Our Heroes Have Returned!!!

Welcome back, Mr. Crane!

Welcome back Ms. Mills!

Not A Big Fan of Flags. Today I'll Make an Exception

It's a good day to be alive.

North American Time by Adrienne Rich

North American Time
by Adrienne Rich


I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
and this is verbal privilege

III
Try sitting at a typewriter
one calm summer evening
at a table by a window
in the country, try pretending
your time does not exist
that you are simply you
that the imagination simply strays
like a great moth, unintentional
try telling yourself
you are not accountable
to the life of your tribe
the breath of your planet

IV
It doesn't matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible
and this is verbal privilege

V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman's hair —
straightdown, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows—
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country

You have to know these things

VI
Poet, sister: words—
whether we like it or not —
stand in a time of their own.
no use protesting I wrote that
 before Kollontai was exiled
Rosa Luxembourg, Malcolm,
Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,
before Treblinka, Birkenau,
Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,
Biafra, Bangla Desh, Boston,
Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam
--those faces, names of places
sheared from the almanac
of North American time

VII I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don't go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least I need to know these things

VIII Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has rage onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stair, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

IX
In North America time stumbles on
without moving, only releasing
a certain North American pain.
Julia de Burgos wrote:
That my grandfather was a slave
is my grief; had he been a master
that would have been my shame.
A poet's words, hung over a door
in North America, in the year
nineteen-eighty-three.
The almost-full moon rises
timeless speaking of change
out of the Bronx, the Harlem River
the drowned towns of the Quabbin
the pilfered burial mounds
the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds
and I start to speak again.

And Now for the Annual Solstice Nervous Breakdown

It's that time of year again.  Crazy beautiful, with long warm days, and cool nights; sunny, azure morning skies giving way to clouds in the afternoon, blessed rain in the early evening.  In past Junes, this would be the time when we go to bed with the inimitable fragrance of the entire state of New Mexico on fire wafting through the windows.  But not this year.  This year, everything is wet and green.  It is an indescribable luxury.

The days are long.  Very long.  First light comes around 4:30, and last light fades well after my husband and I have retired for the night.  This should, theoretically, be the beginning of the sweetest part of the year:  Plentiful harvests, gorgeous weather, plenty of food for goats and all living creatures, warm, soft air in the day, cool, frangrant air in the starry, starry nights, barbecues, pizza parties in the horno, storytelling around the firepit.  Baby chicks, baby goats, baby bunnies running everywhere. Pronghorn and elk herds on the road as one comes home at night.  Farmers' markets booming, and people constantly reassuring us that what we do has value and meaning and makes a positive difference in the life of this valley.  Young, healthy, vibrant interns learning so much, working so hard, wanting so sincerely to make a difference in the world.

Unfortunately, this also tends to be the time of year when my long day's journey into night peaks.

Perhaps it's because we are just, finally, coming down from May, arguably our toughest, busiest, most demanding month of the season.  Everything happens in May.  We have our most intense period of bed preparation, planting and transplanting; the farmers markets start; goat babies are born; new interns arrive and need to be trained; the work increases dramatically.  This year, as often happens, May leaked well into June.  But this year, unlike last, we have a great group of interns and an apprentice to help see us through.  Sure, we're still behind on everything, but when are we not?  The goat babies are doing well, the chicks are growing, we're in the "market groove," and the harvest is still a manageable, modest size.

Perhaps it's the fact that things continue to break down faster than we can fix them, problems continue to materialize at a faster rate than they can be solved.

Perhaps it's the fact that the front door blew open the other night, stayed open all night, and a lovely, furry rat we've named Joffrey has made himself at home in the house.  Yeah, you read that right. There's a rat living in my house.  Ah, the beauty of the natural world.  Until we catch him, my husband's and my sleep ranges from bad-to-nonexistent. [update: when rat babies appeared, we changed Joffrey's name to Cersei]

It doesn't help  that I'm just so damned tired all the time.  Some online quiz tells me I have adrenal exhaustion.  Yeah, sure.  Okay.  Well seven years of the greatest cumulative stress and the most difficult, intense work of my life might have something to do with this.

Perhaps it's because this is when things just start getting a little more nutty than we can handle around year.  We thought we might avoid that fate this year, but no.

