” in climate change.
The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science. This other movement strives to produce more robust, reproducible findings. Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike:
Science needs to be transparent.
Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them.
The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
These are the arguments underlying an “open science” reform movement that was created, in part, as a response to a “reproducibility crisis” that has struck some fields of science.1 But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
“Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
Calls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer. A 1992 Environmental Protection Agency report identified secondhand smoke as a human carcinogen, and Philip Morris responded by launching an initiative to promote what it called “sound science.” In an internal memo, Philip Morris vice president of corporate affairs Ellen Merlo wrote that the program was designed to “discredit the EPA report,” “prevent states and cities, as well as businesses from passing smoking bans” and “proactively” pass legislation to help their cause.
The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions. Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
The tobacco industry’s brilliant tactic was to turn this baked-in uncertainty against the scientific enterprise itself. While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
“Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since, said Stanford University science historian Robert Proctor.
The sound science push is no longer just Philip Morris sowing doubt about the links between cigarettes and cancer. It’s also a 1998 action plan by the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron and Exxon Mobil to “install uncertainty” about the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. It’s industry-funded groups’ late-1990s effort to question the science the EPA was using to set fine-particle-pollution air-quality standards that the industry didn’t want. And then there was the more recent effort by Dow Chemical to insist on more scientific certainty before banning a pesticide that the EPA’s scientists had deemed risky to children. Now comes a move by the Trump administration’s EPA to repeal a 2015 rule on wetlands protection by disregarding particular studies. (To name just a few examples.)
Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know, Proctor said.2
In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?” said Karen Levy, researcher on information science at Cornell University. But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research and the executive director of ClimateDepot.com, in the documentary “Merchants of Doubt” (based on the book by the same name). Morano’s site is a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
Some of these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
But what’s most telling about the Data Quality Act is how it’s been used, Levy said. A 2004 Washington Post analysis found that in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3 is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
That might sound perfectly reasonable, and in many cases it is, Goodman said. But sometimes there are good reasons why researchers can’t conform to these rules, like when the data contains confidential or sensitive medical information.4 Critics, which include more than a dozen scientific organizations, argue that, in practice, the rules would prevent many studies from being considered in EPA reviews.5
It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’” Nosek said.
Most scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement. Michael Carolan, who researches the sociology of technology and scientific knowledge at Colorado State University, wrote in a 2008 paper about why objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,” Carolan writes.
The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them. Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it. While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,” she said in the documentary.
These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations. Both approaches have critics, but the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated? In other words, under what circumstances do we agree to act on a risk? How certain do we need to be that the risk is real, and how many people would need to be at risk, and how costly is it to reduce that risk? Those are moral questions, not scientific ones, and openly discussing and identifying these kinds of judgment calls would lead to a more honest debate.
Science matters, and we need to do it as rigorously as possible. But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
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You suggested Yudkowsky in a previous ask. How do you respond to the accusations that he is a crank? People make these accusations for a variety of reasons. For reference, consider rationalwiki's less than flattering article on him and his work. I am asking this question from a sincerely unbiased and simply curious standpoint. Thank you for receiving it, and, if you choose to respond, thank you for responding.
Hmm.
First of all, thanks a lot for how polite this was! Thank you for asking, and I am happy to respond for you. :)
I have in fact heard of these accusations.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t think these allegations are at all relevant to the validity of his philosophy in the Sequences. Ideas should be judged on their own merit; of course, we don’t have infinite time, so we have to use heuristics to figure out who to listen to, such as general correctness of beliefs; but I have already read Yudkowsky’s ideas and find him compelling. Since you (probably?) think I have relevant and non-terrible opinions, the heuristic “follow recommendations from your favored authors” (or whatever) should override the weaker heuristic about what to draw to your attention.
But I want to address the accusations in more detail, since they seemed interesting and I don’t think it would be satisfying to you if I didn’t. Keep in mind that I’m not qualified to evaluate many of the technical claims (like around physics or AI) in terms of knowledge or expertise. I’ll mostly be defending the idea that Yudkowsky’s ideas in the Sequences have merit independent of whatever weird shit he got into otherwise, but I also will make an effort to refute exaggerated or inaccurate claims.
So let’s get into discussing the accusations in question (long ass post below):
From what I’ve heard, they’re mostly as follows:
Roko’s Basilisk Debacle. I have no idea what happened here. Yudkowsky may have made a mistake in his comportment or in his logic, but it seems to be a sincere attempt to make the world better.
MIRI Work Inconsequential, Sub-par: Again, I don’t know anything about AI. I’ve never met Yudkowsky or MIRI at work, so I can’t really evaluate how hard they’re working or whatever.
AI Apocalypse is a Bit of a Sketchy Theory: I don’t know anything about AI, but the arguments I’ve seen are very unconvincing. After all, making the leap from “machine that does preprogrammed stuff really (really (really) (etc.))) quickly” to “thing with ability to manipulate, self-modify, and seep into the darkness of the internet to achieve its goals” doesn’t seem to be as easy as the arguments assume.
On the other hand, Yudkowsky might well be 1) operating off information I don’t know 2) concluded different, but equally reasonable (at this point in time) things from the information we share such that AI stuff is a major risk 3) giving into the bias that the things he’s interested in are Really Important or 4) something I didn’t think of that nevertheless doesn’t make him unreliable.
He might be wrong, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the other aspects of his ideology/philosophy. People make mistakes, they follow their biases too far, they get obsessed with strange things, they get stuck in bubbles. It’s erroneous to conclude that all of his ideas must be wrong just because he failed to live up to it.
Alternatively,, he could be doing it for personal gain - such as for fame - and therefore lying, which would bring his entire ideology into doubt as one could not know where he fabricated ideas versus where he was sincere.
