so. i have been saying since the top of the season that this feels like a reset, and a reintroduction to the characters (which makes sense for a new network!)—i know others have talked about to being a transitional and setup season as well, which i agree with.

ive been thinking about parallels and mirrors and what it might mean to overlay season seven over season four, the things that could possibly imply…

[ID under the cut for easier legibility than alt]

(self indulgent honorable mention parallel: eddie’s blood in buck’s mouth, tommy’s soot on buck’s lips)

season four is the only other non-pilot season to have less than the full 18 episodes. season four is also the only season that ends on a life-altering arc-beginning injury for a member of the 118 (which also makes sense for a shorter than usual season, big hook to make up for the fewer episodes).

at the end of season four, eddie and bobby both end up dramatically injured (sniper). the end of season four also has the first mention of the will. now, i cannot say for sure that either of these are going to be mirrored, BUT. looking at the roadmap they’ve already given us… i have some feelings and predictions :)

and i’m not even going to begin digging into the vertigo references, others have more eloquent things to say, but i wanted to at least mention it because i DO think it’s going to come into play…

(if you can think of any other 4/7 parallels i would LOVE to hear them)

———

IMAGE ID: a three column spreadsheet with the categories “PLOT POINT” , “SEASON 4”, and “SEASON 7”. the text reads:

Buck learns something life-altering that makes things about the rest of his life make sense in hindsight

- S4: Daniel reveal

- S7: Bisexuality discovery

Eddie meets a woman and ends episode 7 of the season on a date with her

- S4: Ana

- S7: Kim

Maddie and Chimney have a major milestone in their relationship

- S4: Jee is born

- S7: They’re getting married

Something horrible happens right before they do

- S4: Albert’s accident

- S7: Chimney gets sick and goes missing

Buck makes a fool of himself on a first date

- S4: Veronica, and the “double date”

- S7: Tommy

Hen and Karen have struggles with the foster system and how to best protect and provide for their foster kids

- S4: Nia

- S7: Mara

Athena and Bobby have trouble communicating, putting their relationship in a rocky spot

- S4: Bobby sponsoring the woman from the pileup and hiding it, Athena telling Bobby that she had considered retirement but never talked to him

- S7: The cruise ship and Athena being unable to tell Bobbby why she's so uncomfortable with the prospect of down time together

Someone talks to Eddie about following his own desires in a relationship, not what's expected

- S4: Bobby about Ana, Carla about Ana

- S7: Bobby about Marisol

Buck has a heart to heart with Christopher about the anxiety he has towards the fragility of relationships with the people in his life

- S4: Shannon and people leaving him, feeling isolated during the pandemic

- S7: Shannon and the girls he's leading on

Hen and Karen meet another parent related to their foster children

- S4: Meeting Nia's mom in the park and having lunch with her and Nia

- S7: Finding Tyson and reconnecting him with Mara

Someone with the initials TK that Buck met in relation to a helicopter, kisses Buck in his kitchen after Eddie gets hurt and then has to leave

- S4: Taylor

- S7: Tommy

Intermezzo: Free Solo Review

Pre-Cycle 11

So, first of all, for anyone wondering, I did get the go ahead from the warlocks on Tuesday to continue with treatment through Cycle 12 (assuming my blood tests come back okay), which is great news. And I’d normally write about that and how awesome it is (Hooray! More chemo!), but it’s been such a long, weird, event-filled week even by my standards (my car got hit by lightning)(that’s a dramatic exaggeration, but, like everything else in my life, far less of one than I’d like), that instead, I thought I’d review the fantastic (and - for me - utterly terrifying) film “Free Solo.” Also, that’ll enable me to put off trying to figure out my upcoming chemo schedule, which is somewhat less-predictable than others (I’d have to come in on Christmas Eve or Christmas according to my current estimate, which seems a little ghoulish even for me).

A bit of background. Even though I like rock climbers and have many friends and family in that group, and even though I have nothing but love for them, their utterly terrifying sport isn’t for me (and thanks to them for putting up with me long enough for me to figure that one out). Full confession; I’m not only psychologically unfit for it, I’m physically not a good candidate. Even putting my neurological issues aside (unreliable left leg, vertigo)(those are the lasting impacts of neurosurgery #3 and #2, respectively), I’m terrified of heights. And with good reason - I’m about 182 cm tall and 100 kg; if I fall, it’s a much bigger problem than if someone smaller/closer to the ground and lighter does. And I’m about 85% torso, by height. So, why would I see a film about a sport that frightens me? Simply put, Alex Honnold, who is possibly the world’s premier greatest living rock climber.

Many, many, many years ago, someone pointed out to me that everyone’s heard of LeBron James, or Colin Kaepernick; fewer people have heard of Royal Robbins (or Kelly Slater, for that matter), largely because the latter two exist in a weird sub-culture of extreme sports that’s not as profitable or plugged in to pop culture as main-stream sports (I’ve only heard of Honnold because I’m a big fan of the Banff Film Festival). So, one of the world’s most niche-sports-figure getting a film - even if it’s not in wide release - is really cool. Again, it means society, as a whole, is opening up to non-traditional people, and sports, and stories. Which, as a now non-traditional person (again, traditionally, people like me die within two years of diagnosis, and that annoying new gimp/cripple physical aspect makes life a lot less accessible than I’d prefer), is cool, and, more importantly, as a storyteller, it means more, different, and better stories.

