Messages from an Alpha Geek

Randomly wandering around on YouTube, I found this fun interview with Brent Spiner on whether he'd like a part on the new Star Trek, and his thoughts on if he'd ever come back to play Data (physically, no, but voiceover, absolutely). An absolutely charming movie, and Mr. Spiner's choice for who should play Lt. Commander Data in a reboot. She is an amazing choice that never occurred to me until he said it.

Watch the video, or , if spoilers are your thing, look at how I've tagged this post.

As usual, Mr Spiner is absolutely charming.



( Read more...Collapse )

I've watched exactly one episode of CBS's Supergirl--the one where she meets the Flash from The Flash (CW)--and fell in love with her and her show. It's so ... fun. And yet at the same time it couldn't exist without its deep character relationships and badass heroes of all shapes and sizes and power levels. I love it.

I've been binging fanfic. It reminds me a lot of the peak of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman fandom, in terms of enthusiasm and writing skill/plot maturity. I haven't been watching the show due to time. Once all the episodes are on Netflix I can binge Season 1. And given that I was first introduced to the fandom by the AO3 archive, I think it was inevitable that I'd become a Cat/Kara shipper. OMG, they're lovely. Canon, of course, is giving us Kara/Jimmy Olsen, which is giving me an unpleasant Smallville vibe most of the time. (And I'm not just in it for the femmeslash. I'd also prefer Kara/Barry Allen. Or Kara/Anyone Not Jimmy, come to that.)

(There's also a characterization issue w/r/t Kara keeping her secret from Cat via use of Martian shapeshifting mind-screw that's a real thing, but I won't get into that here. ilyena_sylph and I have discussed it at length though. She and I have deep feelings on the matter. As someone who read the Young Justice comic books and remembers Greta Hayes, I'll also never be comfortable with Supergirl or anyone else working so closely with any incarnation of the DEO, but I digress.)

So, yeah. After reading so much fanfic, and given my own background with the comics, I've been getting ideas. I know I'll almost surely never have time to work on them anytime soon, so I'm archiving them here. Tumblr prompt posts are huge in this fandom, and I'm not really sure how those work, but by all means please feel free to run with one of these if you like.

If anyone takes one, please let me know and send a link so I can read it. :) I've included my brainstorming and details, but you certainly don't have to use them all/any of them. it's more the basic idea I'm throwing out there. I'd love to see multiple people's take on the same thing.

The list for this round:

1. Extended Stay: For whatever reason, Barry can't get back home at the end of the crossover ep, and is stuck on Kara's Earth (Earth-3? Earth-CBS?). Maybe the tachyon chest device he was wearing got smashed. So he's stuck there until he can get fast enough on his own to breach the dimensional barrier and get back to Earth-1. As far as Earth-1 is concerned, he's only gone for a few seconds (just as in canon). But for Barry, weeks/months/years pass--anywhere up to 10 years, so at most he'd be in his mid-30s at the peak of his powers when he went home). So he's a dimensional refugee and has to make a new life for himself as both Barry Allen and the Flash, all the while afraid that Zoom is destroying his home (since he doesn't know about the time differential).

• How does he grow?
• How does Kara grow given how much they obviously cared about each other and influenced each other even as friends--and Barry's Older Brother Mentor vibe with her.
• Does Barry keep trusting the DEO the way she does? Barry's interactions with Earth-1 General Eiling and ARGUS have been not-so-great, but not terrible, yet, either. (Eiling was presented as a one-off bigoted nutcase, but Amanda Waller's ARGUS is horrifying, even if Barry didn't have any direct contact with it.)
• Does Kara/Barry happen?
• Does Kara end up with someone else and Barry find someone else or spend a decade pining after Iris (I hope not)?
• How will Team Flash react to an older, more confident and powerful Barry reappearing after being gone for just a second or two?
• Does Kara come back with him to make Zoom's downfall that much more awesome and entertaining? (Because after months/years, I can't imagine Kara just letting Barry go by himself if the last thing he says is that he has to go fight a nightmarish, world-conquering speed demon from hell.)
• There are so many directions you could go with this.