Two nights ago, we were all wakened by the fierce, sharp crackle of a thunderbolt. It was so extremely loud and incredibly close that we were certain the attendant lightening must have struck our wind tower.  But that was the second experience of the universe messing with us.  The first happened earlier that evening when our beloved and extremely competent apprentice, whom we've been counting on to stay through November, informed us that she is very unhappy here and that we, and the stressful life we have created and continue to create here each day, is a major part of the reason.  Hence, she may bail.  Soon.

This hurts on all kinds of levels, not the least of which is that my hubbie and I don't do abandonment well.  It's way too woven into our DNA, and we had yet to fully heal from the worst ones we've survived when we moved onto the land and it became an annual occurrence.

Another level, of course, is that we admire and deeply care about this woman.  We don't want to be the cause of emotional suffering for her.

Then there's the very real fact that, if she leaves now, we are really screwed in terms of the work for the season.  We'll get by.  We always do.  But it will be a hell of a lot harder.

But honestly, deep down, I think the hardest bit is being told you're pushing someone away because of who you are.  Not because of some specific thing you said or did, some pattern of behavior that's changeable, but because you and your life are the way they are.

And the way they are is stressful, although this year has been much less so than previous years.   And although we can definitely concede her point, we're just not sure there's very much we can do about it. She hasn't reached that point in her life wherein work being stressful is just normal, and for most people, unavoidable (although, to be fair, she has survived the extraordinary "Whiplash"-like stress of music school; doubtless she's still recovering from that).

That's not to say I wouldn't like our lives to be much LESS stressful--we're both working to that end--but the main thing we need for that to happen is to have more people here, full-time, committed to this vision and way of life.  Without that, just to survive, we have to take on sufficient work that is, well, pretty much always too much for us.

I know this entry isn't very coherent.  I'm terribly fried.  In fact, we've renamed Friday (tomorrow) "Fried-day." Just figured I should check in and let you know how things are going on my end of the world.

Oh, and I did finish another draft of my Sleepy Hollow spec.  I'm waiting to hear back about it from my mentor.  Fingers crossed.  Writing remains my joy and salvation.

Water, Coal, and Farming in a Desert

(Written about 6 weeks ago)

Today was another of my writing days. Naturally, this meant an adventure having nothing to do with writing.

We live, and farm, on land that is one inch of precipitation away from a desert. We have no rights to the river (see: stream) which flows through the land. Thus, our well is our lifeline. Without it neither our garden, nor the critters, nor we can survive.

My husband came to me this afternoon, as I was just settling down from running errands for the farm, to tell me, in that terrifyingly portentous voice of his, “we may have a problem.” If you're picturing Tom Hanks talking to Houston right now, you've got the idea. “I need you to listen to the well pump. It's making a strange sound.”

Well-pumps are like babies, buildings during an earthquake, and rocket boosters—you never, ever, ever want to hear them making strange sounds.

I knew my writing day had essentially ended, and walked outside. Sure enough, the pump was not only making a very disturbing sound, it was making it really loudly. My guess—which I would just like to point out turned out to be correct—was that the filter on the pump had gotten seriously clogged and needed to be cleaned out. This was a reasonable assumption, given that our water is very heavily mineralized and, of late, the water coming out of our faucets was proving a lot redder than usual (indicating a high iron content, a compromised filter on our pressure pump in the house at the very least, if not a cistern needing a good cleaning, and a potentially compromised well-pump filter too).

Of course, my husband being the methodical, moon-in-Virgo type that he is, we couldn't trust my intuition and go straight to that. We needed to problem solve sensibly, ruling out various possibilities one at a time. My husband's fear sensors had already gone to DEFCOM whatever, and were seriously fretting over the two worst case scenarios: the pump was dying (bad) or the well had gone dry (catastrophic).

I can't make fun of my husband for this because my mind tends to run towards the catastrophic as well, but this wasn't my first rodeo, and the last time the well-pump stopped working, as I was busy freaking out, his sensible problem-solving brought me in off a ledge and fixed everything fine even though he wasn't in the state at the time.

We did things his way. First I tried turning the pump breaker off and on to see if that helped. It didn't. By now the pump was practically having an articulate argument with us it was so unhappy. The next step, the husband suggested, was to open the cistern and see if we could tell whether water was in fact going into the cistern from the well.