The story of “Free Solo” is pretty straight-forward. A man works his whole life to perfect his craft, and then, at the height of his talent, decides to gamble it on a potentially lethal career high-point. Wait, what? Most rock climbers - and certainly my sub-par, failed attempts - use various safety equipment and climb with buddies and do other things to minimize risk. The downside is both minimized risk, and, from my limited understanding, some of these safety devices permanently “hurt” (or pierce, anyway) the rock. “Free solo” climbing eschews such devices, or, indeed, a sense of self-preservation. Says the guy who’s letting science use him as a lab rat for a poisonous substance. Again, when you’re desperate, you make odd choices. However, like me, A. Honnold points out that most free-solo rock climbs are calculated risks (to paraphrase him, “The odds of me actually falling are low, but if that happens, the odds of something really, really bad happening are high.”). Which brings us to El Capitain, the Everest of the climbing world. As I may have mentioned previously, this is the Holy Grail of climbing. If you ever go to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park (and I recommend you do this before you die), you will not be able to miss El Cap. If you’re like me, you might even have to go lie down for a few minutes just looking at up at it (it’s terrifying even from ground level). Even though it’s been climbed by blind, deaf, and physically disabled people (it’s a long story; there’s an old Yosemite joke that El Cap is handicap-accessible), it has never been climbed (clumb? someone help me with these conjugations) without safety devices. Enter Mr. Honnold, stage right, and the codependent National Geographic film crew. To make a long story short, he climbs the mountain and survives, with the support of both the film-makers and his long-suffering girlfriend. Hooray.

The reason this film is worth seeing - and why I’m reviewing it - is that, for all that, it’s a very weird film (it’s a really good film, but it’s weird). First of all, the camera and framing devices need a little description. In every scene or shot of El Cap, it not only dominates everything around it, but they use some cool VFX devices at various points to show Yosemite valley shifting and swinging around El Cap. Which made me grip my seat rests, but also gave an interesting insight into how Yosemite is absolutely dominated by these staggeringly massive walls on all sides. Secondly, this is - as far as I know - the only character study of A. Honnold on file in video form. Even though he’s been prominently featured in the Banff Film Festival and other places, they don’t give a real sense of who he is - he’s just a sort of stand-in rock climber fantasy figure; a James Bond of the rock climbing world - in all the other films I’ve seen, he goes somewhere and climbs something impressive; there’s not a whole lot revealed except he likes to climb. And he’s pretty much fearless - according to a little background research (yes, I do read about my subjects before tackling them), Honnold isn’t known for being the most technically-proficient or skilled climber, but he is known for taking on risks and challenges that no one else in the climbing world does.  Qui audet adipiscitur and all that. This film delves a little more into that, actually following him into an fMRI (one of those specialized MRIs that shows which parts of the brain “light up” during various tasks and images. The science-person in me would point out that this test is so overly sensitive, it should be taken with a grain of salt (my favorite research poster of all time was one that used fMRI analysis to show which images a dead salmon prefers)(you read that correctly). However, in this case, it showed that Honnold’s fear threshold/tolerance was much, much higher than usual. The film also looks at what that looks like in a relationship, as they also follow Honnold’s girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, for some of it. In retrospect, she’s probably the real hero of the film, because she fully supports him in his near-suicidal ambitions. There’s also the weird aspect about how the world’s most recklessly brave climber gets... stage fright. The film actually documents this very well, about how Honnold doesn’t seem up to the task when everyone’s around, watching him; and it takes a series of hidden cameras and a tactical retreat by McCandless to force him up the wall. As someone who has, ah, “performance issues” when it comes to urine samples (I’d imagine that after a year of those, it wouldn’t be a big issue, like the IVs and neuralgia bother me less, but we all have our idiosyncrasies - I intend to ask the chemo ward to quietly move to a different floor next time), I weirdly get it. And I also sort of weirdly get how, in an extreme situation, sometimes the riskier, more outrageous path is also the safer one. Having said that, I still have to give the man props for a following through on a near-psychotic ambition and seeing it through.

ANYWAY… WEIGHT: 96 kilos CONCENTRATION: Not bad, but I’m also exhausted from a week of travel and holidays. Which reminds me, if I make it out of this alive, I intend to start hibernating from Nov.15-Dec, 25, which should make this sort of holiday seasonal travel a little easier. APPETITE: Good. I’m even starting to appreciate “fun” things, like non-vegetable or protein-based foodstuffs. I imagine that’ll definitely decrease as I get back into the grind and find my willpower renewed with... well, the same willpower that allows me to swallow pills that come in “biohazard” bags. ACTIVITY LEVEL: Good, but I’m still exhausted. SLEEP QUALITY: Okay. COORDINATION/DEXTERITY: Excellent; I even went to the gym yesterday without braces. MEMORY: Not bad, I still have trouble forgetting to complete long or multi-step tasks, but that’s hardly new.. PHYSICAL: Overall, not too bad. At the moment, I’m mostly tired, sore, a little cold, and hungry, which - if you haven’t had peripheral nerve damage or chemo-induced panic-attacks, might seem bad, but to have normal, every day physical complaints instead of my usual, hyper-bizarre ones... well, it’s deeply comforting, in an odd, slightly-masochistic way. EMOTIONAL: Good. I realize I just got a clean scan on Monday - I had to wait until Tuesday to review the findings, though - and after 24 hours of that sort of frenzied anxiety, the volume on standard emotional issues gets muted. SIDE EFFECTS: Tired. So tired. Which reminds me, based on my records, I’m pretty sure my limp’s tied into exhaustion/fatigue issues. Which gives me hope that, after the next two cycles (and possibly a six-month nap to catch up on my sleep) I might get something like consistent progress fixing that complaint.  CURRENTLY READING (For Donna): “A Monster Calls.”