The Great Queen Seondeok: WATCH THIS.
Jun. 21st, 2012 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaSome of you may have been reading my twitter feed and may therefore be aware that over the past three weeks I have become completely obsessed with a Korean Sageuk (Historical) Drama. IT'S THIS ONE AND IT IS GLORIOUS.
Streaming within the US on Hulu - subtitled
Streaming outside the US with fansubs
Okay, I will level with you. This show is 62 hours long. And I found some of the early episodes kinda campy, which I think was mostly just me acclimating to a certain amount of culture clash in terms of visual storytelling and acting styles as well as requiring slightly more attention than usual due to subtitles. But you know what? It just kept getting better and better and now that I've seen it all, I can say with absolute sincerity that this is one of the best fucking TV shows I have ever seen.
It's enormous in scope - it tells the tale of Queen Seondeok of Silla, the first female monarch in Korean history, and, I believe, in recorded East Asian history. It was, at the time, forbidden for a woman to govern a country. Information on the historical figure can be found here. The TV show tells a fictionalised version of her life; with 62 hours to work with, it's unsurprisingly detailed in its account of more than forty years of history with a huge number of subplots and minor characters, but the centrepiece is the remarkable, glorious power struggle between its two female protagonists.
Deokman (the name of Queen Seondeok before her coronation) and Mishil (a noblewoman and consort to several kings who has been not-so-secretly controlling the court for decades) take on the roles of Mulan-as-Luke-Skywalker and the Catherine De Medici of Ancient Korea respectively as they brawl across every arena from the personal to the political, on the battlefield and in temples, they fight each other with the economy and with science and with the people they love. It’s about individuals versus institutions. It’s about power and love and ambition and dreams.
It made me cry. Nearly nothing on telly makes me cry. It pulled my soul out through my chest, broke it, and then pushed it back into my throat.
I wanted to keep this relatively short, so consider the above my recommendation. But for the interested, and those not averse to some spoilers, there's...just so much more I want to babble about, I will do so after the cut.
So, okay, first can we talk about the obvious thing that I'm gonna want to talk about? It's an epic TV show where the two main characters are women, and one of them is supposed to be over 40! How am I not gonna love that?
(Additional layer of meta awesomeness? The actress playing Mishil - Ko Hyun Jung - successfully kicked both sexism and ageism in the teeth by defying critics and staging a return to acting after a 10 year break and after a messy divorce, which is still kind of a hugely stigmatising thing in South Korea if you're a public figure. Due in part of her enormously popular role in this show, she's now one of the highest paid actresses in the country, and, at 41, is about to star in the lead role in a big-budget action-comedy film.)
But seriously, the relationship between these two is fascinating and so well done. One of the things that impresses me most is the way the heroine is allowed to be unambiguously ambitious and the villain's obvious use of sexuality as a weapon is never upheld as the chief reason to find her morally suspect.
To clarify, Mishil, consort to two kings, wife of the head of the Council of Nobles, lover of the Chief General, who bore three sons to three different fathers, is clearly playing power games with all of them. They know it, she knows it, she has these wonderfully awkward family conferences with her husband and their son on one side of the table, and her lover and their son on the other side, where she tells everyone what they're up to this week and what their jobs are, and then we cut to scenes with each of the dads explaining to each of the sons why, actually, your mother is very smart, but don't worry, she'll always need us more than that other half of our family. And her ruthless manipulation of people is very much held up as a reason to fear her, but no one ever yells WHORE in her face, no one ever points out her sexual conduct as specifically improper.
On the other point, Deokman, the princess, is not the reluctant heir to the throne. She resolves, when she's on the run, in a cave with nothing but the clothes on her back and an army trying to kill her, having been crushed under the absurd heel of dynastic politics, deprived of everything she thought was true about her life, and with absolutely no legitimate claim to it, that she will have that throne. It's not mindless greed or hunger for power. As she puts it, there are things that happen in that country that are incomprehensible to her, and she will do something about them. But there is, in my mind, a huge, and important distinction between the narrative of the leader who is noble because she is reluctant and hesitant to take power, and the leader who is noble because she goes after power with the intention of using it to improve lives. The latter is a narrative women nearly never get. But Deokman does.