This may sound simple enough, but it's not. For one thing, our cistern is underground. For another, we haven't had to open it in 18 months, and for a third, we live in a valley east of the Great Sand Dunes National Park. In practical terms, this means that every winter our fields, garden beds, and any other bits of earth around the house are covered in drifting, course sand. It took my husband a while to even find the cistern. Once he did, we had to dig it out from beneath two feet of compacted earth.

And goat poop, because our goats love to pasture and sit nearby. Unfortunately, this means that when we finally were able to lift the obscenely heavy concrete lid off (not before nearly crushing both of our sets of fingers and wrecking both of our backs), we got to watch not only sand, but goat poop fall into the cistern holding our drinking water. Nifty.

My husband sent me running for a strainer so he could strain the, as-yet, floating poop out of the cistern. Doing this, of course, required leaning so far into the cistern he a) nearly fell in and b) inadvertently pushed a great deal more sand into the water.

At any rate, ultimately we were able to see that the float—which tells the pump when to come on in order to fill the cistern—was at it's lowest point, and if there was water coming in from the well at all, it was doing so very slowly. My poor husband even extended himself head first into the cistern again to ascertain if he could feel it coming in through the intake. It was, but not with much strength.

So we conceded we had to open up the well itself, haul up the pump and see if we could figure out what was wrong with it. My husband was reluctant to do this; I didn't understand why until we had to put the pump back into the well. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was sent to turn the pump off again, collect tools and a tarp, and eventually cleaning materials. When my husband pulled the pump out, the last five feet of the electrical cord attached to it was coated in a black substance. The pump itself had this hard black substance all over it, and the filter was nearly completely blocked by crusted black goo. I told my husband I'd seen this before, and he had too, but never this bad. I wondered aloud that it must be some kind of mineral, perhaps a bacteria.

“It can't be coal,” my husband said.

Ding, ding, ding!!!

“Of course it can! That's it! It has to be! It's hardened, congealed coal dust picked up along the seams with the water.”

The primary economic driver of this area, until relatively recently, was coal-mining. Coal is as indigenous to this earth as the iron that stains all our appliances, the sand from the dunes, and the Apache, not necessarily in that order.

As we cleaned the filter, first with a flathead screwdriver, scrape, scrape, scraping, and then with a toothbrush, vinegar water, and baking soda, our hands were dyed black by the wet coal dust. The smell permeated everything—if you've never smelled wet coal, trust me, the smell is wholly unique and you never forget it. It's not bad, necessarily, just strong. I felt like an idiot, like somehow I had let my entire family down, not being able to recognize it immediately. It's something, like alcoholism, hospitality and fighting, intrinsic to my extended family.

Eventually we set the pump in a five-gallon bucket of vinegar water and turned it on.  It ran like a champ, and we were able to reinsert it in the well. This process was what my husband affectionately likes to call a relationship test. I wish for you, here and now, that you never, ever have to get a well-pump back in a well. But if you do, seek marriage counseling before and after.

After we finished (remarkably remaining married) I looked at my hands. They were coated in black coal dust. I can't explain how right this felt to me, or how stupid I felt that it took me so long to figure out what the substance was. See, my grandfather was not only a miner, but an organizer of the nascent United Mineworkers union back in Western Pennsylvania in the 1920s. My immigrant grandma got arrested walking the picket line with him (but was eventually released to go home and feed her 9 kids). Both my uncles worked as coal-miners, my brother was a steel millwright, and I can't listen to the song “Youngstown,” by Bruce Springsteen, without crying. Coal runs through my veins, metaphorically, and now, apparently, also literally. I should have known such a close relative on sight.

Best Reaction to the UK Elections

Kudos and thanks to Tom Mison of London for this one.  Paddy Chayefsky and Peter Finch speak for me.

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Sleepy Hollow Episode 2.16 “What Floats Around Sleepy Hollow in A Billion Pieces”

What the hell do they write on their Workman's Compensation claim? 

