Kelly Curtis died recently; she had a respectable acting career, though she was almost certainly best known as “Jamie Lee Curtis’s sister.” (I think she probably at least managed to overcome “Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh’s other daughter.”) She had a modest film and TV career, worked in the stage, made documentaries with her husband. She was a regular cast member, only for a season, on UPN’s short-lived TV show The Sentinel. (Wikipedia tells me there are several films and also TV show episodes with this name, which feels right, honestly.)
Come down a little rabbit hole with me: it’s not too deep, might be fun. The Sentinel realized quite early on that their fandom, such as it was,1 focused mostly on the chemistry between leads Richard Burgi and Garrett Maggart2 and their odd-couple partnership. Burgi played a police officer and military vet who discovered he was a “Sentinel,” a person with preternaturally heightened senses that grad student Maggart insisted appeared in many prehistoric societies.3 Maggart, desperate to finish his graduate thesis and insistent that a Sentinel needed a “guide” to help with overwhelming sensory input, shoves his way into Burgi’s life and eventually his loft apartment. The only other person to know Burgi’s secret was his unit’s captain, played by Bruce A. Young (at the far left in the header image).
It was pretty typical mid-90s action/buddy cop fare, right down to its Vancouver setting (they called it “Cascade, Washington” in the show). But the leads were fun together, and for those ‘no one knows anything’ Hollywood reasons, it gained a large and enthusiastic slash fandom.4 Their passion kept the show limping along for four seasons, the fourth as the result of a classic letter-writing campaign. Unfortunately, their passion for romance between the male leads was also the reason Curtis, who had the misfortune of playing Burgi’s ex-wife Carolyn, only lasted one season. The show would bring in a recurring female character in the last season, who actually assured fans in interviews that her character wouldn’t be dating the leads. The turn of the century was wild times.5
At some point the Sentinel/Guide trope began to take on a life of its own.
At any rate, a lot of the fandom leaned in hard on the Sentinel-and-Guide idea, much more passionately than the show itself did. There were a lot of mystic soul fusions and Burgi’s character being rendered helpless without Maggart’s gentle guidance, and at some point the Sentinel/Guide trope began to take on a life of its own. On the Archive of Our Own (AO3), a multi-fandom archive founded primarily by Western slash fans that now hosts one of the biggest Sentinel fanfiction archives, there are thousands of stories for The Sentinel, but a dig into the tags creators use to categorize their fanworks spread well beyond the show. (AO3 users create their own tags, which are then standardized behind the scenes by volunteers.)
There are straightforward crossover/fusion tags, like “John Watson Is a Guide” and “Sentinel James Bond”, but the one I’d like to call the reader’s attention to is this one:
The Korean Guideverse with the espers and sentinels it doesn’t have it’s own tag
There are also a number of tags in Hangul.
This is the weird and fascinating thing about creative work: you never know where it’s going to go. Supernatural had a wild and rabid fandom of its own that gave birth to the omegaverse, which most readers here might recognize from Lindsay Ellis’s video about the trope (and the subsequent nonsense that followed; I have a Fanfiction Deep State pin still from that debacle).
Omegaverse has grown far beyond Supernatural, including romance novels you can buy right on Amazon, and well beyond Western fandom, with Japanese, Thai and Chinese omegaverse dramas. Yep, there’s an entire Thai live-action series with car racing and omegaverse that was popular enough to spawn6 a sequel series.
“The Korean Guideverse with the espers and sentinels it doesn’t have it’s own tag” took a similar route. It’s possible that the Esper/Guide trope sprung up on the other side of the Pacific all on its own, but it seems most likely that at some point, in some mystic fandom alchemy that I won’t begin to pretend to understand, the concept jumped well out of English-language and Western fandom, gaining the most ground in Korea. The process seems to have developed and well after The Sentinel’s vague, mostly handwaved idea of Sentinel and Guides became something more codified, and long after the show was cancelled.7 “Espers” in Korean webnovels seem to have overlapped a bit with the idea of the omegaverse to create the idea of the “Guideverse,” a slightly different variety of biologically connected pairings. (A kind soul on Reddit did a decent rundown.)