Argument With Hanson: I honestly don’t care if he disagreed with Hanson over who the rightful caliph was AI foom. Ratwiki says:
It was immediately after this debate that Yudkowsky left Overcoming Bias (now Hanson’s personal blog) and moved the Sequences to LessWrong.
This insinuates a kind of foul play or bad faith on Yudkowsky’s side. I notice that it is unsourced, and secondly that Hanson and Yudkowsky both seem on still be on reasonable terms (as far as I know). Perhaps the split was already in the works, and Hanson and Yudkowsky regularly had similarly intense debate which was only “remarkable” because of the leave. Perhaps they believed it was confusing for readers to see a blog arguing with itself.
And besides, Yudkowsky couldn’t have decided based on this incident to create LessWrong in that short a time-span, which makes it highly unlikely that it was a petty reaction or whatever.
Yudkowsky Has Not Achieved Much:
Quoting from ratwiki here:
Yudkowsky is almost entirely unpublished outside of his own foundation and blogs[12] and never finished high school, much less did any actual AI research. No samples of his AI coding have been made public.
It is important to note that, as well as no training in his claimed field, Yudkowsky has pretty much no accomplishments of any sort to his credit beyond getting Peter Thiel to give him money. Even his fans admit “A recurring theme here seems to be ‘grandiose plans, left unfinished’.”[13] He claims to be a skilled computer programmer, but has no code available other than Flare, an unfinished computer language for AI programming with XML-based syntax.[14] His papers are generally self-published and have a total of two cites on JSTOR-archived journals (neither to do with AI) as of 2015, one of which is from his friend Nick Bostrom at the closely-associated Future of Humanity Institute.[15]
His actual, observable results in the real world are a popular fan fiction (which to his credit he did in fact finish, unusually for the genre), a pastiche erotic light novel,[16] a large pile of blog posts and a surprisingly well-funded research organisation — that has produced fewer papers in a decade and a half than a single graduate student produces in the course of a physics Ph.D, and the latter’s would be peer reviewed. Although Yudkowsky is working on a replacement for peer review.[17]
I really do not care how many successes Yudkowsky has had. His ideas are the issue here, not his actual abilities. Some of the more grandiose claims (”optimize the universe!”) are perhaps, well, grandiose; but that doesn’t undermine the other aspects of them.
(And in fact Yudkowsky has been able to create an entire movement of people, with highly influential members such as Scott Alexander and the Unit of Caring, which I notice is far more than is typical.
As for the allegations about MIRI, see above.)
Whether Yudkowsky considers himself a genius is unclear totally clear; he refers to himself as a genius six times in his “autobiography.” However he admits to possibly being less smart than John Conway.[18] As a homeschooled individual with no college degree, Yudkowsky may not be in an ideal position to estimate his own smartness. That many of his followers think he is a genius is an understatement.[19][20] Similarly, some of his followers are derisive of mainstream scientists, just look for comments about “not smart outside the lab” and “for a celebrity scientist.”[21] Yudkowsky believes that a doctorate in AI is a net negative when it comes to Seed AI.[22] While Yudkowsky doesn’t attack Einstein, he does indeed think the scientific method cannot handle things like the Many worlds Interpretation as well as his view on Bayes’ theorem.[23] LessWrong does indeed have its unique jargon.[24]
Yudkowsky may or may not have an overly large ego. I don’t think this is relevant to his philosophy.
Disagreement with Yudkowsky’s ideas is often attributed to “undiscriminating skepticism.” If you don’t believe cryonics works, it’s because you have watched Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.[25] It’s just not a possibility that you don’t believe it works because it has failed tests and is made improbable by the facts.[26]
I notice that “often” is doing a lot of work here. The citation links to Yudkowsky’s article on Undiscriminating Skepticism, in which he does not make the claim that “if you don’t believe cryonics works, it must be because you believed in Penn & Teller: Bullshit!”. Instead, he makes this (verbose and difficult to parse) claim (emphasis mine):
To put it more formally, before I believe that someone is performing useful cognitive work, I want to know that their skepticism discriminates truth from falsehood, making a contribution over and above the contribution of this-sounds-weird-and-is-not-a-tribal-belief. In Bayesian terms, I want to know that p(mockery|belief false & not a tribal belief) > p(mockery|belief true & not a tribal belief).
If I recall correctly, the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, on UFOs, explained away as a sighting of the planet Venus what turned out to actually be an experimental aircraft. No, I don’t believe in UFOs either; but if you’re going to explain away experimental aircraft as Venus, then nothing else you say provides further Bayesian evidence against UFOs either. You are merely an undiscriminating skeptic. I don’t believe in UFOs, but in order to credit Project Blue Book with additional help in establishing this, I would have to believe that if there were UFOs then Project Blue Book would have turned in a different report.
And so if you’re just as skeptical of a weird, non-tribal belief that turns out to have pretty good support, you just blew the whole deal - that is, if I pay any extra attention to your skepticism, it ought to be because I believe you wouldn’t mock a weird non-tribal belief that was worthy of debate.
Personally, I think that Michael Shermer blew it by mocking molecular nanotechnology, and Penn and Teller blew it by mocking cryonics (justification: more or less exactly the same reasons I gave for Artificial Intelligence). Conversely, Richard Dawkins scooped up a huge truckload of actual-discriminating-skeptic points, at least in my book, for not making fun of the many-worlds interpretation when he was asked about in an interview; indeed, Dawkins noted (correctly) that the traditional collapse postulate pretty much has to be incorrect. The many-worlds interpretation isn’t just the formally simplest explanation that fits the facts, it also sounds weird and is not yet a tribal belief of the educated crowd; so whether someone makes fun of MWI is indeed a good test of whether they understand Occam’s Razor or are just mocking everything that’s not a tribal belief.