Damian Kindler and Phillip Iscove gave us a very entertaining episode in 2.16, “What Lies Beneath.” The villains terrified, whilst paying loving homage to two of the show's artistic ancestors, Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (we all want to be Joss Whedon when we grow up, don't we?); our heroes worked together very well and shared some sweet moments; the choice Abbie and Crane are required to make gives us some beautiful character insight; the “love story” between Crane and Thomas Jefferson was interesting; Jefferson himself was more fascinatingly written and played than Abigail Adams, Ben Franklin, and George Washington combined, in my book; Irving and Jenny got plenty of air time and made the absolute most of it; Calvin, a potential new love interest for Abbie, proved a strong, charismatic addition to the team, one with whom Abbie already has way better chemistry than she ever did with Hawley; and the little bit of Katrina and Henry we got was cool and appropriately creepy.

But, let's face it: we all know what didn't work in this episode, namely a plot hole so huge the entire episode started taking on water. That said plot hole didn't sink this episode completely speaks volumes not only about the writers of “What Lies Beneath,” but everyone involved in Sleepy Hollow for the past two years, in creating characters and a world so well-crafted and delightful they can outweigh unfortunate incidents like this.

Our story opens, appropriately, with a survey team studying what lies beneath Sleepy Hollow in preparation for a new commercial development. They come upon the infamous ancient tunnel system and in turn are sucked unwillingly into another, secret tunnel system below that. We eventually learn that the three unsuspecting workers awakened an ancient fighting force of George Washington's called “Reavers,” posted there a couple of centuries ago to protect an anti-apocalypse version of the Bodleian for Abbie and Crane's ultimate usage. Said fighting force, once men, were supernaturally made into vicious creatures who could survive indefinitely—or at least until Crane and Abbie showed up. Unfortunately, these fellas have awakened monstrously hungry, and, not unlike their Firefly namesakes, they are quite willing to slake that hunger with human flesh. Hence, our surveyors go missing.

Abbie and Crane, meanwhile, are strolling around a warship because the Witnesses have a gorgeously weird idea of courtship, and because “sacrifices made for the greater good” is the theme of this week's episode. (Also because Fox is apparently in danger of losing the US Army recruitment account.) Abbie's still not giving Crane much emotional quarter, managing during their conversation to look everywhere but at his handsome self, which I understand not at all. But hey, at least they're together and central to this week's story, which is a huge improvement over much of the season. Crane gives us a great rant as he watches people take selfies, outraged by people “posting life” instead of living it. He then goes on to tell us “there are reminders of conflict everywhere.” Well, Crane, you are standing on a friggin' battleship, for example.

Abbie wonders aloud where their fight against evil might end. To encourage her, Crane reminds Abbie that the Bible foretold a seven-year mission for the Witnesses. “Have faith,” he softly insists, to which the fandom replies, en masse, “we're trying, Fox, but it would be a hell of a lot easier if you'd just renew the show already, damnit.”

Reyes summons them from their Not A Date (via text; sadly, Sakina Jaffrey is still MIA) to help with a missing persons investigation. Abbie and Crane don't make it to the scene until well after dark because daylight is just not scary. At the scene, a journalist stops them before they can make it to the tunnels, and we're introduced to Calvin Riggs, Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent, and an intelligent, brave and (naturally, because this is Sleepy Hollow), ridiculously handsome man who might actually be worthy of Abbie. Between the introduction the writers gave Calvin, and Sharif Atkins' charismatic portrayal, we have a potential new regular who may add an interesting dimension to our story (as long as he's clear that someday, eventually, Abbie will leave him for Crane). (You are clear on that, right, Calvin?).

(Oh dear, I think I feel another Horseman of the Apocalypse coming on).

"Hi. My name is Calvin, and I'll be your cock-blocker
for Season 3."

For now, Calvin's just here to humanize the Reavers' victims: his brother is among them. He takes a lot of photos with his $7,000 camera, but mostly just wants to make sure the cops do their job (oh, and get Abbie to stop giving him “propaganda face” long enough to give him her email address). Abbie promises he'll be her first call once they know anything, and heads with Crane down into their beloved tunnels.

Our heroes aren't the only ones on the job, but they are the only search team that “know[s] about this section,” thankfully. When they find a camera used by the survey crew, and watch the playback, they see what they're dealing with in terms of monsters but they also see something curious which Crane recognizes: a room, underneath them, the architectural design of which points unequivocally to Thomas Jefferson. Huh. That's odd. So they decide, monsters or no, to climb down into the lower tunnels and have a look-see, as you do.

