Blue Collar Kings: How AI could alter the Workforce

With as fitting a post for Labor Day as I could imagine, a few years ago, I wrote a post about automation called, The Shrinking Need for a Workforce, based on what, in 2014, seemed to be the trend in automation; low skilled jobs, with some high skilled jobs, could be at risk, putting millions out of work.  What to do?  Well almost a decade later we can update those predictions a bit and for once, it doesn’t look all bad.

The rise of ChatGPT, seemed to spring out of nowhere, but actually, chat programs on customer service websites have been ubiquitous for years.  Various tech companies have been working on various chatbots, but they’ve had…problems.  Both the Microsoft and Meta versions had to be shut down and terminated after becoming Nazi racists.  Of all the potential risks I saw with AI, becoming a racist Nazi computer program was not on my Skynet Bingo card.

ChatGPT and its siblings are already demonstrating that they can do some pretty amazing things, even in these admittedly early stages.  Remember when journalists used to mock unemployed miners and other working class types whose jobs were being strip-mined overseas to “learn to code?” And remember how someone would get banned if they told unemployed journalists the same? Now, AI can code, better and quicker than humans.  It can write term papers, proposals, news articles, and loads of other, what was formerly considered human only work products.

Nowhere did I see what turned into the biggest surprise (for me anyway); AI’s dalliance into the creative arts. Something that I didn’t even know existed 8 months ago but is now common online are AI art generators.  Just give a text description of what you want to see and voila! There it is!  One of my few memories of a college Art Appreciation class was the definition of art being something man-made.  A painting of a landscape is art, the actual landscape isn’t.  But now what does art mean when it’s created by a non-human intelligence?  Is it still art?

Well, that’s something that others will have to figure out, but surely in any practical sense, it is art.  But that impacts a lot more career fields than automation or macros on an office bound workforce, this effects the very people who always though they would be immune from the advancements of AI; our creative class.  Think how a field like marketing would be affected if the suits could simply tell an AI program what they want to promote their, oh I don’t know, beer, let’s say.  Not only could the AI generate the copy for a commercial, but could (eventually) generate the commercial, with smiling artificial actors all guzzling the AI generated beers.

No humans required.

And as for TV and movie production…imagine someday in the not-so-distant future in which I sit down on the couch after a long day of retirement and tell my TV/Computer, “Mr. Computer, I would like to see a 90-minute movie starting John Wayne as a World War II GI fighting lizard like aliens as these aliens decide to invade the earth on D-Day.”

OK not my best movie pitch but let’s see what the AI comes up with.

As a consumer, this sounds great.  However, if you are in the TV & Movie business…

TV and film writers are fighting to save their jobs from AI. They won’t be the last

By any standard, John August is a successful screenwriter. He’s written such films as “Big Fish,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Go.” But even he is concerned about the impact AI could have on his work.

A powerful new crop of AI tools, trained on vast troves of data online, can now generate essays, song lyrics and other written work in response to user prompts. While there are clearly limits for how well AI tools can produce compelling creative stories, these tools are only getting more advanced, putting writers like August on guard.

“On guard” indeed.

One can easily see why Hollywood actors and writers are worried they could be next up on the “learn to code” chopping block. So, between the creative classes, the professional classes, and the administrative classes all looking at a future shrinking job market, what’s left?

The trades.  In fact, any job that requires both manual labor and problem-solving behavior seems relatively safe for the time being.  That could be a carpenter, plumber, electrician, A/C guy…any of the still skilled and semi-skilled labor jobs that no chat bot, no matter how clever, is going to be able to replace. Our future could very well resemble our past, with the percentage of jobs belonging to working-class, blue-collar type jobs could be similar to what they were a century ago.

How that could alter society as a whole is anyone’s guess, but with a workforce looking more like the turn of the last century, that could have a lot of downstream societal effects.  With a dearth of office type cubical jobs, could women reevaluate career or family conundrum that’s impacted the idea of feminism since the fifties?  It’s one thing to view a future of girl boss singledom when there are plenty of professional and administrative jobs, but it’s quite another when the choices are more practically working on an oil rig or construction.  Although I don’t think the 2040’s will be a copy of the 1940’s, there could be more similarities than to our own age.