But I do propose that before you give anyone credit for being a smart, rational skeptic, that you ask them to defend some non-mainstream belief. And no, atheism doesn’t count as non-mainstream anymore, no matter what the polls show. It has to be something that most of their social circle doesn’t believe, or something that most of their social circle does believe which they think is wrong. Dawkins endorsing many-worlds still counts for now, although its usefulness as an indicator is fading fast… but the point is not to endorse many-worlds, but to see them take some sort of positive stance on where the frontiers of knowledge should change.
But it’s dangerous to let people pick up too much credit just for slamming astrology and homeopathy and UFOs and God. What if they become famous skeptics by picking off the cheap targets, and then use that prestige and credibility to go after nanotechnology? Who will dare to consider cryonics now that it’s been featured on an episode of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit”?
So Yudkowsky isn’t saying that everyone who disagrees with him on e.g. many-worlds or cryonics is a P&T-thumper. Instead, here’s my interpretation of what he’s saying:
1. You can easily accumulate Skeptic Points by having certain views that don’t actually require that much mental effort to come up with, such as “homeopathy is dumb”.
2. These are not really relevant to your actual level of credibility.
3. Certain organizations, like Penn and Teller, have accumulated a lot of Skeptic Points by mocking things like homeopathy.
4. Mockery is not an argument. Organizations like Penn and Teller often mock things based on them being weird, which means that their mockery should mean absolutely nothing.
5.Unfortunately, due to the Skeptic Points that Penn and Teller has, their mockery has an outsize influence, which is bad.
6. If you want to assign Skeptic Points to actual credible people, you should test to make sure they’re not just parroting back their ingroup’s talking points.
The ratwiki interpretation is astonishingly uncharitable, and it also lacks substantiation for the claim it makes.
Note that I don’t know how accurate EY’s interpretation of the facts about cryonics and Penn and Teller is. It’s just that he didn’t say anything like what ratwiki characterizes him (an internet dweller? a random asshole on the bus?) as saying in the link, and that’s not how the principle was intended.
Yudkowsky Has Weird Viewpoints That Are Controversial:
Quoting again from ratwiki since I am very irritated at this point with them:
Despite being viewed as the smartest two-legged being to ever walk this planet on LessWrong, Yudkowsky (and by consequence much of the LessWrong community) endorses positions as TruthTMthat are actually controversial in their respective fields. Below is a partial list:
Transhumanism is correct. Cryonics might someday work. The Singularity is near![citation NOT needed]
Bayes’ theorem and the scientific method don’t always lead to the same conclusions (and therefore Bayes is better than science).[27]
Bayesian probability can be applied indiscriminately.[28]
Non-computable results, such as Kolmogorov complexity, are totally a reasonable basis for the entire epistemology. Solomonoff, baby!
Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics is correct (a “slam dunk”), despite the lack of consensus among quantum physicists.[29]
Evolutionary psychology is well-established science.
Utilitarianism is a correct theory of morality. In particular, he proposes a framework by which an extremely, extremely huge number of people experiencing a speck of dust in their eyes for a moment could be worse than a man being tortured for 50 years.[30]
Yudkowsky believes some strange controversial things! Also, some people on the internet have presented evidence that doesn’t agree with Yudkowsky’s conclusions! Shock! He must be a total crock of shit!
Ironically, this falls into appeal to mockery, the same issue EY addresses in the essay linked above.
Again, I don’t agree with everything EY says, but it’s incredibly uncharitable to characterize his beliefs this way. For example, the dust-speck problem isn’t meant to be Obvious Truth- there was a massive debate around it on LW, in fact, and it appears to be construed specifically to be difficult to answer.
A wrong belief on something doesn’t make you discredited. It just makes you wrong on that thing.
Of course, you’d expect someone as smart as Yudkowsky to have a lot of correct opinions. But I don’t know whether his opinions are correct or not since I’m not an expert in his field. I recommend him based on my personal experience applying and thinking about his philosophy, not based on any particular object-level accuracy of his.
Yudkowsky Once Wrote a Story Where Rape Is Legal and It Wasn’t a Dystopia (rape cw):
Also, while it is not very clear what his actual position is on this, he wrote a short sci-fi story where rape was briefly mentioned as legal.[31] That the character remarking on it didn’t seem to be referring to consensual sex in the same way we do today didn’t prevent a massive reaction in the comments section. He responded “The fact that it’s taken over the comments is not as good as I hoped, but neither was the reaction as bad as I feared.” He described the science fiction world he had in mind as a “Weirdtopia” rather than a dystopia.[32]
Yes, and the point is?
Yudkowsky doesn’t go around raping people - though his non-rape-related philosophy wouldn’t necessarily be wrong even if he did - and he doesn’t go around advocating for a society like this.
It may or may not be morally wrong that he does not address it seriously. This wiki article doesn’t make any argument about that, though.
This is also irrelevant to his meta-philosophy.
In Conclusion
The ratwiki article on Yudkowsky managed to insinuate various terrible things about him which are often implausible, inaccurate, or technically-true but with false implications. It is nothing other than a mockingly snide attempt at character assassination.
It has little or nothing to do with Yudkowsky’s actual philosophy, and manages to strawman him badly.
I continue to recommend Yudkowsky for (critical, skeptical) reading. Thank you again for asking.
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The Last Ship Boss Breaks Down Series Finale, [Spoiler]'s Fate, the Marines' Involvement and That Missing Cameo
The following contains .50 cal spoilers from the series finale of TNT’s The Last Ship.
After five intense, dangerous and world-saving adventures, The Last Ship is no more. And in more ways than one. The TNT action-drama wrapped its five-season mission on Sunday night, and when all was said and done, the Nathan James was down for the count — though she had jusssst enough fight left in her to save the day.
On land, the Navy and Marine forces stormed a Colombian beach, where heavy battle ensued. With an assist from the James, the heroes squelched the enemy and forged ahead to Tavo’s compound, ultimately getting the drop on (and putting down) the revolutionary.
