About this time last year, my husband and I had the opportunity to take a Signum SPACE course about Babylon 5, a series both of us had missed during its initial run. The course, which focused on characterization and motivation, required us to view a selection of episodes; thanks to Babylon 5’s serialized nature it also included a fair bit of discussion about the rest of the series, as well. By the time we were a couple of classes into the course, Will and I had realized we were going to have to go back and watch the entire series.
Spoiler: this isn’t a post about Babylon 5. I may do one of those another time, but this post is a story that begins with watching Babylon 5.
One of the episodes we watched during the course was Season 2’s “Points of Departure,” which introduces actor Bruce Boxleitner as Captain John Sheridan. When we watched, I noticed that Captain Sheridan is left-handed. That made me wonder whether Mr. Boxleitner is as well. In order to find out, I decided to root around on the Internet to see if I could find some of his other performances, and that was when I stumbled into the television series that has been sparking my imagination since last September.
Or, more properly, I stumbled back into Scarecrow and Mrs. King, which was filmed about a decade before Babylon 5.
What I hadn’t counted on was just how many memories would come back from watching the first two episodes I downloaded, nor just how much I would enjoy watching them through the eyes of middle age, as opposed to those of someone who hadn’t quite reached her teens yet. It happened on vastly different levels, but I enjoyed them both times. I ended up downloading the entire series.
During the show’s run, my father actually was a Federal government employee involved in security-cleared work, and my mother was a stay-at-home parent of two kids aged about two years apart. They’d apparently realized that they both liked Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and that watching it was something they could do together, because my family gathered just about every week to do it.
I don’t remember all of those gatherings. But I got déjà vu over and over again during last year’s rewatch, and I was able to “predict” the ending of an episode with much more accuracy than I usually can for television shows. It happened too many times for me to believe they were actually predictions. Rather, they were memories that had faded out of my conscious recall. The majority of those memories have not come back, but more than a few have, and to my considerable surprise, they have all been good memories.
My childhood was, to put it mildly, not very good; but Scarecrow and Mrs. King takes me back to a time before the worst of it happened. I was old enough to understand that what I saw on television wasn’t real, and to understand, at least on a narrative level, what was going on with the two lead characters. While I wasn’t in the show’s primary audience, it was not inappropriate viewing for my age group. When my family watched the show, it gave us something we could relax and enjoy doing together.
I was able to relax and enjoy it again as an adult, as well. As it happened, the latter part of last year and the first part of this year were also trying times in my life. I needed the distraction that a lighter show like Scarecrow and Mrs. King offered, and I frequently needed it more often than Will and I were able to watch Babylon 5 together. (We finished the series earlier this year.)
My father introduced me to Star Trek the summer before Scarecrow and Mrs. King premiered, and I’ve been involved in media fandom ever since. It’s one of the things that keeps me sane. This meant, of course, that I checked to see if there was any such thing as a Scarecrow and Mrs. King fandom, or at least, whether there had been one at any point.
There was. And there is. While it’s a small fandom, it’s an active one. I came into the fold a little too late to be able to make it to last year’s 40th Anniversary Celebration — although I enjoyed it vicariously — but I am going to SMucK-a-Palooza at the end of September and I’m debating attending another event next June. I’ve also read the majority of fan fiction that can still be found online, and last October, I also started writing it.
But perhaps the best part is the fact that, like with other fandoms I’ve been in, I’ve found potential friends — people who are like me, and who like me, and with whom I can discuss something other than work and daily life.
That’s all in addition to the nostalgia and good memories that the show itself brings back, which, if it’s not already obvious, are unusually precious to me. And that is in addition to the fact that it has aged surprisingly well, and is still worth watching. I’m so glad I re-discovered it, which means I’m glad to have done the research needed to learn that Bruce Boxleitner is, indeed, left-handed.
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