{originally written 2013 May 23, then banished to the Drafts folder for no good reason when I never got around to finishing it.}
Spoiler-free review: A solid sophomore outing for the NuTrek crew, but it’s no Wrath of Khan. ====== Spoilers follow =========== (more…)
I just finished rewatching Mad Max: Fury Road. I have to say, I can understand why the film earned the online ire of the so-called men’s rights activists (MRAs). It takes all the high-octane testosterone-drenched tropes of the typical action flick, ramps them up to 11 and, in so doing, exposes the madness that lies at the heart of the culture.
amazon’s The Man in the High Castle (2015)
Insta-score: 4 out of 5.
Short form: After a slow start, this builds to an excellent show.
Spoilers below the fold.
I caught up on the end of the season for Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. (Yes, it’s that time of summer when I get to catch up on the shows I missed.) The first season ended with the fallout from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, when the entire Marvel universe was scrambled. Could Season Two match it?
Short answer: Surprisingly, yes. Spoilers ho.
Oh, heaven above, Steve Moffat is just determined that we all love Clara, and he’s going to keep forcing tripe like this on us until we give and accept she’s the bestest, most wonderful Companion ever, isn;’t he?
Spoilers below.
Ugh. This hasn’t been a great season, and this is far from the best.
Let’s begin with the very-overused flash forward. It’s getting kind of old. Used well, it can be very effective. But Doctor Who isn’t using it very well. They’ve used it as a cheap dramatic tool. Actually the episode was full of cheap dramatic tools: The arbitrary countdown timer; the introduction of two characters whose sole purpose — almost literally — was to die to ratchet up the tension.
Perhaps the most telling flaw was the absolutely shameless theft of the idea behind Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun”, namely, that the solar system bodies were really eggs waiting to hatch. That was awkward in the golden age of pulp, and here it’s just recycled pulp — and not even done as well! The biology is ludicrous and the conclusion laughable. And though I know Doctor Who is not hard sci-fi, I nearly choked on the idea that the egg was just gaining mass. First of all, 1.5 billion tons would not be nearly enough to generate Earth-like gravity, much less world-ending tides. Second, of course, an egg starts off with its full mass, which is merely converted by the embryo into, well, more embryo. It doesn’t magically spawn new mass. The not-quite-spiders are just icing on the screwed-up biology cake, of course, and hardly worth mentioning, since their only role was to pose a false threat and kill the hapless Mexican miners and the two men of the expedition.
Clara is faced with a terrible choice and attempts to punt. (Turn off the lights? Really? What about the half of the planet in daylight? Who’s going to turn off the lights — individuals? Electric companies? Governments? How will it be weighted, by population or by lumens? Luckily, of course, every single human on Earth votes to kill the creature, so at least there’s no awkward need for balancing ayes and nays.) She decides to kill it, then decides not to — and is then mad at the Doctor for making her decide.
“It was cheap, it was pathetic ; it was patronising.” Here, at last, I can find something about Clara Oswald with which I agree. Oh, wait, she wasn’t talking about herself. I think her anger is incoherent and forced. I think she sounds like a spoiled child who, as the Doctor says, hasn’t even taken the training wheels off yet. The emotion of her fight doesn’t ring true to me, and I share the Doctor’s befuddlement if only in trying to understand why I should care that she’s upset.
Up until now, Clara has been meh. Now she’s small. The Christmas special really can’t get here soon enough.
I finally got around to watching Season 8 Episode 1 (“Deep Breath”) of the revived Doctor Who. It’s the first one with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. (What do we call him, anyway? Is he the 12th Doctor, even though we know that Matt Smith‘s 11 was really the twelfth?) So it’s probably worth a few words.
Warning: This will be rife with spoilers for which there will be no further apology.
Today (2014 May 23) is the 20th anniversary of the airing of “All Good Things…”, the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It cannot be denied that this series is directly responsible for the resurgence of American sci-fi on television – without the Enterprise-D, there would have been no Babylon 5, no Stargate, no reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Without the evidence that “geek culture” could make real money, there might well have been no Dark Night, no Lord of the Rings (movies), no Game of Thrones (series), no Avengers assembled.
Watching it again, I was surprised how well this episode holds up as a capstone to an amazing series. Sure, there are glitches – the anomaly grows larger in the past, except when it doesn’t, after being created by tachyon pulses emitted by three Enterprises except one of them was the Pasteur. But that’s just nitpicking. The key to Trek has never been the technobabble. It’s been the intricate interplay between sharply-drawn characters who wear their humanity on their sleeve, and the ineffable possibilities of existence itself. And ST:TNG still had that ineluctable optimism that characterized the original. It had hope in the stars and hope in us. As much as I enjoy the grittier fare we generally get these days, I will admit to missing that simple faith in the future.