At sea, however, the war was uglier. In the course of outwitting one of Tavo’s corvettes, the James was sneaked up on by the near-mythical battleship that Chandler (played by Eric Dane) had been sensing all season long. Perforated by missiles and rendered defenseless, the Nathan James crew heard Kara say the two words they had in myriad skirmishes before eluded: “Abandon ship!”
Abandon they did, though Chandler secretly stayed behind, determined to go down with the ship and all that. But first he saw to it that the James got in one final, fatal blow, by turning the weapons hot and steering the ship right into the belly of the battleship beast. It seemed a purposeful suicide for Chandler, but in a surreal sequence that followed, we saw him — alive and well, clad in his dress blues and touring a healthy James.
There, he was teased by the hint of dearly departed Dr. Rachel Scott, while reuniting with other heroes lost along the way — Tex included. It was a conversation with the latter, coupled with the voice of Chandler’s daughter Ashley, that nudged Tom to halt his underwater free-fall and swim up to the surface, much to the delight of Slattery, Kara and Jeter in a nearby RHIB.
In this in-depth post mortem Q&A, TVLine spoke with Last Ship showrunner Steve Kane about finally dry-docking the TNT drama, Chandler’s fate, that brutal Wolf fight and the assorted cameos — including the one that wasn’t.
TVLINE | You wrapped filming well over a year ago. How does it feel to finally have the series finale on air? Well, I’ve been saying goodbye to the show slowly for a year now, you know. When we wrapped, that was pretty emotional. We actually wrapped on the beach after we finished shooting the D-Day sequence, which was a great way to go out. It was really special with lots of hugs and tears and toasts and speeches. And then I had several months of post[-production], where I was still kind of busy with the show and I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of it being over.
Then we had the final mix of the finale in February, and that became sort of a final ending. For the last 10 months, I’ve been sort of adjusting to life post-Last Ship, and then to watch it come on the air and talk about it has been fun.
TVLINE | That D-Day sequence, by the way… wow. This finale looked expensive. It was, but it wasn’t crazy. We had to make a lot of compromises to be able to make it work, but we ended up under budget or on budget again this season.
TVLINE | When I see the half-dozen amphibious things that clamber onto the beach, I’m like, that’s not easy. Oh, the AAV — the amphibious assault vehicle. And then we have hovercrafts later. Well, that didn’t cost us anything. What happened was the Marines wanted to play with us in Season 5 — they had been watching the show from a slight distance and eventually were like, “OK, we want in.” So I said to them, “We’d love to have you guys.” Sometimes you get all these offers for really cool things and it’s great, but a lot of times it doesn’t work out — it’s either too expensive for you to go shoot it, or the timing doesn’t work out or you don’t have a story for it. Like, the Navy would offer us really cool stuff and we didn’t really have a story that was designed around that. You had to be picky and choose your battles.
I knew early on I wanted to do D-Day, so I said to the Marines, “If you’re ever doing any kind of amphibious landing exercises down at Camp Pendleton — nothing you’re not going to already do, because we don’t want to use taxpayer dollars — but if you’re going to do it, can you let us film it?” So I drove down the coast with a small crew, brought like nine cameras and a drone, and we filmed this amphibious assault exercise with the amphibious tanks coming out of the water and all this stuff. That was in April, and we went back in September and shot again with our crew. And then all the Marines who were off-duty came out and worked as extras for us…. We got a lot of production value, is my point, for the same budget we always have. It still was the most expensive episode of the season, probably, but we also find ways of doing smaller “bottle episodes” where you don’t even need a set and you do very internal storytelling. Those episodes actually end up being sometimes our most successful because we’re really getting creative.
TVLINE | Talking about bottle episodes, that reminds me: There was one a couple of weeks back where you had a team in Cuba working through different scenarios to take back the command center in Florida. That gave me déjà vu to a Season 1 SEAL Team episode — but in retrospect, you filmed yours before they did. And maybe that’s just a very common tactical thing. It’s funny. I haven’t seen the SEAL Team episode where they did that, but it is actually very common for SEALs to do a full rehearsal. Like when they got Bin Laden, they do a full rehearsal over and over again. The only difference with ours is that different people were rehearsing than would be executing it. And what was challenging about that was we had to figure out how to redo our entire command center set. It was actually the very same set; we just boarded it up and then shot the scene the way it looked in Cuba.
TVLINE | Let’s talk about the finale. Was there any debate about Chandler’s eventual fate? Because you had me thinking he heroically went kablooey, which I would have been “OK” with. Well, it’s good that you didn’t know. We took the show from, I think, a much more popcorn, all-American story of good guys and bad guys in the first season to much more complicated areas as the seasons went on, and we have always dealt with moral ambiguity and other real issues.
And in this last season, we were sort of undermining a lot of what we’d built in the first season because we wanted to show that all this gunplay and shoot ‘em up and war actually killed people that matter, as opposed to extras or just bad guys. They killed people we love, and that screws up brains and emotions. So you see Danny go into his struggles with Kara and just being a dad, and Chandler being haunted by the specter of his own demise. He’s been haunted since really the third season, when he was like, “I don’t want to be the man who saved the world any more. I don’t want to be this guy who’s face is on the wall of the buildings.” So yeah, if he did actually die, you would see that as a logical conclusion to his story.
But the one thing that we kept from the very first season — and from the very first meeting I had with Michael Wright, who at that time the head of the network, and I totally agree with it — is that this is a show about hope. The book on which it was loosely based was a nuclear holocaust story which didn’t have much hope. I wanted to change it into a pandemic because that was more frightening to me at the time, but also with a sickness there’s always hope for a cure. So the idea of killing off the hero at the end felt a bit like a betrayal of that. What I wanted to really say in the end is that yes, despite being haunted, despite this fact that the world can be an ugly and awful place with violence, if you theoretically or metaphorically go to the light, or go towards where there’s love and hope, you’ll be better off.