I love how angry the character is allowed to be. It is, essentially, rage that fuels her original decision to make a play for the crown. It's revolutionary fury. And it's enormously powerful for the fact it happens more than twenty episodes in, after we've seen the same incomprehensible things as she has. After we've seen her sharp intellect and indiscriminate curiosity get her into as much trouble as it gets her out of. After we've seen her previously rock solid sense of self and pride and identity swept away to the point she realises that there are situations where everyone around her would benefit from her death more than her life (and she's right is the awful thing of it), and resigned herself to that. After all that, they add one more straw to her backbreaking load, and she just snaps. "I will have the throne," she says. "This nation is absurd," she says, "and I will devour it."
Ladies and gentlemen, our heroine.
The best bit is, she never does give herself over to vengeance. Never, not even when everyone around her is telling her that she is legally and morally justified in doing so. She tears down corrupt institutions and power structures, but never individuals unless she is forced to do so.
She gets challenged on this at one point. The wandering Swordsmaster we have spent half the series waiting to appear, the one we have been cued to expect to herald a major victory for our heroine, the one we think will be on her side, finally shows up and tells her, bluntly, that he does not support her desire to become the monarch because she's a woman and she's too angry. So Deokman thinks about that for a while, then tells him why he's wrong, why being a woman and being angry are perfectly acceptable traits, and then goes ahead without him. She listens to everyone, especially the people she doesn't agree with.
Some of the most interesting parts of her conflict with Mishil revolve around the ideas of individuals vs institutions. It's probably not surprising that the narrative sees Deokman learning political strategy from her rival. I mean, it's great to watch, but it's also unavoidable for this type of story. What I absolutely was not expecting was the way that Mishil would learn from Deokman. And what she learns isn't ~the power of love~ or ~how to be a better person~, it's a shift in perspective. A heartbreaking, empowering, dangerous shift in perspective that causes her to re-evaluate everything in her life.
Mishil is unparalleled when it comes to manipulating the power structures and institutions of her nation. But those self-same structures are the ones that will ultimately never allow her to achieve her goal. Seeing Deokman, whose foreign upbringing and disassociation from the traditional class system, simply attack those structures is horrifying to her, because without them, how would one wield power? Until the day she realises that without them...without them, there's nothing stopping her from doing whatever the fuck she wants either.
In most narratives about a manipulative older woman and her younger rival, youth comes into it. The older woman wants the youth of the younger. So yes, that happens here too. But as to why she's jealous. Oh, god, why. It's because she suddenly realises how much of her life she's spent desperately clawing towards a throne that is already within Deokman's reach. And if she'd been younger, or born into a nobler family, maybe she would have had a chance to work out what she wanted to do next. Maybe she'd have her own grand vision, her own illusive dream for the future of the nation, instead of dragging it down into the mud as she constricts everything in an effort to retain control of the nation in practice even if not in name. She's jealous of Deokman's whole life because it let her see what she never could - the world outside the power systems that left her with such towering resentment and ambition in the first place. And once she realises that, how dangerous she becomes...
The whole thing is just staggeringly, beautifully complicated. There's even more I want to say, but this is long and spoileriffic enough already.
So I'll move on to the other two characters I wanted to talk about: Yushin and Bidam. A simplistic way of explaining them would be to say that they form a good guy/bad boy love triangle around our heroine. You can probably all guess, however, that I think the situation is a good deal more complex than that. For Bidam, certainly, romantic love is an overriding concern, but in the scheme of the show, and even their relationships with each other, perhaps part of the tragedy is that it can never be about only that. It's not even mostly about that, honestly, with the exception of the very end of Bidam's tale.
As you can imagine, I expected to hate Bidam. He was an asshole angsty floppy-haired assassin swordmaster with ~issues~ and ~emotional problems~ who was too ruthless for his own good but violently loyal to the ~right person~. Similarly, while Yushin was kind of a prissy jerk at first, the way he exhaustively and without question stuck by and fought for Deokman when basically everyone in the country was out to kill her - his quiet, determined devotion to her, really won me over.
So, again as you can imagine, I was fairly surprised when about twenty episodes later, I found myself fervently wanting to punch Yushin in the mouth until all his teeth fell out and feeling an overpowering need to hug Bidam.
