Kink Bingo fill: Defying Gravity vid for prompt: suspension

[theleaveswant]

Title: Nothing I'd Like Better than to Fall
Music: "Fear" by Sarah McLachlan
Length: 3:54
Video source(s): Defying Gravity
Character(s): Zoe Barnes, Jen Crane, Rollie Crane, Claire Dereux, Maddux Donner, Evram Mintz, Paula Morales, Arnel Poe, Nadia Schilling, Ajay Sharma, Ted Shaw, Steven Wassenfelder, Eve Weller-Shaw (highlights canon 'ships, sexual and non-)
Kink(s): suspension
Summary: Antares crew <3 space
Notes: No standard content notes apply, but vid contains quick motion/cuts and a few shots of blood and burned flesh.

Download: 22MB .avi here, or 45MB .wmv here

morning smiles like the face of a newborn child
innocent, unknowing
winter's end, promises of a long lost friend
speaks to me of comfort

but I fear I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose here in this lonely place
tangled up in our embrace
there's nothing I'd like better than to fall
but I fear I have nothing to give

wind and time, rapes the flower trembling on the vine
nothing leans to shelter
from above they say temptation will destroy our love
the never-ending hunger

but I fear I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose here in this lonely place
tangled up in our embrace
there's nothing I'd like better than to fall
but I fear I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose
I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose
I have nothing to give (etc.)


This was the first vid I ever started. I did the clipping and made a first start at a timeline for last year's Kink Bingo, then picked at it occasionally during last year's amnesty, and finally sat down to pick at it some more finish it this year--basically I have been working on it for far too long and have to stop and just let it go.

Defying Gravity is a bit of an odd duck; a Canadian-American co-production about astronauts set 40-odd years in the future, it tried to capitalize on the success of the revived Battlestar Galactica by presenting a human-drama-heavy space adventure with mysterious scifi elements--which is fine as a premise, but I wish they hadn't tried to explicitly market it as "Grey's Anatomy in space", with rocket ships for teh menz and kissing for teh wimminz (eff that noise! Rocket ships are for everyone and so is kissing, thank you very much).

The 13-episode first-and-only season juxtaposes two timelines, one beginning with the launch of the International Space Organization's spacecraft Antares on a six-year tour of the solar system and leading up to their arrival at the first planet on the itinerary (Venus), while the other shows us the same characters as students ("ascans", astronaut candidates) and teachers five years previous, all vying for a spot on the mission's eight-person flight crew. The eight who first go into orbit are mission commander Rollie Crane and his wife biologist Jen Crane, flight engineer Ajay Sharma, pilot Nadia Schilling, payload specialist and educational TV host Paula Morales, physicist Steve Wassenfelder, doctor and psychiatrist Evram Mintz, and geologist Zoe Barnes; however the discovery of previously undetected heart plaque causes Ajay and Rollie to return to Earth, to be replaced by alternates Maddux Donner and Ted Shaw, who were part of a previous mission to Mars that left two astronauts, one of them Donner's girlfriend, on the surface with no means of survival (the main well of specifically manly manpain). This is spicy gossip time because Ted and Jen were involved before Jen married Rollie and Ted married Eve, who represents a shadowy corporation funding the program, and Jen's best friend Zoe had an abortion rather than leave the ascan program in her first year after a one-night-stand with Donner, who has since been engaged in a long-lasting friends-with-benefits relationship with the sexually assertive Nadia. I've tried to highlight these and other emotional relationships between the characters included in the vid (a couple of fairly major recurring cast members, such as mission control flight director Mike Goss and journalist Trevor Williams, were left out because Too Many Characters).

The non-linear format of the series encourages viewers to wonder at the intervening time, asking what had occurred in the interim to set things up as they were for the launch, and the continuity is fairly well-tracked as characters in the "present", on the ship and on Earth, refer to conversations and other minor incidents in their pasts that the audience has yet to see. In my vid I've mostly segregated the training phase into the first verse, prior to the launch in the first chorus, and the on-ship business into the rest of the video, but on-Earth post-launch clips do sneak into both sections (watch the haircuts). The series also uses a scifi/metaphysical(?) element, which I've mostly kept out of the vid because Too Much Stuff, in the form of the mysterious "objects" which appear to be manipulating the mission by changing the physiology of the astronauts and causing them to hallucinate and relive significant emotional events. Interviews with the series' creator after cancellation outline how the rest of the hoped-for run was supposed to play out (some of those ex-spoilers make me wary, but others, like Nadia transitioning, make me wish the show had continued, in the tentative hope that they could do it without too much fail).