I think that was kind of the metaphor or the theme for the whole five years, “looking for the light.” So even though Chandler really feels like he’s committing suicide as he’s crashing his ship into the other ship, he does have a choice when he’s underwater. He can follow his Nathan James into the murky depths and join Tex and Rachel and Michener and Meylan and Burk… everyone who’s passed away that he feels responsible for and guilty about, or he can listen to the voice of his daughter and go towards the light. So it was never really in doubt for me. I like that it was in doubt for you, but no, we were always about ending with a sense of hope. (Coming up this week on TVLine: the inside story on how the series almost ended.)
TVLINE | For the record, in your mind Wolf (played by Bren Foster) wound up surviving? Yeah. You see him getting into the gurney at the end, so in my mind he does survive.
TVLINE | Because, man, that was a brutal fight, including him getting stabbed six ways to Sunday. He was operating on pure adrenaline there. I called Bren Foster and said, “I want to give Wolf the mother of all Wolf battles, but I don’t want it to be in this big, open space, and I don’t want any guns involved, at least in your hands.” I told him we’re going to do it in a hallway, so he went to the location a week in advance with his team of martial arts experts and choreographed this thing, and I can say he really brought everything to it. He gets shot twice, he gets stabbed, he gets punched in the groin a couple times…. And the way, Bren described what he was doing to people! He goes, “Here I’m going to break the guy’s trachea. Here, I’m going to punch his rib cage into his heart….”
TVLINE | He knows his stuff. It was pretty visceral, but that alone is a really fun kind of relationship story, between me and Bren. I passed him for Season 2 based on his audition, but I didn’t know he was a martial artist. Someone told me on the set: “Have you seen Bren’s martial arts videos?” I said no, and I looked on YouTube and I was like, “Oh, my God.” He’s a several times world champion in many different versions of martial arts, so I said to Bren, “Yeah, maybe we’ll take the gun out of your hand a couple times.” [Laughs] I was just happy I’d named him Wolf because it worked out perfectly that he became Wolf.
TVLINE | Tell me about approaching John Pyper-Ferguson, because seeing Tex at the end was a great little callback. Pyper is just a great mascot of the show. We originally only had a two-year deal with him, because he was exploring other opportunities, and I begged him, please, let’s find ways to be able to work together. On a handshake agreement, we agreed he’d come back with three episodes in Season 3, but we knew we didn’t have a contract with him and that he wasn’t going to be available to us on a full-time basis beyond that, so I killed him off. And his death was so important because it was the last straw that kind of pushed Chandler to the edge. I knew that when Chandler was going to be teetering between life and death, Tex was the one guy he was always able to talk to him straight. Even if Slattery and Jeter were always guys he could count on, there was something about his relationship with Tex, because Tex wasn’t in the Navy and there was something more plain-spoken about him.
It was great for the cast and crew to see him again — it was like homecoming week. What was lovely was bringing back all the old faces for the final scenes, when they’re all in the room saluting Chandler. Actors and friends who’d been gone for several seasons came back, and we had a great kind of reunion there on the set which was nice.
TVLINE | Well, I have to ask: Do you even put in the phone call to Rhona Mitra, to her people? To actually show Rachel? No. We do not. In fact, I shouldn’t say that – I was going to, but then she made it very clear on some of her social media postings that she was not happy with the way things ended with us, so I didn’t want to stir the pot. But I think the way it is now actually is more spectral, more interesting.
TVLINE | True. True. And then lastly, if I were to say that I think that Season 5 was among the best, perhaps the best of the run, would you argue the point? No, I would appreciate that. Every year I go, “This is our best season yet,” and I think that’s because I’m always looking forward, I’m always trying to evolve the show and grow the show. I feel like we’ve done so many cool things over the years. We’ve been as much of a genre show as any kind of Walking Dead-type show in terms of our virus, but we did a very realistic version of it. We dealt with the occult and the religion that cropped up in this post-apocalyptic world. We dealt with post-traumatic stress and the drugs and the Mediterranean adventure…. This was really just our way of saying that in the end, these people were warriors and this is what a warrior’s life is like.
I think also that this was our most accomplished season because we got really good at making the show. We did Season 4 and 5 back-to-back, and the demands on that were so great. On the one hand, we had to create two seasons’ worth of stories and mythology without a break. Normally you get 10, 12 weeks of buildup between seasons just to get a running start. We finished the writing of Season 4 really early, by November of whatever year that was, 2016, and we were still filming that season in April of the following year. That gave us a big head start to really get our act together and write Season 5.
We also got really good, as you can imagine, with our production meetings, where I’d say, “OK, Page 2, how many tanks do we have? OK, we have 40 tanks, great. And we have two helicopters, and we’re going to blow up how many people…?”
TVLINE | You no longer have Jimmy in the props department saying, “Tanks?! Where am I going to get a tank?” By the time we got to Season 5, it was no skin off anyone’s back. “You want 12 tanks? You got it.” The crew was so professional and there was no challenge too big for them. I remember we had a guest visiting during one of the production meetings and he was, like, having a panic attack just listening. “How do you do this every week on the budget?!” Because every episode is really custom made. There’s no episode that’s like the others, so each one created from scratch.
I could go on at length about our amazing locations and art departments. That we were able to shoot from the North Pole to Asia to South America to the Mediterranean without leaving Southern California? That’s because we found great locations and we had great art direction, a great production design team, great visual effects people…. I’m so very proud of those guys, and I’m very proud of Season 5. I think that we took the show to its logical end, and it feels like the show was always destined to be five seasons as a result. People say, “Could you have done six seasons?” You know, of course, but…
TVLINE | I love the show, but I’m very satisfied with where and how it ended, yeah. That’s the way I feel. Again, the biggest thing for me is that we had just gotten so great at doing the show and we were such a tight-knit family. That’s the biggest loss for me, that everyone’s kind of scattered to the wind to do different shows. I’m proud of all of them, but what we had was really special and I’ll cherish it.