2. The Fugitive from Krypton: So, in the comics, the DEO was perfectly happy to treat metahuman children as things to be dehumanized, experimented on like lab rats, and weaponized. The ones that couldn't be controlled were hauled off to something called the WABE, where they were presumably killed/dissected for evil science. They were not nice people. The comic incarnation of Young Justice forms almost solely to protect Greta Hayes, one of their escapees and one of the world's most powerful metahumans, from getting recaptured by people who refer to her consistently as "it" and other even more unpleasant things while they torture her. So I was incredibly thrown when I watched Supergirl to be presented with a "nice" DEO who were Kara's allies/trainers/support team. Until it was revealed that the Supergirl-verse DEO was just as evil and twisted as the comics mainline version until J'onn replaced and masqueraded as Hank Henshaw to take it over. It's a huge deal in the show when J'onn is outed as an alien and has to flee, and General Lane--his usual xenophobic, horrifying self, who waterboards Kryptonians with kryptonite injection torture--is going to put one his allies in control. Especially horrifying since he's of the mind that Kara is just as bad as the evil aliens she fights, and humanity would be best served by her being ... contained, at best. In canon, J'onn uses his mind powers to make sure that doesn't happen, by persuading the top brass to appoint Lucy Lane, who is not a xenophobic bigot nutcase, to command the DEO.

• Now, let's assume for whatever reason, that doesn't happen. Kara, not being down for being treated like an it, or a living weapon, or otherwise being forced into the DEO's servitude ("Here's a list of people we want killed. Get on it, alien.") lest she be imprisoned forever or killed or turned into a lab experiment, flees.
• It's entirely likely the DEO uses its influence to frame Kara for some sort of horribad act so the world thinks she's a villain and understands why "the good guys" with the guns and black helicopters are hunting her.
• This places, at minimum, Cat Grant, Carter Grant, and Jimmy and Winn in huge danger, as the DEO knows they're her chief allies and the first place she'll go for help.
• At minimum, Cat and Carter end up on the run with Kara, mostly because she has to rescue them from the DEO and its not safe for them to go anywhere else. Given how much they both care about Kara, I think their upset at having to be on the run would be tempered to some degree by outrage/fear at how she's being targeted, but still, this is not a recipe for happy times.
• Cat/Kara pre-shipping/ship launching would be very interesting under these conditions, but if platonic Supercat is your thing, that would also be magnificent. Carter struggling with what's going on around him and trying to reconcile the DEO chasing Kara with Kara being his hero would also be very interesting.
• The usual question that comes up with a lot of my Supergirl plot-bunnies and meta about the series: where the hell is Clark?

3. Studies in Xeno-Oncology: This one is more my reaction to the incredible, hair-pulling out stupidity of the DEO using constant Kryptonite exposure to make it possible for their human agents to train Kara. Put aside for a second that the best person in the world to train Kara to use her powers to the greatest extent is Clark Kent, and his buddy Bruce Wayne would be happy to teach her how to fight like a human for when she needs to do that (and hey, if Diana's around ... ). The DEO surely loves this also because it teaches Kara that she's no real match for humans determined to hurt her, if they have the right tools. The government hates uppity aliens. The show seems to think Kryptonite is merely an off-switch for Kryptonian powers, but that's not correct. It's radioactive. It doesn't strip Kryptonians of their powers so much as instantly and viciously painfully give them radiation poison that puts them in too much pain and causes enough instant cellular damage that the solar-absorption processes that enable their powers can't work correctly. So, consider what the DEO is doing in their training rooms:

• (a) Constantly bombarding Kara with Kryptonite radiation to damage her cells enough that her superpowers cannot fully manifest, but not so much that she can't still function;
• (b) Putting her in training simulations where her body takes varying degrees of non-lethal damage;
• (c) While her irradiated body tries to heal itself via normal, Kryptonian yellow-sun-accelerated healing processes:
• (d) which include (now irradiated) cells attempting to multiply themselves at a prodigious, superhuman rate to repair the damage
• (e) Kara seems fine, and they apparently do this to her daily, at least
  • BUT: we know from real world science that when radiation poisoning happens, it causes cellular mutations in cells spawned after the poisoning occurs, and this is happening to Kara over and over and over and over and with her superhuman healing compromised
  • IN CONCLUSION: Cellular mutations left unchecked, even when they're just happening at little bit at a time, are how cancer happens
• In sum:
  • The DEO's preoccupation with poisoning Kara (just a little bit) so they can regularly beat her up while she is in "my cells are on fire" pain, which must be great for her mental health,  do training, without any consideration to the realities of radiation poisoning, gives Kara cancer, likely either already spread throughout her body or in  position that it's likely to spread quickly once it's found given how rapidly her accelerated immune system/healing reproduces cells even when not pressed by physical damage.
  • Chemo and radiation and most other human means of curing cancer will not work on Kara's invulnerable body, not without the application of more Kryptonite, which given that it's already given her cancer, is not on.
• The big questions:
  
  • What do?
  • More importantly, how do the people that love Kara deal with this, and how does it change their attitudes about the DEO, which they've been trusting to safely train Kara all this time? I'm sure people like General Lane will actually be pretty thrilled with the news.
• I like to imagine that Cat is the one who figures out Kara is sick first, because she has experience of seeing someone developing cancer or something similar and she's Cat Grant, investigative reporter/Queen of All Media/Badass, and this messes with her head a great deal and scares the hell out of her, because of course Cat knows Kara is Supergirl, and Supergirl isn't supposed to get cancer or be mortal and sick. And she'll have fun explaining this to Carter.
  
  • Feels everywhere!
  • Platonic/shippy Supercat to taste.
• And also: Where the hell is Clark? (Given the number of terrible things that happen to Kara in this show without an appearance from Clark, this is kind of constant refrain in most of my plot bunnies.)

4. The Au Pair from Krypton (Superman Returns/Supergirl Fusion): Crossover AU. Superman leaves Earth after Superman II for the five year trip to go see if Krypton survived, just as in canon. Lois finds out she's pregnant, just as in canon. But before she meets and begins courting Richard White, and even before she writes her "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" editorial, Kara Zor-El escapes from the Phantom Zone and arrives on Earth, looking for Kal-El. She goes to the Fortress of Solitude and manages to track down the only Kryptonian life sign on earth--which is presently gestating inside a human woman. Kara is 13 and of average intelligence by Kryptonian standards (which would make her a genius on Earth), and still hurting from the realization she failed to protect her cousin, who grew up without her. It doesn't take her long to realize the baby must be Kal-El's. Kal-El is missing, and the last heir of the House of El is unprotected. That's totally not on.