There are tons of little eddies like this in pop culture. Probably the most familiar to us are the great little references to long-dead pop culture tropes in the Looney Tunes shorts, like Senator Claghorn-inspired Foghorn Leghorn and turning “nimrod” into an insult. How many people know the origin of “It was a dark and stormy night”? The ‘red pill’ was already an abstract representation of hormone therapy when it was dropped into The Matrix, and now it gets used by people who loathe the trans women who created the metaphor in the first place. Things change, and twist, and escape out of their creator’s grasp, and one of these days you find yourself checking out the great-grandchild of an idea you’ve half forgotten about. But that’s just the way art goes, I think. It’s always moving.
Fanlore’s article on The Sentinel is an interesting look into the English-language fandom but doesn’t address the issue of Korean esper/guide tropes.8
About the writer
Bridgett Taylor
Bridgett Taylor has a day job, but would rather talk about comic books. She lives in small-town Vermont (she has met Bernie; she has not met Noah Kahan), where she ushers at local theatrical productions and talks too much at Town Meeting.
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In Memoriam
A father, son, and talented performer who will be Giles to a generation.
In Memoriam
A brief career that made a blockbuster impact.
"You're so normal, you're weird."
Year of the Month
Eroticism and suffering entwine in Mishima's second novel.
Intersectional Femivision
What's wrong with looking at something pretty? It depends on who you ask.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Four, Episode Eight, “Dear Mildred”
“As your cousin Natalie once said, and she has been quoted by so many, war is hell.”
“Your hand is filthy.”
“I was leaning against a dusty nurse.”
“Can’t say I care for the coffee here. But if I run out of ink I’m covered. Haha.”
“Know anything about horses?”
“I stepped in some manure once.”
“You’re in charge.”
Absolutely tremendous moment where Margaret speaks in pig-latin to Frank, and you see his lips move as he tries to work out what she said.
“The man’s ex-cavalry – if he sees four flies having a meeting, he knows they’re talking about a horse!”
“That’s disgusting!”
“Son, to me, that’s a tiptoe through the tulips.”
Obviously, this feels like an attempt to really sell us on Colonel Potter – it’s funny to me that having a character write home is a kind of default move for this show, giving us both anecdotes inspiring responses and a personal voice, including to the person they’re writing to. They reckon writing a letter to someone is a deeply therapeutic experience, even or especially if you never send it. Potter in particular is amused by what’s happening around him, but not enough to interfere; having him be brought to tears by the gift of a horse is a perfect note to end on and bring us to sympathy with him. There’s nothing like sincere love to make a character likeable.
Meanwhile, we also get a note about Margaret here; her wanting to give Potter a gift for his anniversary is touching (and a great detail that she essentially dragged Frank along), but her condescendingly ordering it from the local dealer is even better. She’s kind but not the empathetic type.
Re: the letter-writing–I feel like MASH was also very good at understanding that one of the easiest ways to make a character likable is to have them like other characters, so knowing that Potter is sharing his (nuanced) regard for the 4077 with his wife instantly makes him more endearing. (Not that he wasn’t already.) The tarter humor of the gossipy bits about him talking about Margaret and Frank’s affair are different, obviously, but incredibly entertaining, and I love how they lean into his folksy side and show what it’s like when it’s uninhibited by command and military decorum. Back home, Potter would gossip with his neighbors over the fence and have a good time doing it.
Widow’s Bay, S1E9 – Penultimate episode that’s somewhat low-key, with few scares except one genuinely terrifying tornado, and nevertheless hits on the issue of the trolley problem, namely what it says that you’re even considering it. (I have noted privately how fellow Americans who defend the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings always seem ANGRY, like you’ve really touched a nerve.) Dale Dickey should get some kind of Emmy for her big scene here at the projector. I also enjoyed all the weird names and backstories of Warren’s descendants such as one person nicknamed “The Heretic.”