To permit myself a Star Wars reference for a moment, I'm still not convinced that Anakin Skywalker ever needed to be the kind of character George Lucas clearly intended him to be, but if he had to be, I wish I could travel back in time, kidnap him, and force him to watch Bidam's arc before insisting he rewrite the entire prequel trilogy with that in mind. Bidam is a wounded child, possessed of enormous skill and bravery, fierce, irrational, immoral loyalty, and a violent fear of being discovered to be a monster and abandoned that nothing and no one can assuage. I think it's the honesty of the show I find refreshing. He has wonderful points and awful ones, and ultimately he causes his own downfall, and everyone tells him so. At the end, someone asks Deokman, isn't it better? Knowing he was tricked? That he didn't really mean those awful, hurtful things he said? And she asks why it would be better to know that a lifetime of trust is such a fragile thing, so easily destroyed by one lie that plays to his insecurities, no matter how awful or clever the lie might have been? For Bidam, the question was never, "do I trust her?" but "when will she stop trusting me?" I feel so much more for him, and for the reasons he ended up this way, because I never felt the show demanded it of me. Because I was supposed to hate him at the same time he was supposed to be breaking my damn heart.
On the other hand we have my changing reaction to Yushin. When Deokman was a soldier under his command, or a fugitive, she was the recipient of the immovable, inflexible morality of protecting those for whom he was responsible. He was brave, and sincere and loyal and it made me love him. And once she became his leader, that sincere loyalty never, ever wavered. But their relationship changed irrevocably because now he was responsible to her but not for her, and she became the one who had to deal with his inflexibility and insistence on self-sacrifice.
"If you do this," he tells her, when she tells him that she will claim the throne, "if you do this, I will support you every step of the way, but things will never be the same between us again, because I will have to think of you as my ruler, and you will have to think of me as a pawn." And I scoffed and thought to myself, yes, yes, that old chestnut to rack up the romantic tension. And then the series proceeded to fucking demonstrate to me why that was true. Not with some cheap, "oh no, I must send him into danger and not play favourites!" plotline, but rather with the way he will not ever put himself first. That he won't take the pragmatic choice that won't force Deokman, as a human, to lose Yushin, her friend, because it's more important that Yushin, as a commander, not lose the support of his followers, even when they're being dicks, because if he does, he can't serve Deokman, his Queen, nor can he, in future, protect those who follow him, having set the precedent of giving them up for political expedience.
The worst part is that he's often partially right, but it dumps the problem further up the line, because Deokman, the Queen, can't afford to lose Yushin, the commander, and the support of the political factions who are loyal to him. He has the option to stick by them and stand his ground and say that he is the one who should be held responsible for their conduct - Yushin can define himself against his ruler and align himself with his followers, even if his intent is simply keeping them in line. Deokman can't align herself against anyone internally because they're all her people and that would make her a tyrant. Yushin knows it too. He warns her, before she embarks on her journey, not to be too grateful that he's chosen to support her. He'll always be asking her for impossible favours; he'll never have enough to offer in return. He knows, because she was always doing it to him, never quite understanding the ramifications of her requests.
There's a love triangle going on here, but it's sewn into discussions of honour, power, diplomacy and the impossibility of being both an individual and representative of a wider institution. In the latter chapters of the saga, both Yushin and Bidam contend with political factions who both support them and demand from them things they cannot deliver. Both characters turned out to be much more complicated than I was expecting when I first met them. I feel I can't really ask for more than that.
And I STILL have more, like about Chunchu (and argh, the fact they weren't clear about the passage of time in the middle episodes thus leading to the accidental impression they soap opera aged him is one of the few straight-up criticisms of this show I have), and his developing mentor/student relationship with his aunt that doesn't quite alleviate my (or her) moral concerns about his attitude. Or about the way the final ten episodes left me feeling far more uneasy than I wanted, but the sneaking suspicion I have that the show's meditation on institutional power, and indeed the show's characterisation of Deokman as a leader, wouldn't be nearly as nuanced or complete without them, even if I desperately missed the opportunity to watch Women Do Politics at each other every other scene. And the way they didn't fuck up the Sohwa and Chilsuk story. And the pitch of the final scene, where Deokman contextualises her life and choices, not to her love interest, not even to her rival, but to herself.
"Your life will be difficult," is what she would say to her younger self. "But," she would say. "Endure it."
Not, "I wouldn't change it for the world," not "run far away and never look back," just the words the soldiers say to each other, to inspire them to get up one more time, even when their limbs are bruised and broken, because it's important to keep trying.
