Re: FIC: THHGTS (4/5)

[danspector@xxxxxxxxx]

And the winner in the "That's no Rosetta Stone, that's just a big rock"
category goes to--well, me.

Silent Spirit wrote:

>Who's Oliver Sampson? What's VR5?

Okay, explanations from the guy who really doesn't know, either?

VR5 was a 1995 spring replacement series on Fox about a female hacker
(Sydney Bloom, played by "Footloose" co-star Lori Singer) battling a
conspiracy that involved the use of Virtual Reality (hence the VR in the
title).

Practically everything you need to know about VR5 can be found here:

www.nic.com/~augie/vr5/

(big thanks to Google for leading me to this page)

As Sydney battled her foes with the aid of the mysterious "commitee",
she became involved with her "dashing and dangerous" contact with them,
Oliver Sampson.

Oliver was played by, as you may have guessed, Anthony Stewart Head. So
when Faith isn't sure whether she got the information from Giles or from
"Oliver" in your fic, I thought that was a VR5 shout-out.

Apparently, much of the ASH fandom goes back to Oliver Sampson, but I'm
not a GASPer (I don't even know what the acronym stands for), so I
really couldn't tell you. I just figured this was the equivalent of
having someone call Buffy "Kendall" (SMG's double-Emmy-winning role on
"All My Children").

Dan

now realizing he may have spent a little TOO much time looking for
subtext?

PS--One of VR5's executive producers was Thania St. John, whom BtVS
fans may recognize as being mostly responsible for "Gingerbread".  

The other VR5 exec. was John Sacret Young, formerly half of the team
that made "China Beach". Yep, John Wells went on to make "ER" and John
Sacret Young made VR5. OTOH, Young is the one who married Dana Delany,
so he probably thinks he came out ahead?