Shockingly, this doesn't go well. On the upside, they do get some valuable intel. There are a lot of these creatures down below, and our heroes are going to need more firepower to have any hope against them. But more importantly, they learn that Calvin's brother is still alive, in captivity somewhere close by (in their battle with the Reavers, one of the workers had the presence of mind to hold onto a radio; I want these guys on my team when the apocalypse comes).

On the downside, Crane is nearly taken by the Reavers, saved only by flashes from Calvin's camera as the journalist enters the upper tunnels to capture all this fun on film. The light from the flashes unnerves the Reavers sufficiently that Crane reaches the top alive. Calvin immediately starts getting pissy with Abbie because, despite the fact that until a half-second ago she and her partner were fighting for their lives, she hasn't called him yet to tell him of this latest development.

Having grown up in Sleepy Hollow, Calvin's neither surprised nor thrown by the seemingly supernatural creatures Crane and Abbie have encountered. He demands to be embedded with them. After a quick confab with her fellow Witness—Crane, of course, doesn't want such a handsome man within a mile of Abbie—the leftenant grants him “limited access” to their investigation, confiscating his cell phone for good measure.

After the first act break, we're introduced to some wonderful C story: Frank Irving having a drink with Jenny Mills, and seducing her into helping him break into the police evidence locker, ostensibly to recover his wedding ring. Jenny--being Fabulous Fucking Jenny Mills--is skeptical, silently notes the weird tattoo on Frank's arm, and eyes him with heartening reserve. She agrees to help him, but also volunteers as his back-up.

Abbie and Crane return to the archives for more firepower, research, and detective work. Happily they need no help with witchcraft in this episode since Katrina is, as usual, napping. Crane's deduction regarding the “fenestella,” the room he's convinced Jefferson designed and built under Sleepy Hollow, leads naturally to Crane recounting his relationship to the third President. It turns out Jefferson was one of his many mentors, and Crane counted him a friend—so much so that he even helped him edit a draft of the Declaration of Independence, in a flashback scene which is handled beautifully, refreshingly devoid of camp. But suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, Jefferson turned cold to Crane, cut him off.

“In the common vernacular,” he explains to Abbie, “he 'unfriended' me.”

Delightful, but you guys meant “current vernacular,” right? Since “common vernacular” is redundant? Crane still carries the wound of that break-up, as Jefferson never explained himself.

The time in the archives also introduces us to the history of the Reavers, whose unswerving loyalty to the first President was repaid by their being made into immortal monsters forced to spend eternity beneath the ground guarding whatever the founding fathers thought important enough to keep in the fenestella.

Seriously, Frank!  We all knew Ms. BAMF the Younger
wouldn't fall for this.

At the police department, Jenny and her gorgeous romantic heroine hair help Irving break in, pretend to stand guard, then follow him. She sees the evidence he's actually taking is from The Hellfire Club and pulls a gun on him. Lyndie Greenwood deftly delivers lots of exposition to explain to viewers just tuning in why this matters, and a brief, physical confrontation follows. Frank takes off, leaving Jenny her gun.

Armed to the teeth, our heroes return to the tunnels, and, much to Calvin's horror, also commandeer his $7000 camera to use as a flying Reaver deterrent. Our heroes get a good scary fight from the Reavers, escaping eventually through an open door, into the gorgeously lit fenestella, and a face-to-face meeting with...Thomas Jefferson. As act breaks go, I daresay, that one's pretty hard to beat.

Once we meet Jefferson, things start to get rather interesting. Save his (sarcastic, I hope?) insistence that Crane call him “Mr. President”--something Jefferson would never have done--and Crane's incessant courtly bows (Abbie gets one; Jefferson gets three?), the meeting with Jefferson is charming. Crane is enchanted, while Abbie remains marvelously reserved as Jefferson greets her warmly (we learn later that he immediately recognized her as the Second Witness).

Crane has so much more chemistry with Jefferson
than he ever had with Katrina. It's sad.  