Pitch for a new Stargate Show

Amazon’s purchase of MGM kindled interest in a revival of the Stargate franchise, which next to the Trek shows, kept the TV fires burning for televised Science Fiction.  However, per Brad Wright, one of the producers of the last series of Stargate shows, his proposed script treatment, a continuation, rather than a reboot, was shelved.  Amazon-MGM seems like it’s interested in rebooting the show, rather than doing a sequel launched from the multiple Stargate shows.

I get it.  If I were a fancy cigar chomping studio exec, I might prefer that route too.  It’s easier, and provides limitless story opportunities without being hemmed in by several years and hundreds of episodes of canon.  On the other hand, fans like canon, and like that the knowledge accumulated from loyalty to the series actually means something.

However, I think I’ve come up with a compromise show pitch, one that is within canon yet allows a new audience to discover it a bit at a time.

Working Title: Stargate Reborn

Genre:  Military Science Fiction

Hot Take: Stargate: The Next Generation

Cast:  Two main characters who were minor ones in Stargate SG-1, but due to their young ages are in their adult prime for the current iteration of the show (everyone else from the show are either dead or in retirement).

Character One: Young Jack (Jonathan) O’Neill.  This character was seen in the season 7 Episode Fragile Balance.  A renegade Asgard kidnaps O’Neill, creates a teenaged clone with O’Neill’s memories copied into him, and after considerable hijinks the Stargate crew pull off a capture of the renegade Asgard.  That still leaves the problem of an extra Jack O’Neill; a teenaged one at that.  The Air Force basically gives him a new identity, drops him off at High School, and that’s the last we see of him.

Character Two:  Cassandra Fraser.  Cassandra was a pre-teen human, although native to the planet Hanka.  After the G’ould wiped out her planet’s human inhabitants, she was the only survivor and was taken back to Earth and adopted by Doctor Fraser.

So, both of these child characters are knowledgeable of the Stargate program and the wider universe.

Backstory of the show:  Sometime after the end of Stargate SG-1, the nations involved in the Stargate program, afraid of the constant near misses of incurring the wrath of advanced aliens, decide to shut the program down and simply concentrate on developing the vast amount of alien tech acquired.  So, in the present, there is no active Stargate program and only a few intelligence, military, and scientific personnel read in on the program to even know there are aliens.

Premise: Cassandra Frasier, an archeology professor is on a Peruvian dig when her grad students find a cave system with a Stargate, although one that looks different from the typical Ancient type Stargate.  She recognizes it for what it is, warns her students to stay away from it, and calls her old Air Force contacts to let them know what she found.  By the time an Air Force team get there no one is found

The Pentagon looks for someone with tactical knowledge and prior knowledge of the Stargate program, which narrows the search down to one person, Johnathan O’Neill, the clone of Jack O’Neil, former Stargate SG-1 and Homeworld Security commander.  This O’Neill, although initially trying to carve a separate path, eventually winds up in the military, and becomes a Navy Seal.  So he’s the perfect choice to send in while they try to put together a larger support team.

An arriving to the new Stargate, O’Neill quickly discovers it’s activated by the Ancient marker gene, a DNA signature that activates Ancient technology, so O’Neill (who is a carrier) is whisked away to wherever Cassandra and her grad students go.  O’Neill and Fraser are the only ones who know anything so they can provide exposition as they go along to explain to the grad students (and new viewers) what’s going on as they try to figure out a way back to Earth.

Sounds like that’s a pretty good starting point for adventure.

Don’t like this?  How about another canon option 2?

In the current day, the Stargate team comes across a “Quantum Mirror,” and device for traveling to alternate universes.  The Stargate team came across one in season one and General Hammond had it destroyed.  However, with a new one, they make a plan, as a test run, to see if they can use the time traveling puddle jumper to use the Quantum mirror to see if they can alter time in one of the many alternate universes in which the Goa’uld conquered Earth… aww forget it.  As I write this, I can see too much knowledge of canon is required to understand the pilot!

OK just reboot the damn thing.

Still no Aliens, and There Never Will Be

The long awaited government report is finally out there.

