01 April 2016

Notes - the cleaver / shelled



       Mid-morning. Jadah is sitting silently with a cat’s serenity in a sunbeam, Carol is finishing one of her books and you are finished checking email. Kim, Paul, Owen and Brennan are heading north today after a good few days in Kissimmee with their friends. You are thinking on how good last night’s old “X-File” fourth season episode “El Mundo Gira” was. – Amorella

       1024 hours. Ha. I have to place a review of that particular episode here.

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Reception

"El Mundo Gira" was originally broadcast in the United States on the Fox network on January 12, 1997, and was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC One on November 19, 1997. This episode earned a Nielsen rating of 13.3, with a 19 share, meaning that roughly 13.3 percent of all television-equipped households, and 19 percent of households watching television, were tuned in to the episode. It was viewed by 22.37 million viewers.

The episode received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club reviewed the episode positively, rating it a B. He considered the episode "entertaining to watch" with "nifty direction from Tucker Gates", despite being formulaic and with the same problems he found in the previous episode penned by John Shiban, season three's "Teso Dos Bichos". Handlen had much praise for the second half, which he noted was filled with dark humor, and featured a "bizarre ending". John Keegan from Critical Myth gave the episode a largely negative review and awarded it a 2 out of 10. He wrote, "Overall, this episode is a disastrous combination of political commentary and stereotypical “Mexican soap opera” caricatures. Mulder and Scully have nothing to do with the resolution of the episode, and in fact, the writers fail to provide that resolution. There are some good character moments, but they are too far and few between." Author Keith Topping criticized the episode in his book X-Treme Possibilities, calling it an "awful episode with a heavy-handed, clod-hopping attempt at social comment that hardly sits well with the themes on display in the rest of the episode." He called it the worst episode of the fourth season. Robert Shearman and Lars Pearson, in their book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode one star out of five and wrote that it was "trying very hard to be clever". Despite this the two explained that "if cleverness were only about intent, then we could all be geniuses". Shearman and Pearson derided the episode's use of social criticism, referring to it as "rubbish [because it] only works if it isn't underlined each time it's made." Furthermore, the two criticized the story's "Mexican soap opera" style, noting that it drowned out the themes in "unengaging melodrama". Paula Vitaris from Cinefantastique gave the episode a largely negative review and awarded it one star out of four. She wrote that "'El Mundo Gira' is so overloaded with ideas that it falls over and can't get up".

Selected and edited from -- https://en.wikipediaDOTorg/wiki/El_Mundo_Gira

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       1029 hours. I particularly like the last two lines from the above article because the reason I liked the show, it was the overload of ideas – very clever; alas, others gave it the cleaver instead.

       Such is a cultural world where everyone can have a say. Post. – Amorella

       1033 hours. And our cultural world is the better for it.


       About noon Kim posted texted that they would be north of Atlanta tonight thus you calculate that they will be in Mason between three and four tomorrow. – Amorella

       1527 hours. We are running errands.

       You are waiting for Carol at the community center. Let’s go to Dead Eleven. – Amorella

       Merlyn speaks of ‘Encompassed Physics’ because the books look to wholeness, not separation. You are perplexed with the words but like the concept. – Amorella

       1613 hours. It appears silly to think on multiple dimensions and universes from Merlyn’s perspective. Physics is the yolk of humanity. The ‘yellow’ is Encompassed Physics. I don’t know what the white and the shell are in context. Earlier in the books each universe is as a bud, a leaf on a tree; its location on the tree would give a sense of dimension(s) to the place location on a twig, a branch or even an opened root as far as that goes. To put the ‘tree of universes’ within an egg appears unreasonable. I can see the tree within an otherwise empty shell, but not within a yolk within a shell. This conjures up some classical/ not so classical goddess/god made from iconic cultural images of animals and sea creatures anthropomorphically transcribed into particles/waves of light into a ‘Beyond-a-Being’ when in my good consciousness it would have to be from the other way around. (1629)

       Home. After several stops at pharmacies you finally found the Compound W Freeze for Dr. Paul to use Saturday night or Sunday before they leave for home. – Amorella

       1832 hours. At Walgreen’s it was a dollar more than on Amazon. I hope it works. Skin tags are a nuisance, but medical science is generally a better remedy than not.

       1903 hours. Time to watch the news.

       Post. - Amorella

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