Tuesday Tunes: Remains
Sometimes the power in music is in the associations it makes with what else is going on when you hear it. This week’s tune, “Remains” by Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon, is a great track by itself, but I enjoy it more for how I came across it.
Whedon’s brother Joss is the man behind some of the most interesting genre TV of the last decade or so: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Firefly and the current Dollhouse. The fraught first season of Dollhouse ended with an unexpected and initially unaired future-set episode called “Epitaph One”, in which the writers were pretty cruel to their characters in order to lay out some of the darker ideas the show plays with. Revolving around a couple of powerful scenes, “Epitaph One” is very good TV (much better than unfortunately large chunks of Dollhouse’s first season).
The sadness and hope of the final scene of the episode can be heard in the song.
There seems to have been a glut of good, smart TV over the last number of years. I hear The West Wing and Battlestar Galactica talked about a lot, although I haven’t seen any of either of them. (I’ll hear about that, I know.) As in books and in film, I find some really high quality hidden away in genres where the mainstream might never find it. That’s a shame, I think.