Jefferson's presence in the fenestella is a stellar creative invention: he's a hologram, powered by a delicate but indefinite electricity source co-created by Jefferson and Katrina's coven (damn but those witches got around), and provided with a perfect facsimile of Jefferson's personality, thought processes, memories and values. But near as I can tell, his sole reason for being there is to welcome Crane and Abbie when they eventually find the place. Couldn't he have just left them a note? Beyond powering Jefferson's hologram, which Crane hilariously keeps running his hand through (“could you please stop doing that,” Jefferson entreats), I have no idea what the point of the delicate, indefinite electrical source is. To keep the lights on? Couldn't they have just left some wood for torches, trusting Abbie and Crane to figure how to light them? Was the place climate-controlled to keep the books and scrolls in good condition?

Meanwhile, Jenny catches up with Irving, and with the help of a very moving performance from Orlando Jones and a powerful flashback, we learn that Frank protected his humanity, before his fatal confrontation with War, with a rune stolen from Henry. The little bit of Good Frank left in him broke in to steal a ledger from the Hellfire Club proving wire transfers of $1.37 million dollars, and the flashdrive that would allow him to transfer that money to his family.  He gives the latter to Jenny and begs her to protect them from Evil Frank, about to overtake Good Frank, because the power of the rune is fading.  Jones and Greenwood are magnificent together.

Back with Jefferson, Abbie and Crane are ever-so-slightly impressed with the fenestella. But they're also unequivocally clear that their object at the moment is to find the workers and free them from the nasty clutches of the Reavers, and they're not going to let a little thing like a treasure trove of answers to every question they've ever had about their purpose and the fight against evil come between them and those men.

Ms. BAMF the Elder.  As usual, clear as the proverbial bell.

And here would be where our plot begins to take on water. In an agonizingly slow bit of exposition, Jefferson explains that the fenestella is there to help Crane and Abbie. Abbie, never a big fan of wasting time hanging out with a dead white guy when men's lives are at stake, leaves Crane to negotiate with his old pal--“get him to help”--and goes in search of the men. Just below the fenestella she finds a “nest” of (currently) sleeping Reavers, the fenestella's power source, and the two surviving surveyors. Abbie signals the men to sit tight, that she'll be back for them, and returns to tell Crane.

But Jefferson's having none of it. Attacking the nest, he says, will destroy the fenestella. “It weighs on me that these men must die, but the information within these walls eclipses the needs of the few.” Both Abbie and Crane are horrified by Jefferson's conclusion, but this fan is deeply grateful for your showing Jefferson as morally ambiguous at best. When Abbie says “Mr. President,” she glances at Crane, and he nods to show her he agrees—men before books—in an absolutely gorgeous economy of storytelling, bond-showing.

I'm so glad you guys finally got work again.  I was worried about you
when Firefly got cancelled.  What have you been up to the last 12 years?

I just need to pause a moment here and encourage fans to go back and watch this entire episode for no other reason than Nicole Beharie. She is so beyond marvelous, especially in the scenes with Jefferson. You can see the extraordinarily complex emotions and thoughts this woman is having simultaneously in response to meeting this man, and it's all SO RIGHT in terms of strengthening Abbie's character as a badass hero. The subtlety of Beharie's performance, her range, are just awe-inspiring.

Well, huzzah! Abbie and Crane manage to free the two surviving men, leaving the fenestella and a dejected Jefferson behind them, without harming the power source or the library at all! It would seem they can have their cake and eat it too! Battling fierce Reavers, they make it to the surface and hand off the traumatized men to Calvin.

And then our A-story really starts listing. When Crane and Abbie reach the top of the secret tunnels, they agree quickly that they have to kill the Reavers, and blowing up the power source of the fenestella is the only way to do so.

Wait. Huh? Why? The Reavers were down there for 250 years and never bothered a soul!  Can't you just re-bury them until you get a chance to come back and empty the fenestella of its invaluable, irreplaceable contents?

Crane tells Abbie to take the surviving surveyors to get medical attention, and then quite heroically goes back into the tunnels alone. A flash-bang scares off enough of the Reavers to get him to the fenestella, and then he shoots and hand-fights two more. But just as he's about to go into the Reavers' nest, an iron fence comes down out of the ceiling to block his way. It seems despite being a hologram, Jefferson still has some tricks up his sleeve, and he's had about enough of these ungrateful Witnesses trying to destroy his greatest invention.

And at last we come to the reason Jefferson abandoned Crane. It seems that, like everyone else Crane cared about in 1781, Jefferson also knew he was a Witness. But apparently the “prophecy” required that everyone keep this secret from him until the Second Witness appeared. Thus when Crane's research and initiative took him too close to the truth, Jefferson relieved him of his work as his assistant before Crane could discover the fenestella's purpose.

