the comforts and strengths of "Dead Issue"

[brightknightie]

Please don't misinterpret this post as inviting contemporary politics to my fannish blog. This post is about FK.

That said, I've been wanting to share with you that FK's difficult episode "Dead Issue" had been a comfort to me in the misogynist ick circa the latter two US presidential debates. Maybe it can offer something similar to you, if you need it?

Few women don't have something buried raised by that indefensible stupidity and its defense. I found that certain swells of anxiety and sadness subsided when I remembered "Dead Issue," and thought on what Nick knows, and learns, and remembers. It's just a story, of course, but such reach and resonance in contextualizing and positioning reality is part of why and how we love stories, and why and how we love FK.

"Dead Issue" and its difficulties are one of the happy reasons that I've never been remotely able to reconcile to the fourth of Ophelia5's "Flowers" stories (the series that starts with "Physical Therapy," probably FKdom's most famous NC-17 story). Ophelia5 was such an outstanding writer that she could make feel natural and compelling many things from which I'd otherwise recoil, but that? No. Not. That.

Just remember "Dead Issue." In the flashbacks, Nick is but an observer of Ilsa's predicament. By the present, he is metaphorically Lynn, or she him; he's been there, too.

Comments

[batdina]

first season, Nick's past with an artist? am I remembering that correctly? Ends with a department picnic?

it has been, as you know, a very long time since I've watched much FK. But I'm oddly interested again after at least a decade or more of "not this lifetime." Will let you know if I do anything about this. no promises, but if I am remembering, the picnic scene at the end was my version of comfort food during first season when it originally aired.

[greerwatson]

Yes, that's the one. There's a plot summary in the FK Wiki article; or, if you want more detail, you can look at Judith Freudenthal's Episode Guide, which has "Dead Issue" scene by scene.

[brightknightie]

Any time you'd like to play FK, let me know how you'd like to play just then, light or heavy or whatever. I'll do my best to match. ♥

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Yep, just so. I think that the essence of the picnic interlude at the end of "Dead Issue" is where many of us imaginatively breathe in FK. Those of us who choose to nest in first season or the hiatus, anyway.

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I wrote a "Dead Issue" poem, once. The episode is difficult and nobody loves it (outside the picnic scene), but... I find it powerful in its difficulty?

And, yes, indeed, "Dead Issue" is that one with the flashbacks that include a painter whose canvases are those of the historical Hieronymus Bosch ... even more highly fictionalized than usual for FK's historical figures, as the real historical figure has almost no surviving mentions, just a very few contracts and the paintings, to the despair of scrupulous biographers. (I looked it up in library books, pre-Google, pre-Wikipedia.)

The flashbacks vary noteworthily across versions of the episode. There's a whole scene that's cut from most North American airings... properly so, imo, as Nick wasn't there and so couldn't have witnessed it to remember it.

But it's the present-day that matters most. The flashbacks just make the story bigger on the inside.

Dead Issue

[(Anonymous)]

Another positive about the episode is that John Kapelos's brother, George (?), is in a scene near the beginning.

WaltD