I’ve had a summer cold for the last week and a half so I’ve barely gotten anything done. The cold hasn’t been especially bad but it comes with fatigue and a lack of concentration. As I’ve written before I can trudge through a day and get paying work done because I have no choice but any art of my own is nearly impossible.
Today (Tuesday the 20th of August 2024) was the first day I got a “Dreams of Things” cover done. It took me about twice as long to marker color it than it usually does. Yesterday it took me all morning to get a three marker ink drawing finished and that usually takes an hour. Lsat week I don’t think I got anything done except for one “Dreams of Things” cover that I inked. I must have had a bit of energy that day. Mostly I tried to rest and watched TV.
I’m not much of a binge watcher of TV but when I’m sick I don’t have anything else to do so I’ve been watching a couple of shows. I actually have been rewatching a couple of shows. Sometimes it’s easier to rest when I have something on that I’ve seen before.
The first show is one on Apple TV called “Severance.” It came out back in 2022 and it only has nine episodes. It’s a bit of a mystery show that also has a little bit of science fiction in it. It’s about a group of people who work at an office job but the job has a twist. The twist is that they have to undergo a process called severance in which their memory is cut in two. Their work selves have no memory of their outside selves and their outside selves have no memory of what they do at work. Why would anyone do this? They have their reasons and some of them are part of the plot of the show.
It’s a stylishly done show with interesting sets that have a lot of liminal spaces. Hallways galore. I like the look and feel of it. The mystery is what the heck they are doing there? They’re got some shady bosses and their actual work is on computers and is removed from whatever else is going on at the place. The office is very buttoned up but the four people who work in the department start to get curious about everything.
As I mentioned it’s a mystery show and here is a funny thing about me watching it again. After I watched it in 2022 and some of the mystery was revealed I wanted to watch it again with this new knowledge in mind to see what the show was like a second time through. The problem is that I waited two years and forgot how the season ended. So watching it again this time was almost just like the first time.
The second show that I’ve been rewatching is the show “Lost.” I watched it back in 2004-2010 and really had no interest in rewatching it again but I heard of a different version of it. A fan cut. To me “Lost” started a whole new genre of show in which the plot was, “What the heck is happening on this show?”. It was a mystery show but instead of a show in which a mystery was solved the whole show was a mystery. We didn’t know anything about the characters on the show, what they were doing on that island, and why were so many strange things happening on the island.
One of the reasons I never had much interest in rewatching the show is that they just stacked mysteries on top of mysteries and I didn’t think there were many satisfying answers to the mysteries. I enjoyed the show and never really expected satisfying answers (I know how TV shows are written) but when it was over I was done with it. But then I heard about a fan cut of the show.
I believe “Lost” just made it to one of the streaming services for the first time this summer so it must have made it into my social media algorithm. That’s how I heard about the fan cut, “Chronologically Lost.”
Since “Lost” has a lot of mysteries and we know nothing about the characters’ pasts there are a lot of flashbacks in “Lost.” That was one of the big complaints back in the day. People wanted the plot to move forward and it was forever moving backwards. There was even time travel in the show near the end. Talk about moving backwards. So some fan somewhere decided to re-edit the show so that it was in chronological order. All the flashbacks are at the beginning. Then they released it onto the internet.
I would not recommend watching “Chronologically Lost” if you’ve never watched the show before. Stick with the real thing. I’m enjoying it as a curiosity but it might be hard to follow if you’ve never seen the show before. As I said there are a lot of flashbacks in the show and it takes about twenty five episodes that are all the flashbacks before we reach the plane crash that was in episode one of the real series.
The episodes made of these flashbacks that were created for the fan edit don’t really have the same kind of dramatic structure as real episodes. The fans did their best and it’s well done but it’s not always like watching an actually TV show. It’s often just watching the events in the character’s lives in chronological order rather than a TV drama with first through third acts. I like it but I’ve seen the show before so I know what’s going on.
One final show that I’ve been watching random episodes of is a favorite of mine. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Yes, I’ve seen all the episodes multiple times but as I was resting sometimes I just needed a laugh. Sunny is always good for that.