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Source: https://tvline.com/2018/11/11/last-ship-recap-series-finale-season-5-episode-10-nathan-james-sinks/
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Sensor Sweep: David Lindsay, Robots, Hollow City, H. Beam Piper, Jonah Hex
Lit-Crit (Jewish Review of Books): It’s a bit surprising to come across Harold Bloom’s confession that the literary work that has been his greatest obsession is not, say, Hamlet or Henry IV, but a relatively little-known 1920 fantasy novel. After all, Bloom is our most famous bardolater. When I took an undergraduate class with him at Yale, he announced his trembling bafflement before Shakespeare’s greatness in almost every lecture. In the course of his career, Bloom has named a handful of other literary eminences who compel from him a similar obeisance—Emerson, Milton, Blake, Kafka, and Freud are members in this select club—but one does not find David Lindsay on this list.
Writing (McSweeneys): I had a whole gaggle of 100-point bucks in my sights, sleeping peacefully on their feet, like cows. The way they were lined up, I could take down the whole clan in a single shot of gun, clean through their magnificent oversized brains. That’d be enough (deer) meat to last Nora and the baby through the harsh Amarillo winter. I shifted my weight in my hidey spot, snapping a twig and pouring more pepper on the fire by muttering, “God dammit all to hell.”
Gaming (Modiphius): Conan the Brigand is the complete guide to the nomadic brigands of the Hyborian Age, providing the gamemaster and player characters with all the resources to run campaigns that embrace the path of the brigand, or are affected by it. Here within these pages are all the resources needed to bring to life this outlaw world!
New material to expand your Conan campaign, with brigand-themed castes, stories, backgrounds, and equipment, allowing you to create your own unique brigands, nomads, and raiders.
Science Fiction (Brian Niemeier): The Unz Review shows how the Right all too often rushes to enshrine earlier Leftist subversion simply because it precedes current Leftist subversion.
This time, the subject of misguided right wing hagiography is John W. Campbell, Jr.
Alec Nevala-Lee, an Asian-American science fiction writer, has here written something remarkable: an intentionally PC multi-biography that nevertheless manages to be well-informed and informative, well-written and compulsively readable.
Science Fiction (Unz.com): Alec Nevala-Lee, an Asian-American science fiction writer,[2] has here written something remarkable: an intentionally PC multi-biography that nevertheless manages to be well-informed and informative, well-written and compulsively readable. It’s the first substantive biography of John W. Campbell, Jr., the man – or, as we’ll see, some would insist on “the white male” – who basically invented modern science fiction; and that last point means that to do so properly, we have to take into account the three men – yes, again, white males – whose writing careers he promoted in order to do it.
Fiction (DMR Books): The Ivory Trail was Talbot Mundy’s fifth novel and his most widely reviewed book up until that time. It was serialized in Adventure magazine in early 1919 under the title On the Trail of Tipoo Tib and then published in book form by Bobbs-Merrill later that year. It received a largely positive reception but was quite different from his previous books in that it was set entirely in East Africa, amid Mundy’s old hunting grounds.
Tolkien (Pages Unbound): I first picked up Tolkien when I was very young (sometime in elementary school). Some fantasy had come into my hands—some book or another, or perhaps the original Final Fantasy game on the NES. My mom said, “You know, if you like that, there is a book you would like . . .” I’m not even sure if my mom has ever read The Hobbit, which is a testament to its cultural cache. I did not immediately acquiesce. I was a pretentious child—before I became a man and put away childish things like the fear of seeming childish—and I initially rebuffed my mom’s efforts. But a book is a book, and I didn’t have so many laying around in those days, so I didn’t wait long before reading it.
Science Fiction (G. Scott Huggins): Robots. I have never really understood why there is an obsession with stories about robots. As with fae, I understand the attraction of having robots exist in a story. What I don’t really get is stories about robots. Robots as the reason for the story. Yet many, many people love stories about robots. Isaac Asimov, arguably, built his career on an obsession with robots. I can’t think of any other piece of future technology — with the possible exception of spaceships — that has inspired such a wealth of stories about them. Can you imagine a whole subgenre of SF devoted to, say, laser guns?
Fiction (Wasteland and Sky): Super powered cop Adam Song has dedicated his life to the law. In the military and the police force, Adam ruthlessly protects the innocent.
But this time he’s killed the wrong bad guy. Now the local drug lord’s son is dead, and the boss is out for Adam’s blood. Even his secret identity won’t keep him safe. The police department hangs him out to dry, his years of exemplary service forgotten. Adam must take justice into his own hands to keep his family safe.
Fiction (Fiction Fan Blog): When a young lady comes to Sherlock Holmes for advice, what at first seems like an intriguing mystery soon turns into a tale of murderous revenge. Mary Morstan’s father disappeared some years ago, just after he had returned from colonial service. He had been in the Andaman Islands, one of the officers charged with guarding the prisoners held there. A few years after his disappearance, Miss Morstan received a large pearl in the mail, and every year for the six years since then, she has received another.
Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): Following the whinefest by Fake Game Journalists over Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Oliver Campbell of the Metro City Boys put together a supercut of how he prevailed over the game. As the saying goes, “The master failed more times than the amateur ever attempts.” That’s what it takes to beat this game: persistence.
Every game of this sort has similar requirements of persistence to succeed. Oliver here goes over how he did that. Skip to 14:10 for the lesson, taken from Rocky Balboa.
Acting (Chris Lansdown): Thanks to frequent commenter Mary, I recently learned about the existence of William Gillette, the first man to play Sherlock Holmes, mostly on the stage but also in a silent film.