• Kara's already a 13 year old, with most of the education Kal-El got in Superman (1978) during his 12 years in the Fortress' tutoring program. It wouldn't take Kara nearly as long to work with Jor-El's hologram to get caught up on Earth culture. Probably less than a year, just doing it at night.
  • Kara would identify herself to Lois as Kal-El's cousin before she knew a thing about who Clark Kent was. So Lois has a traumatized, teenage alien girl determined to be her body-guard/live in babysitter, and wondering what the hell happened to her idiot baby cousin and why he went off to go find a planet Kara saw explode before her eyes. This whole situation kind of blows Lois' seething resentment of Kal-El (that led her to write "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman") to pieces.
  • Lois is too paranoid about such things to ever let the DEO or any other government branch anywhere near Kara, and Kara wouldn't let them anywhere near the baby.
  • Lois and Kara figure out together that Clark is Kal-El, and end up talking things out with Martha Kent while Lois is still pregnant. Martha would be thrilled she's going to be a grandmother; ready to strangle Clark for getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock and then disappearing like a moron, and perfectly happy to go along with the Jor-El AI's plan to set up a "Kara Kent" identity that would make Kara legally Clark's cousin.
  • Lois still writes "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman," but it's not nearly so much of a hit-piece as it was implied to be in canon, and more a self-examination of herself and society for being overly-dependent on someone who everyone sort of forgot had his own emotional wants and needs, so they were totally unprepared when he needed to leave to take care of himself. (This is the article I actually wanted to see her write, and one I think would've been award-worthy. Much more so than the "The Reason You Suck" article she seemed to actually do in canon.
  • By the time she's 16-17, Luthor/Zod/Non/Evil Lincoln is back and escalates things to the point that Kara realizes the world needs SOMEONE with an S on their chest. Perhaps Luthor targets baby Jason somehow, realizing he must be Kal-El's son? Enter Supergirl.
• Richard White: I suppose it's possible Lois still ends up with him, if she's angry enough with Clark/feels like he's not ever coming back, but I think it's much less likely he's with her here. But I'd hope he's still around. I loved his character.
• Superman Returns: and is greeted with joy by the people of Earth. And ends up hearing about his cousin first from the press corps covering the space shuttle/plane rescue. Awkward/wut-filled family reunion fun for everyone.
• Cat and Kara: Cat is always shown as being Lois' rival, so trying to set up a platonic or romantic relationship with Kara in this AU would be tricker, but I'd love to see it still done. Cat and Kara are such a key part of this incarnation of Supergirl. You could dial things back a bit with the timeline, so when Kara is about 15-16, Lois is about 26-28 (how old I think she must've been in the Superman II era), Cat is an intern/Perry's assistant/junior gossip columnist at about 18-19. Still squickly until Kara's a bit older if you're gonna ship it, but feasible. Plus, I kinda love AU stories where Cat and Kara are close in age and younger, because it means Kara tends to be there when Cat has baby Carter.

So, there's some plotunnies, and the overthought reasoning behind them. And now they're off my chest and will hopefully stop whispering to me when I'm trying to do other things, like make money to feed/clothe myself and keep the water and electricity on.

After years of resisting, I'm finally going to admit the truth: most of the fandoms I'm currently in exist primarily now on Tumblr--which I kind of despise as a platform on both a technical and philosophical level.

More importantly, fandom friends I've had for more than 10-15 years are still here on Dreamwidth. So, I'm not leaving.

But I do want to interact with my Tumblr-heavy fandoms, so I've set up a cross posting recipe to copy this and all future posts to Tumblr. There's a great tutorial put up last year that uses IFTTT and Dreamwidth's RSS feed.

Let's see how this goes.

Press the button, Frank.

So, the last couple weeks, I rediscovered how much I love ER as a show (though I have continuously dabbled in Kerry/Kim shipping on and off the last several years, when I remember they exist and can find AU stories for them that don't depress the hell out of me).

Key to getting back into ER fandom has been admitting that as much as I enjoy some of the latter stuff, I'm one of those people who just prefers to stop at the end of Season 8, and aside from a handful of miscellaneous bits, just ignore Seasons 9-15. They could be great, but the tone and cast turnover just made it a completely different show, and there were too many storyline decisions I couldn't stomach. (That, and I'm not a huge fan of Abby Lockhart and her Queen of Gloom sex symbol status, however the hell that is supposed to actually work.)

So I'm gonna re-watch the first 8 seasons when I get a chance.

At the same time, Xena has been popping up in conversation on the internets since she and Gabrielle are getting a reboot, and since the particulars of the Xena series finale have relevance to the current awareness campaign and intense fandom discussions about the decades long ubiquity of the Kill Your Gays trope in television, especially as applied to lesbians, that was set off by Commander Lexa's murder on The 100. I didn't even know about how the series ended and how Xena got fridged until the Lexa event, as I had stopped watching mid-series because my real life went crazy and I pretty much abandoned most TV and fandom while trying to finish high school and start college.