The chamber, Jefferson goes on to explain, represents his proudest achievement. That the Witnesses are both there in the flesh fulfills his grandest hopes. “The price I paid in building all this,” he regretfully tells Crane, “was our friendship.”

“And now you tell me it must all be destroyed,” Jefferson opines.

No, it musn't. At least not yet, and not for these reasons. And that's the fundamental problem with this story.

Mison's performance as Crane, passionately arguing that if these three men stumbled across the Reavers, there will be more; that the world is changed, and 300 million Americans now live above the fenestella and they cannot endanger them, is spot-on. His performance is not the problem; Crane's argument is. He reminds Jefferson he once told him “a single life is worth more than a thousand books,” and while I agree that's true, and am glad to see our heroes agree that's true, this is such a lousy justification for blowing up the fenestella I don't even know where to start. Of course, there was a reason why it had to be done then, and a good one, but it's buried in the denouement, and I had to piece it together myself. But there's no good reason explicated at the time why Abbie and Crane couldn't have come back later with Jenny, Calvin's camera and a U-Haul, killed off the rest of the Reavers, and moved that library out of the fenestella and into the Archives.  Even killing the Reavers doesn't really sit well with me.  These were men sent to those tunnels as Crane's allies, to help him and the side of good. Sure, the Reavers were hungry. But throw the fellas some take out, pat them on the back for a god-awful job LONG well-done, and let them go back to sleep.

What did make sense, in the denouement, is that the workers' experience with the Reavers had to be explainable to their traumatized minds and the police as an attack by wild animals living underground. Naturally, this would inspire the police and/or department of wildlife to immediately investigate the tunnels. Had they done so, before the A-Team could come back and clean out the joint, they not only would have found the deadly, inexplicable Reavers, but the even more inexplicable Thomas Jefferson and a library that would have confused and terrified them mightily.

The Witnesses had to make sure that didn't happen. Blowing up the fenestella gave them the excuse of a “gas line explosion,” to keep immediate search teams out, and keep future teams from finding anything in tact once they did go in. Unfortunately, that's not the kind of heroic choice we need Abbie and Crane to make. Saving people is one thing, but keeping information from them by destroying it... not quite so sexy, not the kind of stakes that make for a great B story. Unfortunately, this meant our stakes and our story were at odds with each other.

Anyways, Jefferson finally comes around, tells Crane the best spot to plant his charges for maximum effect, waxes poetically that the country is in good hands, and Crane runs out the door—without grabbing even ONE book and stuffing it in his satchel! As Charlie Brown put it,

Upon Crane's return to the surface, Abbie says, “I can't believe we just blew up the author of the declaration of independence” to which Crane charmingly replies, “truth be told, he insisted.” Very cute lines, very well delivered, but, no, he didn't. He yielded. C'mon, guys. We were there. It was like, four seconds ago!

Crane's conclusion, upon blowing this knowledge nirvana to hell, that they still have the internet—granted, I understand that it was meant to be a joke—didn't land for me at all. If that were true, there would again have been no moral quandary for our heroes. It wouldn't have mattered that they blew up the fenestella. Their decision to save the men would have no cost, and therefore could not be heroic.

(Again, couldn't Crane have thrown a FEW books in his satchel on the way out the door?)

The beauty of the love story between Crane and Jefferson, Steven Weber's delightful portrayal of Jefferson as a fierce intellect with an ambiguous morality at best, and at worst of all, willing to let men die to save knowledge, is extremely well done. Unfortunately, it's all tainted for this viewer because a choice is presented between two options which need not be in conflict with each other. Stakes are posed that needn't be stakes.

Our concluding scene between napping Katrina and Henry is marvelously creepy. Katrina awakens to see her son sitting before her. They chat a bit, he hands her a dead rose with lots of thorns, one pricks her and causes her to bleed, then suddenly she wakes and he's gone! She believes it was all a dream. But when she gets up to wash her hands, she sees the blood and realizes he really was there. This oft-used trope was very well-done. I do wish we could stop raiding Stevie Nicks' closet for Katrina's wardrobe, but the audience teasing of this scene was great.