Damn, but I loved this show.
Apparently it was a total ratings juggernaut, which is just awesome.
Streaming within the US on Hulu - subtitled
Streaming outside the US with fansubs
Okay, I will level with you. This show is 62 hours long. And I found some of the early episodes kinda campy, which I think was mostly just me acclimating to a certain amount of culture clash in terms of visual storytelling and acting styles as well as requiring slightly more attention than usual due to subtitles. But you know what? It just kept getting better and better and now that I've seen it all, I can say with absolute sincerity that this is one of the best fucking TV shows I have ever seen.
It's enormous in scope - it tells the tale of Queen Seondeok of Silla, the first female monarch in Korean history, and, I believe, in recorded East Asian history. It was, at the time, forbidden for a woman to govern a country. Information on the historical figure can be found here. The TV show tells a fictionalised version of her life; with 62 hours to work with, it's unsurprisingly detailed in its account of more than forty years of history with a huge number of subplots and minor characters, but the centrepiece is the remarkable, glorious power struggle between its two female protagonists.
Deokman (the name of Queen Seondeok before her coronation) and Mishil (a noblewoman and consort to several kings who has been not-so-secretly controlling the court for decades) take on the roles of Mulan-as-Luke-Skywalker and the Catherine De Medici of Ancient Korea respectively as they brawl across every arena from the personal to the political, on the battlefield and in temples, they fight each other with the economy and with science and with the people they love. It’s about individuals versus institutions. It’s about power and love and ambition and dreams.
It made me cry. Nearly nothing on telly makes me cry. It pulled my soul out through my chest, broke it, and then pushed it back into my throat.
I wanted to keep this relatively short, so consider the above my recommendation. But for the interested, and those not averse to some spoilers, there's...just so much more I want to babble about, I will do so after the cut.
So, okay, first can we talk about the obvious thing that I'm gonna want to talk about? It's an epic TV show where the two main characters are women, and one of them is supposed to be over 40! How am I not gonna love that?
(Additional layer of meta awesomeness? The actress playing Mishil - Ko Hyun Jung - successfully kicked both sexism and ageism in the teeth by defying critics and staging a return to acting after a 10 year break and after a messy divorce, which is still kind of a hugely stigmatising thing in South Korea if you're a public figure. Due in part of her enormously popular role in this show, she's now one of the highest paid actresses in the country, and, at 41, is about to star in the lead role in a big-budget action-comedy film.)
But seriously, the relationship between these two is fascinating and so well done. One of the things that impresses me most is the way the heroine is allowed to be unambiguously ambitious and the villain's obvious use of sexuality as a weapon is never upheld as the chief reason to find her morally suspect.
To clarify, Mishil, consort to two kings, wife of the head of the Council of Nobles, lover of the Chief General, who bore three sons to three different fathers, is clearly playing power games with all of them. They know it, she knows it, she has these wonderfully awkward family conferences with her husband and their son on one side of the table, and her lover and their son on the other side, where she tells everyone what they're up to this week and what their jobs are, and then we cut to scenes with each of the dads explaining to each of the sons why, actually, your mother is very smart, but don't worry, she'll always need us more than that other half of our family. And her ruthless manipulation of people is very much held up as a reason to fear her, but no one ever yells WHORE in her face, no one ever points out her sexual conduct as specifically improper.
On the other point, Deokman, the princess, is not the reluctant heir to the throne. She resolves, when she's on the run, in a cave with nothing but the clothes on her back and an army trying to kill her, having been crushed under the absurd heel of dynastic politics, deprived of everything she thought was true about her life, and with absolutely no legitimate claim to it, that she will have that throne. It's not mindless greed or hunger for power. As she puts it, there are things that happen in that country that are incomprehensible to her, and she will do something about them. But there is, in my mind, a huge, and important distinction between the narrative of the leader who is noble because she is reluctant and hesitant to take power, and the leader who is noble because she goes after power with the intention of using it to improve lives. The latter is a narrative women nearly never get. But Deokman does.