As ilyena_sylph can attest from being witness to my angry, heartbroken rantings on the subject (and more to the point, putting up with said ranting (thanks!)), finding out how Xena ended really upset me. I was angry-weepy for a day or two whenever I thought about it, because I get tired of things I loved in my childhood getting stabbed/shot/burned or otherwise murdered to death when I'm not looking--or twisted beyond recognition. Given how adorkable and happy together Xena and Gabrielle were when they weren't stabbing and bludgeoning Evil and generally being epic, I was pretty broken up about this, even if I'm 20 years late finding out. 

So, yeah, Xena is also on Netflix, and I've resolved to watch the first three seasons again, and ignore everything after that when the Train of Suck and Misery starts picking up steam, because this whole thing has reminded me how much I miss these characters and how much fun they were.

The Point (There is One!):

So, the problem with fandom binging two fandoms at once is that your brain sometimes plays tricks on you. I was looking at ER stuff and Xena stuff at the same time and by Evening Four had convinced myself that I once read a really funny, enjoyable crossover fic wherein Kerry Weaver and Kim Legaspi used the power of (or had used on them the power of) Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Whimey to meet Xena and Gabrielle and they had adorkable, heartwarming shenanigans, possibly including Kerry Weaver beaning Kevin Smith's Ares with her crutch, all while Kerry dealt with her fear of coming out of the closet at work by comparing her situation to Xena's. (Because Kerry and Xena are so totally alike, amirite? < /not-completely-joking-why-brain-why >)

So many details of this existed in my head and I had such good memories of having read it, so I searched for it.

Except: it doesn't exist. Nowhere. Anywhere. I looked. A lot.

My brain, on a nostalgia overload, invented a bizarro crossover plot bunny and tried to cover how embarrassingly weird and off the wall it is by convincing my conscious mind someone else had written it.

That has to be a new level of dorktastic.

At least I'm totally not thinking about writing it myself. At all.
Maybe a one-shot someday.
Dammit.

Continuing with the theme from SVS 006 of ordinary people's relationships being a wonderful treat in an otherwise unordinary setting, let us travel back to the halcyon days of 1990s family television programming that we both love forever and are now almost uniformly too embarrassed by to admit we like in public.

ABC's TGIF Friday night family sitcom lineup spent over a decade codifying the family-friendly, (usually healthy) aesop-heavy, generally-harmless, sometimes groan-inducing style of programming that defined 1990s domestic comedy.

There were a lot of them, and with a few exceptions that explicitly embraced the supernatural (hello, Sabrina and Teen Angel), they all purported to be aggressively rooted in the real world. (Admittedly, Family Matters got overtaken by Steve Urkel's descent into zany super-science, but if you cut that out the show was really about the relationships between Steve and various members of the Winslow family.)

The problem emerged within the first few episodes of all these shows, though--if not the pilot episode itself. Watching aggressively normal people do aggressively normal stuff is aggressively boring. And these shows needed to be funny and entertaining enough to keep people coming back for enough years to wrack up sufficient episodes for lucrative first-run syndication deals. So invariably you took your aggressively normal people, wrapped them in Plot Armor and Made of Iron tropes usually reserved for shonen and shojo anime protagonists, and subjected them to the sort of bizarre, reality-is-unrealistic comedies of errors and random, I-can't-believe-that-didn't-kill-you coincidences and accidents that might happen to one of us in the real world maybe once in our entire lives.

And you did that weekly, and we loved to watch it.

Looking at the situation from a meta perspective years later, one can only conclude the people in all these shows were subject to living on an earth that, while appearing to be Pleasantville, was actually the playground of some mad god who was treating them like his own personal game of The Sims and trying to see how far he could push them before they broke. That some of them (like Eric Matthews on Boy Meets World) descended into a functional sort of actual insanity indicates that they figured out what was going on and went a bit mad from the revelation.

Then there was the actually horrifying stuff, like one of Frank Lambert's sons actually disappearing from Step by Step and no-one mentioning him or acknowledging he existed ever again, or the habit of babies to age up to approximately age six in less than a single calendar year. Likely because the mad Sims-playing god adjusted the age slider because infants make somewhat useless toys.