Going to start watching this next week, but I already agree with this–Dale Dickey should get some kind of Emmy–on general principles.
This is true!
Lifeboat – An absolute classic, with stellar effects and a great cast and no small amount of suspense. Maybe a bit pat in the ease with which the romances happen, and how Joe (Canada Lee) is portrayed apparently is only because Lee worked to make sure that there wouldn’t be any servile “yes’m” dialogue. But even taking into account that WWII was still raging and its end was uncertain, even taking into accounts that we’re dealing with Nazis here, the defense of the mob assault on the German captain leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. As much as the movie comes close to questioning our worst behavior, Hitch and company justify dehumanizing the enemy a bit too much. But this is a blemish, not a scar on a great movie.
Elementary, “No Lack of Void” – A pickpocket dies of anthrax he accidentally stole from someone (and swallowed thinking it was a baggie of coke). Soon a desperate hunt for the maker of the toxin begins before things get bad. This one taps very well and only briefly into the panic felt in NYC after the 2001 anthrax attacks, and while we deal with right wing terrorists who want to send toxic letters to Congress, the plot ends up more interesting than that. But the juice here involves the death of an actor friend and mentor to Sherlock. A friend who had been on the wagon for 30 years and apparently happy, but died of an OD. Sherlock dealing with the loss of his friend and the possibility that he too could relapse even a lifetime later throw him for a loop. And have him seeing the ghost of his friend, which is played very well by Roger Rees. (The title is a line from Waiting for Godot, which we are told was the first play Sherlock saw his friend in, and was one of the last plays Rees appeared in.)
Frasier – The very annoying character played by Julia Sweeney returns. I have pretty much nothing to say about that. More important is the final fate of Maris, who while on house arrest gets herself shipped to her family’s private South Seas island instead of facing the law. Some weird stuff along the way to get this moment that almost but doesn’t quite work. I have no idea why we needed to wrap up things with Maris, but as wrap ups for unseen characters go, this wasn’t bad.
My Elementary viewing was a bit scattershot, but I instantly remembered seeing this one when you mentioned Sherlock’s emotional arc in it. Definitely packs a punch.
Lifeboat is on my “watch ASAP” list now that it’s easily available again.
Lifeboat is on Prime now. Just sort of showed up.
Been a minute since I’ve seen Lifeboat but Tallulah Bankhead and how Hitchcock gets so much mileage out of the single location left the biggest impact on me.
Love this. I’ve read no small amount of Sentinel/Guide stories over the years (and unlike many people who can say the same, I did at least see a couple episodes of the original show), and it’s always fun to see people realize that the setup came from somewhere specific–and, these days, incredibly obscure. I love that it spread to Korea and has been embraced by so many people wanting this exact kind of good time.
I think there’s something really exciting about mediocre or even bad art–and obviously mostly forgotten art–having something in it get into the groundwater like this. It’s a legacy, and a reminder that putting art out into the world does change the world, and it doesn’t even take greatness, just connection with other people.
Also, I love how necessarily baroque most thorough hobby write-ups get. A+ footnotes and hyperlinks.
Year of the Month update!
This June, you can write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1958.
Jun. 5th: Gillian Nelson: Paul Bunyan
Jun. 12th: Gillian Nelson: Grand Canyon
Jun. 14th: Tristan Nankervis: Vertigo
Jun. 19th: Gillian Nelson: Elfego Banca
Jun. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Basil of Baker Street
Jun. 25th: John Bruni: Mon Oncle
Jun. 26th: Gillian Nelson: Disneyland Gay Days
Jun. 28th: Tristan Nankervis: Touch of Evil
And in July, we’re opening up submissions for your writing on any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1979.
Jul. 14th: Lauren James: Flowers in the Attic
Jul. 29th: Lauren James: Ghost Story