I love how angry the character is allowed to be. It is, essentially, rage that fuels her original decision to make a play for the crown. It's revolutionary fury. And it's enormously powerful for the fact it happens more than twenty episodes in, after we've seen the same incomprehensible things as she has. After we've seen her sharp intellect and indiscriminate curiosity get her into as much trouble as it gets her out of. After we've seen her previously rock solid sense of self and pride and identity swept away to the point she realises that there are situations where everyone around her would benefit from her death more than her life (and she's right is the awful thing of it), and resigned herself to that. After all that, they add one more straw to her backbreaking load, and she just snaps. "I will have the throne," she says. "This nation is absurd," she says, "and I will devour it."
Ladies and gentlemen, our heroine.
The best bit is, she never does give herself over to vengeance. Never, not even when everyone around her is telling her that she is legally and morally justified in doing so. She tears down corrupt institutions and power structures, but never individuals unless she is forced to do so.
She gets challenged on this at one point. The wandering Swordsmaster we have spent half the series waiting to appear, the one we have been cued to expect to herald a major victory for our heroine, the one we think will be on her side, finally shows up and tells her, bluntly, that he does not support her desire to become the monarch because she's a woman and she's too angry. So Deokman thinks about that for a while, then tells him why he's wrong, why being a woman and being angry are perfectly acceptable traits, and then goes ahead without him. She listens to everyone, especially the people she doesn't agree with.
Some of the most interesting parts of her conflict with Mishil revolve around the ideas of individuals vs institutions. It's probably not surprising that the narrative sees Deokman learning political strategy from her rival. I mean, it's great to watch, but it's also unavoidable for this type of story. What I absolutely was not expecting was the way that Mishil would learn from Deokman. And what she learns isn't ~the power of love~ or ~how to be a better person~, it's a shift in perspective. A heartbreaking, empowering, dangerous shift in perspective that causes her to re-evaluate everything in her life.
Mishil is unparalleled when it comes to manipulating the power structures and institutions of her nation. But those self-same structures are the ones that will ultimately never allow her to achieve her goal. Seeing Deokman, whose foreign upbringing and disassociation from the traditional class system, simply attack those structures is horrifying to her, because without them, how would one wield power? Until the day she realises that without them...without them, there's nothing stopping her from doing whatever the fuck she wants either.
In most narratives about a manipulative older woman and her younger rival, youth comes into it. The older woman wants the youth of the younger. So yes, that happens here too. But as to why she's jealous. Oh, god, why. It's because she suddenly realises how much of her life she's spent desperately clawing towards a throne that is already within Deokman's reach. And if she'd been younger, or born into a nobler family, maybe she would have had a chance to work out what she wanted to do next. Maybe she'd have her own grand vision, her own illusive dream for the future of the nation, instead of dragging it down into the mud as she constricts everything in an effort to retain control of the nation in practice even if not in name. She's jealous of Deokman's whole life because it let her see what she never could - the world outside the power systems that left her with such towering resentment and ambition in the first place. And once she realises that, how dangerous she becomes...
The whole thing is just staggeringly, beautifully complicated. There's even more I want to say, but this is long and spoileriffic enough already.
So I'll move on to the other two characters I wanted to talk about: Yushin and Bidam. A simplistic way of explaining them would be to say that they form a good guy/bad boy love triangle around our heroine. You can probably all guess, however, that I think the situation is a good deal more complex than that. For Bidam, certainly, romantic love is an overriding concern, but in the scheme of the show, and even their relationships with each other, perhaps part of the tragedy is that it can never be about only that. It's not even mostly about that, honestly, with the exception of the very end of Bidam's tale.
As you can imagine, I expected to hate Bidam. He was an asshole angsty floppy-haired assassin swordmaster with ~issues~ and ~emotional problems~ who was too ruthless for his own good but violently loyal to the ~right person~. Similarly, while Yushin was kind of a prissy jerk at first, the way he exhaustively and without question stuck by and fought for Deokman when basically everyone in the country was out to kill her - his quiet, determined devotion to her, really won me over.
So, again as you can imagine, I was fairly surprised when about twenty episodes later, I found myself fervently wanting to punch Yushin in the mouth until all his teeth fell out and feeling an overpowering need to hug Bidam.
