Military scifi filled with dudes, all of them boring except for the guy who's been abducted by aliens, which is the only interesting thing about him. His dad, brother, and sister—one of five women in the book, and that is an overly generous count—hatch a cockamamie plan to get him back. It's the kind of scheme only Miles Vorkosigan could (accidentally) pull off, and none of these people are as smart, confident, or unhinged as Miles.

The first in a series that probably isn't worth reading unless you already have all three books in front of you, which I did not.

I watched this for FREE from kanopy* through my library, and I knew going into it that it was filmed, and set, during the lockdown portion of the pandemic, but I didn't expect it to hit me the way it did. Not that it's particularly engaged with the threat of covid, but iykyk and you know what that underlying constant panic felt like and the vibe was so incredibly familiar to me (a person who has, to this day, never talked to anyone over Zoom or Teams or Facechat) that it immediately took me back to those early days of the pandemic and I was so distracted by amorphous feelings that I couldn't fully concentrate on how cute David Tennant and Michael Sheen were being. I instantly took to Georgia, though, which is a relief because I was afraid I resented her for capturing David Tennant. Though, I mean, she can have the version on this show. He is USELESS. But adorable. I love that he had the same thing on for weeks. And that it was gumboots, shorts, and a hoodie. No shirt, iirc.

Then the second season zooms out and recontextualizes the first season—no longer understood as private communications we were privy to through the magic of the narrative, but now an actual scripted show. That wasn't David Tennant we were watching being useless, that was a character! And here's the real David Tennant and the real Michael Sheen doing press for the show we just watched. Only, as it played with the different levels of characters and public personas and our access to them, even as it was no longer presented as a "scripted" show, it was still perfectly clear this wasn't the real Michael and David, either, though surely there were pieces of them in there? But such is celebrity, I suppose, where you're broken up into bits of ever increasing smallness and scattered throughout time, so everyone knows something of you, but nobody knows all of you because who are you even anymore after pretending to be so many other people?

These are the questions that writing RPF raises. Anyway, while they were writing RPF of themselves, why didn't Michael get his hug at the end? I was very disappointed, but was made to feel like it had no importance after all and I should not be disappointed because this wasn't a script where everything is meaningful, it's just life, where we are forced to make our own meaning, and when denied things often have to convince ourselves we didn't want it after all.

If there had been a third season, how would it have overturned the second? A fun puzzle to think about. Probably some fanfic out there doing that work? I would assume.

* A WHILE ago. This has been in my drafts for quite some time, so out it goes!

A Correction: It has come to my attention that there is a third season, though it's not on kanopy. But I have reports that the first two seasons are still available there.