Government report can’t explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens

A new intelligence report sent to Congress on Friday concludes that virtually all of the 144 sightings of unidentified flying objects documented by the military since 2004 are of unknown origin, in an extremely rare public accounting of the U.S. government’s data on UFOs that is likely to fuel further speculation about phenomena the intelligence community has long struggled to understand.

The Pentagon, assisted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, found no evidence to indicate that they mark a technological breakthrough by a foreign adversary, or that the objects are of an extraterrestrial origin — though neither explanation has been ruled out in what has been described as a preliminary assessment that lacks sufficient data.

Not exactly a surprise.  Although to true believers this was a crushing disappointment and likely a retreat into conspiracy, that the US government has alien ships, bodies, and so on, hidden away in Area 51 or that warehouse where we keep the Ark of the Covenant.  However if you look, there is plenty of skepticism of even the 144 mystery sightings are really that mysterious.  Scott Adams has done a great, almost off handed debunking of many of the UFO claims, and if you look, you can find other debunking sites and videos.

As a kid, I would have been excited and hopeful that aliens actually existed and were frequent visitors to the coolest planet in the Milky Way: Earth.  However as an adult, I’ve (mostly) put away childish things, and it makes more sense that we’re alone in the cosmos.

But what about the vastness of space?  What about all of those planets?  What about the Drake Equation?  Although a fun way to engage in conversation, the Drake Equation is meaningless when all of the values are unknown.  My skepticism is pretty simple and boils down to this; we’ve advanced pretty far in our understanding of biology; “life” as we know it, but we can’t create it from scratch in the lab. That’s a trick we should have mastered decades ago if it was a simple and inevitable process of natural forces. That suggests that “life” may be a totally off the wall, once in a zillion occurrence. How that would happen I don’t have a clue, but since we can’t replicate it, we can’t estimate the odds of it occurring elsewhere no matter how many planets in the universe are in the Goldilocks zone.

There may come a time that we are able to replicate it experimentally in a way that could occur naturally, and at that point I’ll reconsider my position, but right now, I feel pretty safe in thinking that we’re alone in the universe.

TV Show Pitches: Poul Anderson Edition

In my continuing effort to pitch ideas for TV shows that I would like to watch, allow me to introduce science fiction writer Poul Anderson.  Anderson wrote science fiction from the 1940’s up to his death in 2001 and is considered one of the greats.  He would easily make most of the top ten best twentieth century science fiction writer listicles, and his work is extensive enough that it can supply an entire network or streaming service with shows.  Of course, the problem is that science fiction and other genre shows are expensive because of the effects and sets involved, and have a natural ceiling for an audience unless it’s the rare crossover hit that appeals to people that normally wouldn’t watch science fiction or genre type shows.

So that narrows the list considerably.

So let’s start with a TV show idea based on, as Anderson describes as, “one of the most popular things I’ve ever done,” The High Crusade.

Working Title:  Space Knights!  Knights in Space!  Err…still working on this since the source material is called The High Crusade and crusades are problematic so…

Genre:  Science Fiction, Romance

Hot Take: Game of Thrones vs Aliens

In 1345 an alien ship lands near an English village while doing a scouting mission to colonize the planet.  Completely underestimating the threat of the low technology locals, a local Lord manages to capture the vessel and intends to use it to win the 100 Years war, and then roll back the Saracen gains in the Middle East with a new Crusade using the spaceship.  Ambitious right?  So he loads up the entire village on the ship to assist in the effort, only to be tricked by the sole alien survivor who sets the navigation to take the ship to the nearest alien colony world.

At this point that’s where I’d say the fun begins. Sir Roger, Baron de Tourneville, has to figure out how to take on aliens with advanced technology when they have only the barest idea of how things work, and have to bluff their way in dealing with other potential alien allies. Although it’s been many years since I read the book I remember it as being a lot of fun and this is a good moment for television shows that have characters drinking mead and wearing plated armor.  The story rolls out like an Arthurian legend lite and should have a lot of crossover appeal.

Working Title:  Flandry of Terra

Genre: Science Fiction, Spy Thriller, Space Opera

Hot Take:  James Bond meets Star Trek

In many ways this is a James Bond in space type of show, although the Dominic Flandry character predates Bond.  Flandry, a dashing intelligence agent in a declining 31^st Century Terran Empire, shoots and seduces his way across the galaxy in service to the crown.  Unlike Bond however, Flandry does it with the full knowledge that the empire he serves is doomed, and is on an inevitable path of decline and crash, taking civilization with it.