To permit myself a Star Wars reference for a moment, I'm still not convinced that Anakin Skywalker ever needed to be the kind of character George Lucas clearly intended him to be, but if he had to be, I wish I could travel back in time, kidnap him, and force him to watch Bidam's arc before insisting he rewrite the entire prequel trilogy with that in mind. Bidam is a wounded child, possessed of enormous skill and bravery, fierce, irrational, immoral loyalty, and a violent fear of being discovered to be a monster and abandoned that nothing and no one can assuage. I think it's the honesty of the show I find refreshing. He has wonderful points and awful ones, and ultimately he causes his own downfall, and everyone tells him so. At the end, someone asks Deokman, isn't it better? Knowing he was tricked? That he didn't really mean those awful, hurtful things he said? And she asks why it would be better to know that a lifetime of trust is such a fragile thing, so easily destroyed by one lie that plays to his insecurities, no matter how awful or clever the lie might have been? For Bidam, the question was never, "do I trust her?" but "when will she stop trusting me?" I feel so much more for him, and for the reasons he ended up this way, because I never felt the show demanded it of me. Because I was supposed to hate him at the same time he was supposed to be breaking my damn heart.
On the other hand we have my changing reaction to Yushin. When Deokman was a soldier under his command, or a fugitive, she was the recipient of the immovable, inflexible morality of protecting those for whom he was responsible. He was brave, and sincere and loyal and it made me love him. And once she became his leader, that sincere loyalty never, ever wavered. But their relationship changed irrevocably because now he was responsible to her but not for her, and she became the one who had to deal with his inflexibility and insistence on self-sacrifice.
"If you do this," he tells her, when she tells him that she will claim the throne, "if you do this, I will support you every step of the way, but things will never be the same between us again, because I will have to think of you as my ruler, and you will have to think of me as a pawn." And I scoffed and thought to myself, yes, yes, that old chestnut to rack up the romantic tension. And then the series proceeded to fucking demonstrate to me why that was true. Not with some cheap, "oh no, I must send him into danger and not play favourites!" plotline, but rather with the way he will not ever put himself first. That he won't take the pragmatic choice that won't force Deokman, as a human, to lose Yushin, her friend, because it's more important that Yushin, as a commander, not lose the support of his followers, even when they're being dicks, because if he does, he can't serve Deokman, his Queen, nor can he, in future, protect those who follow him, having set the precedent of giving them up for political expedience.
The worst part is that he's often partially right, but it dumps the problem further up the line, because Deokman, the Queen, can't afford to lose Yushin, the commander, and the support of the political factions who are loyal to him. He has the option to stick by them and stand his ground and say that he is the one who should be held responsible for their conduct - Yushin can define himself against his ruler and align himself with his followers, even if his intent is simply keeping them in line. Deokman can't align herself against anyone internally because they're all her people and that would make her a tyrant. Yushin knows it too. He warns her, before she embarks on her journey, not to be too grateful that he's chosen to support her. He'll always be asking her for impossible favours; he'll never have enough to offer in return. He knows, because she was always doing it to him, never quite understanding the ramifications of her requests.
There's a love triangle going on here, but it's sewn into discussions of honour, power, diplomacy and the impossibility of being both an individual and representative of a wider institution. In the latter chapters of the saga, both Yushin and Bidam contend with political factions who both support them and demand from them things they cannot deliver. Both characters turned out to be much more complicated than I was expecting when I first met them. I feel I can't really ask for more than that.
And I STILL have more, like about Chunchu (and argh, the fact they weren't clear about the passage of time in the middle episodes thus leading to the accidental impression they soap opera aged him is one of the few straight-up criticisms of this show I have), and his developing mentor/student relationship with his aunt that doesn't quite alleviate my (or her) moral concerns about his attitude. Or about the way the final ten episodes left me feeling far more uneasy than I wanted, but the sneaking suspicion I have that the show's meditation on institutional power, and indeed the show's characterisation of Deokman as a leader, wouldn't be nearly as nuanced or complete without them, even if I desperately missed the opportunity to watch Women Do Politics at each other every other scene. And the way they didn't fuck up the Sohwa and Chilsuk story. And the pitch of the final scene, where Deokman contextualises her life and choices, not to her love interest, not even to her rival, but to herself.
"Your life will be difficult," is what she would say to her younger self. "But," she would say. "Endure it."
Not, "I wouldn't change it for the world," not "run far away and never look back," just the words the soldiers say to each other, to inspire them to get up one more time, even when their limbs are bruised and broken, because it's important to keep trying.
Damn, but I loved this show.
Apparently it was a total ratings juggernaut, which is just awesome.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 10:38 pm (UTC)