Born in 1853, in Connecticut, William Gillette was a stage director, writer, and actor in America. In 1897, his play, Secret Service, was sufficiently successful in America that his producer took it to England.
Gaming (Rampant Games): I played over 70 hours of No Man’s Sky when it was originally released. Unlike others, I wasn’t disappointed. Yeah, it got repetitive and lonely at times. There was a starkness to it that no amount of lush procedural visuals could overcome. It’s changed a lot since then, graphically, in gameplay, and it has true multiplayer. Sadly, I haven’t had the time to devote to it. Yet.
Fiction (Razored Zen): This is a collection of stories selected by Joe Lansdale, and including in introduction by Lansdale. Before I talk about the individual stories, I’ll give my overall viewpoint. I’d generally say I enjoyed most of the tales but the title is very misleading. A better title might have been, “Tales of a New West,” or something along those lines. Most of these tales are nowhere near traditional westerns. Lansdale is clear in the introduction that that was what he was looking for but the title certainly would have led me to expect a different sort of collection.
Writing (Rawle Nyanzi): Larry Correia, the Mountain Who Writes, is a personal hero of mine. His advice to writers is to be prolific: write lots of stuff, then release that stuff, then write some more, release some more, and so on. I am often in awe of how much he writes and publishes, and I wish that I could reach even one-tenth of his yearly output. To him, “writer’s block” simply isn’t a thing — he presses on, no matter what.
Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): Henry Beam Piper was born on this day, March 23, in 1904. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1964.
Piper is not well known today, and that’s a shame. In his lifetime, he was best known for two series, The Paratime Police and the Terro-Human Future History, as well as the stand-alone short story “Omnilingual”. His best known novels include the Little Fuzzy subseries of his future series and Space Viking, which was a major influence on Jerry Pournelle.
Fiction (John C. Wright): Abraham Merrit is one of the foundational authors of speculative fiction, and it is a shame that he is not well remembered. I blame a deliberate effort of John W Cambell Jr and his protegees to undermine the fame of pulp authors in order to glolrify the more nuts-and-bolts fiction following the model of Jules Verne or Buck Rogers.
Now, I like Hard SF or Tech SF as much as the next fan of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, Baxter, &c., but I also like the pulps and their freedom from strict genre restraints, and I hate snobbery in all its forms.
There is no wrong way to have fun.
Fiction (Rich Horton): Today would have been H. Beam Piper’s 115th birthday. His first novels were the two serials discussed below, published in books form as Crisis in 2140 and Uller Uprising. (A version of “Uller Uprising” had actually appeared as part of the Twayne Triplet The Petrified Planet a year earlier.) In addition to those novels, I append a short look at perhaps his most famous story, “Omnilingual”.
Comic Books (Broadswords and Blasters): In 1993, editor Karen Berger at DC Comics forged a new imprint that focused on stories geared at a more mature audience and creator owned works as well. The end result was the creation of Vertigo Comics. Such early titles included, naturally enough, a transfer of already established titles such as Shade the Changing Man, The Sandman,[1] Swamp Thing, Hellblazer,[2] Animal Man and Doom Patrol. Soon after, new titles, both ongoing and limited premiered under this imprint including Neil Gaiman’s Death: the High Cost of Living, the Matt Wagner-helmed Sandman: Mystery Theatre and Peter Milligan’s Enigma.
Sensor Sweep: David Lindsay, Robots, Hollow City, H. Beam Piper, Jonah Hex published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames
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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight
With under two weeks to go until Election Day, the political universe is in full horse-race obsession mode. Who’s up, who’s down? Does fundraising matter? Who’s going to turn out on Nov. 6? What popular narrative that’s snaking its way through Twitter is the right one? WHO’S GONNA WIN???
FiveThirtyEight relies on forecast models to give a sense of where a race stands, and we base those forecasts on polls and what we call fundamentals — historic factors that help us predict the way voters will act. But even with the model, elections can be difficult to get your arms around. The Classic version of our model currently gives Democrats a 1 in 6 chance of winning the Senate1, but events in the last couple of weeks of the campaign and a lack of polling in some places leave our model with a couple of blind spots.
This lack of certainty in the last few days of campaigns means that partisans work overtime to slick the highest sheen of gloss onto races. They want the Twitter and media narratives to go their way — they want their party’s spin to work magic. With that dynamic in mind, I thought I’d ask a couple partisans to give us their best spin on the Senate map. Republican Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Sen. Mitch McConnell and who now runs his own political consulting firm, and Democrat Lauren Passalacqua, the communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, obliged.
What follows are their takes on a few key Senate races as the campaigns come down to the wire. Their remarks have been edited and condensed for clarity, and I’ve offered some fact checks and clarifications in the footnotes where appropriate.
Indiana
FiveThirtyEight projection: 2 in 3 chance the Democrat, Sen. Joe Donnelly, beats Mike Braun to win re-election
Holmes (R):
Obviously after what happened in 2016 with Evan Bayh, it’s more of a red state than it used to be, but it’s still very competitive. I think Joe Donnelly has run, up to this point, one of the better Democratic Senate campaigns, but I think he’s got his work cut out for him. I think it’s just a tight race. Who knows. In 2016, it broke very late and decisively toward Republicans.
Passalacqua (D):
There’s early voting already in Indiana. They’re already turning people out in the places we need them to be turning out in great numbers — Indianapolis, Marion County. We’re also seeing enthusiasm on college campuses. But what you’re seeing, too, is Joe Donnelly running just as a middle-of-the-road Hoosier — “I’m going to Washington to get stuff done. All that bickering back and forth, that’s not what I’m a part of, that’s not what Indiana wants to be a part of, so I’m just going to work with whoever I can to do the job that Hoosiers expect.”
