Epic Storylines
While thinking of sf/fantasy movies & TV today, it occurred to me that they’re all more ‘fun’ if the fate of humanity hinges on the outcome. That’s hard to do in episodic TV, of course, but Babylon 5 managed it, Deep Space Nine managed it, and Enterprise picked that up by its third season.
It’s in all the fan favorites; The Original Series and The Next Generation didn’t do it often, but when they did (“City On The Edge Of Forever”, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, “Best of Both Worlds’) It was memorable. The best Trek movies did this: Khan had to be prevented from getting the Genesis Device; the Whale Probe had to be silenced; the Borg had to be prevented from disrupting First Contact).
Of course, the original Star Wars trilogy let us know practically from the opening crawl that ‘humanity’ (i.e., the Rebellion and a pair of leftover Jedi) was gambling everything on Anakin’s twins; and in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship knew that if they screwed this up, Middle-Earth was lost. Indeed, in SDF-Macross, the heroes almost blew it, and vast populations of human beings didn’t live to see the end of the series.
This may have been part of the problem with the new Star Wars trilogy, and the first two seasons of Enterprise. There was just no urgency in what the characters did, since we knew, in broad strokes at least, what the eventual outcome was going to be. You can make up for that with compelling character drama, but we didn’t get that either. (I know that Enterprise had a “Temporal Cold War” going on, but it was dull as dirt. We didn’t care until the Xindi zapped Earth.) Voyager eventually became character-driven and somewhat interesting, but might have had far better legs in the beginning if it had tried the Space Battleship Yamato / B5: Crusade formula and had to deal with an urgent need to get home ASAP – whether or not their technology was initially up to it.
Perhaps that’s something the writers of Trek Series 6 should think about. (I don’t doubt there will be a Series 6, next year or 10 years from now.) Make us worried, maybe not from the first episode but before too long. Make us feel like the leads are fighting not just for themselves, but for us or our kids. Give us an investment.
I bet we fans will eat it up.
Space Thoughts
Ahh… a nice road-ragey morning. Rather than rant about it, though, I’m going to let it wash right over me.
After months of procrastination, I have cleaned up my office. There’s a four-foot-square floor-to-ceiling stack of boxed books and models in one corner, but at least I can use the rest of the space now. I look forward to getting a real computer desk to replace the wheeled cart I’m using at the moment.
Jo and her son Danny and I watched “Cosmic Voyage” last night, which was a updated version of the classic “Powers of 10” educational film plus some material on the ongoing history of the universe. It was narrated by Morgan Freeman, so you couldn’t go wrong. We were discussing the ‘life on other planets’ issue – with a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, it would be amazing if the intelligent life thing had only worked out one single time – and I brought up an article of faith on my part: cool science-fiction movies aside, any race which manages to reach the stars will have matured far beyond the desire to invade us, mutilate our cows, make circles in our fields, and probe our lower GI tracts. Jo pointed out quite correctly that we were close to reaching the stars, on a universal timescale, and we hadn’t matured to that level yet; my heartfelt response was that if the human race doesn’t put its house in order really damn soon, travelling to the stars will be quite the moot point.
I really could have sworn I had a lot more to talk about this morning. Maybe it was mostly the road-rage. Oh, well – if anything comes back to me, it’s not like I won’t be in front of a keyboard all day.
Weekend thoughts
Ocean’s Twelve had some really funny parts, but it wasn’t really a good caper movie. It’s so busy being cute and inscrutable that the we give up on the plot too long before the Big Twists are revealed. Still worth a ticket for the good bits, but don’t expect the coolness of the first one.
Continued musings on the plight of the superhero: if you have a Code Against Killing, but the serial-murdering super-villain you’ve just captured laughs at you and tells you he’ll be back on the street killing people in 6 months – and you know he’s right – what do you do? Break your code and make sure the villain can’t hurt anyone else ever? Or follow your code, knowing that the likelihood is that people will die for your choice?
Morning linkage: This is a keen Smithsonian webpage that allows you to sit in the cockpit of several aircraft, from a Spad to a Mercury capsule, using QuickTimeVR.
Saw the last of the Vulcan arc of Enterprise this weekend – it did not disappoint. As usual, a few quibbles – I’d have like to have gotten farther in the head of the main bad guy, and another character did something stupid for an excruciatingly long time before stopping and admitting he should have known better – but plenty of good stuff. Trip is growing up fast, and it’s great to watch; and the sehlat exchange was classic Vulcan dry humor. “You keep a pet – Porthos.” “Porthos doesn’t try to eat me if I’m late with dinner.” “Vulcan children are never late with dinner.” I’m back to being a regular watcher, I think.
I’ve had a cold or a bug or something for days. Sore throat and stomach issues all week, then weakness Friday and Saturday, and Boom! – Sunday was Drainage and Constant Sneezing Day. This morning, it’s nearly all gone away – I am thankful.
Yub Nub!
Y’know, the fan commentary on the release of DVD Star Wars is just further proof to me that I’m abnormal: I have never found the Ewoks annoying. I always thought their victory was a metaphor for the fact that the Empire’s arrogance and brutality were in fact its biggest weakness. Or, in the Princess’ words, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
Jar-Jar, on the other hand, I’ll give you.
“You mean this isn’t real?”
I suppose it’s because I know a little about technology, but I tend to get quickly annoyed by “sucked into the computer / Internet” stories. To start with, there’s no “there” to be sucked into, mainly – it’s all numbers, words, and pictures constantly copied from A to B and back; and there’s no technology on the horizon that can copy & paste your consciousness like an MS Word file. Moving the story ahead several technology levels helps a bit, as does tossing in blatant magic (if a character is sucked into a painting, no author ever tries to convince us that it’s a glitch in the painting). Still, to simulate *everything* about a world, one needs information storage, processing, and display greater than the sum of the information to be simulated. If you plan to build an virtual planet with a convincing ecosystem and 6 billion people, that can be a heck of a challenge.
Ironically, one of the movies that did the best jobs of this was actually Tron. The hero was sucked into the computer by a device specifically designed to suck physical objects into computers – there was no “I put my cell phone on my low-bandwidth acoustic modem and I suddenly ended up here!” crud. And the simulation he arrived in was clearly crude and basic – there was no pretense of complete realism. Maybe the plot and characters didn’t hold up, but at least there was some underlying logic.
On the other hand, a compelling plot and interesting characters can easily make up for technological BS. The world of the Matrix movies is extremely technologically suspect, but at least during the first movie, we didn’t mind. Just be aware that if you have an “in the computer” story you have to tell, make sure something’s distracting us from the technology, please?
Fandom ought to equal tolerance
Even though vt_komainu has already posted a link to this guy’s entry, I want to quote this paragraph from Lay Off the Furries, OK?
“Fursuiters aren’t hurting anyone. […] They’re role playing. I remember when more SF fans did this, and I miss it terribly. You know, maybe the fursuiters wouldn’t be so remarkable if there were more space pirates, jedis, elves, ninjas, wizards, androids, zombies, Vulcans, barbarians, Klingons, starship pilots, and bounty hunters running around, like we used to have in the old days. When I first attended my first science fiction convention over 20 years ago, it was explained to us newcomers that we didn’t have to create a fannish persona to attend. But we did have to do so if we were going to ever be accepted as one of the cool kids. Then fannish persona and consistent hall costuming declined precipitously, and now only the fursuiters and the anime cosplayers still do it. Well you know what? That doesn’t mean that they’re sick and weird. It means that the rest of us suck.”
Hear, hear!