But I seriously digress.

The point being, for all their supposed normality, these shows were deeply and fundamentally bizarre. Re-watching them post-puberty, with an awareness of how romance is supposed to work, leads me to think that, just like in Xena, there is value in celebrating the normality of healthy, loving relationships in these sorts of universes. It's telling that on a lot of the TGIF shows, the most interesting romantic relationships belonged to the stable, happily married parent-couples that stood a few degrees removed from the zany hellscape that so infected their children's romantic entanglements. While JT Lambert idiotically tried to use his baby sister to pretend to be a single father to pick up chicks in a mall (a number of boys tried this on various shows), Frank and Carol Lambert sat at home and held hands and hugged while looking at their finances and realizing they can actually barely afford their newest kid, Lily. Cory Matthews and Topanga Lawrence take a break from their neurotic college romance, and Eric Matthews shook off his crazy, when they are pulled back into the orbit of Cory and Eric's parents Alan and Amy, whose new baby is premature and ill and may not make it out of the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital.

So, watching the kids' romantic arcs, the most interesting thing to me is seeing them grow and mature and gradually move out of the zaniness and towards the normality and stability of their parents' relationships. Some of them are better at this than others, and some never quite get there. even by the time of their series finale, and viewers are left holding the bag and cringing and thinking, "well, they're better off than when they started."

And some of them don't just get there but cross the finish line on a jetpack, and when these are the ones you wrote off as gag couples, that's even sweeter.

Dana Foster and Rich Halke are probably at the top of the stack in terms of TGIF teen-couples. It starts off fairly cliched: Dana is a highly motivated, intelligent, career- and goal-driven nerd (though she would never be called that because she was also beautiful and it would be another 15 to 20 years before TV really started to admit that beautiful nerds were a thing that existed) who was socially conscious and politically active and had no patience for those she viewed as beneath her (this was in fact her biggest character flaw at the start: it made her hard to watch because she came off as genuinely hurtful more than once). Watching her grow out of that last thing while still maintaining everything that made her great was a real joy. (Now that I think about it, Dana's character arc is not that dissimilar from Daria Morgendorffer's.)

Rich started out as one of JT's friends, which meant he was very much like JT: a shallow, girl-crazy, insensitive jock who came across as a complete idiot, but good-hearted and loyal and even brave when it actually counted. Though while JT got no justification for his constant academic failure and lack of common sense until the show runners tried a saving throw and diagnosed him with dyslexia (which was sadly played for laughs and never really explored beyond a few lines of dialogue), Rich was quite clearly shown to be lazy. His idea of tutoring is to hire someone to write a paper for him while he played basketball, and he was even self-aware enough to request that the papers not be too good so as not to draw attention.

And he's apparently been getting away with this for so long that he doesn't think a thing about it when he accidentally hires Dana to be his tutor, and tries to order a paper from her. Needless to say, that lasts about 30 seconds (which is 25 seconds longer than I thought it would) before she makes him do the work himself (or tries to), and one thing leads to another and in one moment of what she quite accurately and hilariously calls "demented passion," they're making out in the kitchen.

And on most shows that would be the end of it. Maybe you'd get one disastrous joke date (with a 50 percent chance of ending in a food-fight), but that would be the end of the gag and neither character would really change, but instead go on comfortable and secure in the knowledge that they are correct and "demented passion" or not, the other character is wrong and lame and Status Quo is God and no one is allowed to grow up.