Missouri
FiveThirtyEight projection: 4 in 7 chance the Democrat, Sen. Claire McCaskill, beats state Attorney General Josh Hawley to win re-election
Holmes (R):
Claire McCaskill spent the better part of 2018 with the good fortune of an in-state governor scandal that she tried to muddy the water with and tie her opponent to. But once that was in the rearview mirror, there was an awful lot that went with it. In about June, Josh Hawley sort of hit his stride in engaging with McCaskill and started playing a lot of offense. I think that race now is in a very strong position. It’s one of the two that has broken [towards Republicans] most obviously since Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.
Passalacqua (D):
This is another place where we’ve seen the public polling neck and neck, which is what we expected, especially in a state that does trend more conservative. Certainly we’ve seen the attorney general back on his heels a bit with the kind of advertising he’s had to rely on, which fights back on this idea that he won’t protect pre-existing conditions, but obviously that ad is undermined by the lawsuit he’s on [challenging the Affordable Care Act].2 So what we see is a debate unfolding on the issues where Claire does have the upper hand.
North Dakota
FiveThirtyEight projection: 3 in 10 chance the Republican, U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer, beats the incumbent, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.
Holmes (R):
I’ve said since the middle of August I thought North Dakota was done with Heidi Heitkamp. It has become a much more conservative state in recent years, and, interestingly, Trump’s economic message resonates perfectly with the kind of historical prairie populism we’ve seen in places like North Dakota. And she finds herself down double digits pretty durably now, going on a couple months.3 Of the races where Republicans are playing offense, I would say it’s the only one where it’s totally off the board.
Passalacqua (D):
I do think it’s closer than people expect. It was always going to be one of the toughest states for Democrats. That’s historically a state that’s hard to poll. I think everyone remembers that famous photo of her with the newspaper that declared her opponent the winner.4 She has an advantage in spending on advertising5 and we know Republican groups like the Senate Leadership Fund continue to spend there, so that still, in our mind, is a place where we’re monitoring it and Heidi is closing it out.
Florida
FiveThirtyEight projection: 5 in 7 chance the Democrat, Sen. Bill Nelson, beats Gov. Rick Scott to win re-election
Holmes (R):
This race is a little bit of a black box to election observers, because of the hurricane and because it’s such a large and diverse state that you have a little bit of everything in terms of political-environment factors. The governor’s race has an interesting component, we’ll have to see. Democrats will tell you they’re hopeful that demographics that were inaccessible to Bill Nelson become accessible because of gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum [Gillum is black]. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Particularly in southwest Florida, there could be a whole bunch of retirees who are just getting down there who may react to the idea of governance that’s more liberal than they’re comfortable with.
Passalacqua (D):
Florida folks were very bullish on Gov. Scott because he brings a blank check and it’s an expensive state. It’s one of those places where you’ve seen the Scott playbook before: Spend a ton of money, get elected. When you dig a little further, there are a couple problems for Scott. His previous races were in 2010 and 2014, which were really good Republican years for Florida, yet he barely won by a single point both times and he underperformed the Republican ballot. I think the thing that works to Nelson’s advantage is that he’s a workhorse. He is someone who will keep his head down.
Arizona
FiveThirtyEight projection: 5 in 8 chance the Democrat, U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, beats U.S. Rep. Martha McSally to win
Holmes (R):
Sinema has taken on an awful lot of water in the last couple of weeks. She was very successful at using a Republican primary to rebrand herself as a moderate. And I think it has taken more effort than maybe Republicans would have thought to dislodge that. She has one of the worst oppo files in the Democratic recruiting class, and I think there were an awful lot of folks who thought that it would speak for itself. [Sinema’s past has been in the news — some reports have cast doubt on her stories of childhood hardship and some have questioned remarks she made as an anti-war activist during President George W. Bush’s administration.] Now, maybe it will, but it’s still a very tight race. Republicans, to a person, feel like we have a superior candidate with better credentials and a better fit ideologically for the state.
Passalacqua (D):
This is also an exciting race because this is the first election cycle where you’re seeing a lot of resources pulled into the state. Democrats closed the registration advantage that Republicans had. I read the reporting like everyone else, and what she said is what her parents said: She grew up in tough circumstances and they have helped shape who she is and how she approaches her work.
Tennessee
FiveThirtyEight projection: 3 in 4 chance the Republican, U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, beats former Gov. Phil Bredesen to win
Holmes (R):
The electorate just isn’t the same as it used to be — it’s not in an elder-statesman mood. It’s in a change, drain-the-swamp, fight, represent-us type mood, and it’s just tough for guys like Bredesen who are in the middle of an electorate where there is no middle.
Passalacqua (D):
This is very much a pure toss-up, it’s incredibly competitive. Gov. Bredesen has run a race that’s solely focused on Tennessee. “Forget the noise, let’s talk about Tennessee.” In every one of his ads, in the events he holds, he’s applying for the job, and that’s really refreshing at a time when you’re overwhelmed by the punditry on television.
Texas
FiveThirtyEight projection: 4 in 5 chance the Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, beats U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke to win re-election
Holmes (R):
I think Beto is a hell of a political celebrity, and if you’re running an underdog race in 2018, he’s laid out a perfect blueprint for how to get attention, how to raise money, how to become a national superstar. But I don’t think he’s given us a blueprint to win a red state. We’re living in an age of political celebrity, and there’s no question he’s become that, but in terms of putting votes in a box, he’s got positions that are far, far outside the mainstream of Texas.
Passalacqua (D):
I don’t know if there’s anyone who’s run up as many miles on a car driving around a state the size of Texas as he has. This comes back to something that we’ve seen is so important in all these states: Who’s showing up, and who’s listening? I think something has been a little shortchanged about Beto: He is putting in the work. I think this is going to be a high-turnout election, and I think that’s good. When more people vote, that’s good.
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