Show Notes 102 "Resonance"
What’s That Sound, Agents?
Is that a limbic trigger?
Herein, find the show notes for episode 102 “Resonance”
Our Actor Spotlight this week focuses on the incomparable Tricia Helfer. We talked about her current podcast in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries. It’s called the Battlestar Galacticast, and you can listen to it and find more information about it here. While we’re on the subject of Battlestar Galactica, we talked about a few important bits of information from Battlestar Galactica that are relevant to our Actor Spotlight and to the episode overall. First off, we mentioned the theme music for her character, Number Six. It’s called The Sense of Six and you can listen to it here. You can see from the comments under the video that it’s a real limbic trigger for most people who watched the show! Here’s just one example of that!:
username redacted in case they don’t want it shared.
We also talked a bit about why and how that theme was designed to cause anxiety. Jill read the factoid about this years ago and, despite her best efforts, was unable to find the interview to link to it here. However, almost every interview she was able to find about it refers to its unusual and unnerving aspect of it deriving from the 9/8 structure and a series of its nine main notes being divided into a group of three notes followed by three groups of two notes. (BEWARE BSG SPOILERS) More information about that can be found here, here, and here.
We also mentioned that the iconic and masterful works of music that scored Battlestar Galactica were performed as symphonies in concert. There are hundreds of youtube videos documenting these events, but here are four of Jill’s personal favorites (the last link is longest, but perhaps the best audio quality): Apocalypse, Prelude to War, Wander My Friends, and a 34-minute concert. (Jill is currently listening to the last link as she types up these show notes, and she’s embedded the video below in case you want some background music while you read):
Finally, as a last note on the topic, we gave a shout-out to the outstanding, godlike music-maker that is Bear McCreary. His personal blog/website is here. There, he writes detailed blog posts (again BEWARE SPOILERS)—like this one—that really give insight into the tremendous amount of work he puts into each composition for each episode of anything he scores.
Moving on, there was an open-ended discussion about the Copeland to which the writers were referring.
Was it this one or this one? What do you think?
We also talked about the “sex pollen” episode of Star Trek that gave rise to a whole trope within fan fiction. The episode is the 24th episode of Season 1 and is called “This Side of Paradise.”
We also discussed an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the main character undergoes an extremely traumatic event and temporarily falls into a catatonic state. (SPOILER WARNING) The catatonic state begins at the end of the 20th episode of Season Five “Spiral” and ends at the conclusion of the following episode, “Weight of the World.” While we are using these episodes of pop culture as a point of reference, we fully understand that catatonia is a severe and real psychological issue and is not something to be taken lightly. Our use of a cultural reference point is in no way intended to minimize the actual struggles of people who have or care for those who have experience with catatonic states.
We talk a little bit about diagetic vs. non-diagetic sound. Here’s some more information on what that means.
We gave an “Almost” Actor Spotlight to composer, Edward Rogers. You can find his personal website here.
In the episode, Myka describes her childhood by referencing the film, The Great Santini. IMDB summarizes the film as follows:
As he approaches manhood, Ben Meechum struggles to win the approval of his demanding alpha male father, an aggressively competitive, but frustrated Marine pilot.
We referenced this iconic meme image of the character Charlie from the show It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia:
PEPE SILVIA!!!!!!!
The meme comes from Season 4, Episode 10, “Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack.” Specifically, it comes from this scene:
We had an outstanding Artifact Expert named Valjeanne Jeffers as a contributor on our show to talk about steampunk, steamfunk, and more! By clicking on her name in the previous sentence, you’ll be taken to her website that lists her own work as well as her work with fellow writer Quinton Veal. In turn, she gave shout-outs to author of Black speculative fiction, Milton Davis and steamfunk author Balogun Ojetade.
Miranda gave a shout-out to scholar and author, Jaymee Goh. In particular, she referenced Goh’s work, The SEA is Ours.
In this episode of Warehouse 13, Dickinson referenced Flash Gordon and Punk’d.
This week’s Writer Appreciation focused on the multi-talented showrunner of Warehouse 13, Jack Kenny. In particular, Jill and Miranda were delighted to learn of his involvement with the 1990s Nickelodeon series, The Secret World of Alex Mack—a childhood favorite.
They also remembered that the abilities of Alex Mack reminded them of a certain series of Capri Sun commercials from the same era:
Finally, this episode featured a lot of…
~HEAVY THEMES~
These themes particularly revolved around mental health, surviving childhood familial abuse, and the importance of setting boundaries.
If the themes in this episode touched on anything for you and you need to talk about it, one resource that may help is the Crisis Text Line. If you have overcome such issues in the past or helped someone to overcome such issues, please feel free to comment on this post with links to and information about resources that helped you.
And if you are struggling to set healthy boundaries in your life, here is some useful information on how to start setting boundaries in romantic relationships as well as familial, platonic, and more broad categories of relationships.
That does it for this week’s edition of Show Notes.