That didn't happen, this time. Dana tried; she had terrible luck with dating up till that point because most guys were intimidated by/jealous of her intelligence and independence and so she was primed to assume the worst about everyone interested in her--which is disturbingly realistic for young women in Dana's position. But Rich wasn't willing to let it go and we got to see a new side of him: he was still an academic slacker and not the sharpest tool in the shed, but when he decided to be honest with her it turned out there was a whole actual person underneath all the 1990s dudebro cliches he was wrapped in, and he managed to get her to keep going out with him in a respectful, yet hilarious way. She was never a nerd he was taking pity on or something he won or brought down to his level. She was Dana and he was thrilled and honored that she wanted to share herself with him; it's implied that one of the reasons he was initially dismissive and combative of her was that he was convinced she was the sort of person who was completely beyond him, so he got defensive from the beginning. And Dana grew at the same time: Rich was the kind of person she started the series thinking was much beneath her boot soles, and a good part of her early courtship is admitting to herself that she has been overly-judgmental and that there is actually someone underneath the moron jock facade that she is deeply attracted to.

It's a horrible thing in real life and writing when a person tries to remake themselves and sacrifice their core values to appease a romantic partner, and most sitcom gag couples end when they try to do this, with the obvious aesop. The Step by Step writers acknowledge and deliberately avert this. Both Rich and Dana have characteristics and habits the one one doesn't care for, but the solution is not to excise those bits out, but to engage in realistic self-improvement that's not about changing your identity, but about how you engage with the people you care about. Dana, in essence, has to learn that real people are complicated, and in a relationship you have to take all of them. You can't just cherry-pick the parts you like. Rich has to learn how to stop using his slacker persona as a shield from forming the sort of deep and genuine bonds real romantic relationships require (because that shield is keeping Dana out), without sacrificing the fun-loving, joyful part of his personality. In other words, he has to learn balance if he wants this relationship to work.

And they both acknowledge these things, and work on them together, and in the middle of the laugh tracks and everything-but-Godzilla-showing-up insanity, they succeed. In fact, aside from Frank and Carol, by series' end they have the most developed, stable, healthy and realistic relationship of all the "child" characters, and have personally undergone some of the most comprehensive growth arcs.

This was most striking as a viewer upon seeing the thing that almost broke them up. It wasn't some zany mistaken-for-cheating plot (though they went through one of those, but it was resolved in 5 minutes), or a harrowing set of circumstances like one of their parents moving several states away and physically separating them, or any of the normal Pleasantville-Hellscape cliches generally reserved for a show's "kid couples." They were college age at that point, or nearly so, and Dana became so overwhelmed by the idea of planning for the future in the midst of their presently dim financial prospects and career uncertainties and other such things that, well, are quite familiar concerns to almost every real world adult couple everywhere.

And Rich, instead of freaking out and doing something that blows it like he would've before they first started dating and he was consumed with flippant laziness and shallow inability to commit, fully understands where she's coming from and why she's afraid (because he's not exactly not worrying about this stuff either). But he'll never be a genius like Dana and knows he doesn't have the words in him to get his message through to her.

So he thinks hard about it, takes out his heart and tacks it on his sleeve, and risks humiliating himself in a way he never would have dared upon his introduction. He invokes TGIF's most adorkable, heartwarming music number ever (according to me, tenured Professor of Dorkdom at I Can't Believe You're Writing So Many Words About This University), and proceeds to get her back with a hand held karaoke machine and the power of Sonny and Cher, who had the right words decades ago. In public, with dozens if not hundreds of witnesses.

And it works, because what he's really saying is "yes, there are uncertainties, and yes, they are frightening, but it doesn't matter because I would be facing them with you, and you would be facing them with me, and we'd figure it out and make it work because that's what love gives you the strength to do."

It's presented with the usual goofy, nearly-impossible-to-believe-that-worked circumstances common to most TGIF kids' romantic scenes, but when you stop and think about it you realize it only works and they only stay together because of how much both of them have grown and are able to think and function in a relationship like young adults, not kids. Rich and Dana look and function most like Frank and Carol in this moment.

I think one of the things I like best about it is all the initially annoyed/confused adult couples in the room getting into it and starting to dance as he sings. It's tacit approval.

And it's still cheesy and goofy and still kind of beautiful just for that.

The actual song is about 2 minutes long. Stick around for the after credits scene where they cosplay as Sonny and Cher. It's hilarious and adorable, but doesn't have the magic of the in-character performance.