Outside of the typical science fiction fans, it’s difficult to gauge how much of an audience there is for this type of show.  And it would be expensive.  As a writer, Poul Anderson was probably one of the best world builders in the business, but designing worlds isn’t like going from Hong Kong to Monaco.  It would require the type of money a network or streaming service is unlikely to invest in unless there is the type of angel investor that Jeff Bezos was for The Expanse.  Bezo’s liked the show so when it was cancelled on the Syfy network, he swooped in and bought it for Amazon Prime.  Any chance Bezos is a Flandry fan…?

A Sampling of Light Beers

Light beers are not part of my regular beer diet.  I consider kicking back and having a beer a treat, so I can’t be concerned overly much about how it affects the bottom line of my bathroom scale. Of course, beers are not for every day in my world.  I’m saving that sort of wacky lifestyle for retirement.  But I do come across a light beer now and again and have made a few snap judgments about some of them.

Warning: I must caveat that all light beers taste like water with a little bit of beer mixed in, so take that into consideration when considering the ratings.

 

Bud Light Orange

Carbs: 14.3    Calories: 142

Beers with flavors are somewhat of a crapshoot, and that goes double with light beers.  The Orange “taste” really does seem to imitate an orange artificial taste, if that’s what you are looking for.  It started out OK but by the end of the beer, I was really getting sick of that fake orange.

Rating:  Would not buy again

Yuengling Flight

Carbs: 2.6      Calories: 95

Although this beer shares the light beer problem of being watery, it’s actually not that watery.  In other words, it’s in the upper tier of light beers just on that alone.  However it’s still watery enough that it’s somewhat lacking in flavor. And although I felt the faint hint of an aftertaste, it never quite got there, which, in the light beer arena, is not bad.

Rating:  OK if that’s what is left

IC Light Mango Premium Light Beer

 

Carbs:            5.3      Calories:  126.50   (for a pint)

Small breweries and microbrews don’t usually dip into the Light Beer market since almost always their inspiration is creating flavorful, delicious beers, but Pittsburg Brewing dared dip its toes into it, and came up with a not bad beer. Again, it’s a light beer, but the flavor is there, if of course muted, and diluted.  However on a hot day, this seems like a good choice.

Rating: Pretty good for a Lite

Bud Light Platinum Lager

 

Carbs: 4.4      Calories: 137

This is described as “triple filtered” so that sounds important.  Plus it’s called Platinum, which sounds fancy.  As far as light beers go, I couldn’t find too much to complain about, but it’s another side reminder that no one is searching out light beers for their full, rich taste.

Rating: Could be a great mixer with a real beer.

 

 

 

Blue Moon LightSky Citrus Wheat

 

I could keep going on this light beer list.  There are, after all, plenty of light beers to choose from, but after trying this, I decided to stop. I’ve drank enough light beers to know that the flavor runs from bad to OK.  None of them are great enough to enjoy for flavor on it’s own. But this one seems to hit the top levels of “OK.”  The promise of the name is actually met for this beer.  It has a faint hint of citrus and it’s somewhat wheaty.  Watery?  Sure, but not to the degree that the others are. That’s important.

Rating:  If you are going to get Light Beer, get this one.

This may sound like a very lackluster review of beers, but light beers fill a niche for people who want to continue to drink, but are wary of the sheer number of carbs and calories that go along with it.  If you are throwing a party or get-together, you need to have light beers available to accommodate the people who are on nutrition alert.  Not only that, it’s a good way to cut a beer that you’ve decided you don’t like that much.  It’s a useful household item, and I don’t mind having them around.

Is there a limit to what we must give up?

On the radio last week (or the week before-time moves differently in 2020), I heard a talk show host make the argument that because of racism, white people are just going to have to give up some things.  He was referring specifically to Confederate flags at NASCAR, but it could include the myriad cancelling’s that the Twitter Red Guards have instituted in the past few weeks since George Floyd’s death.  There was some self-canceling as well. Tina Fey, creator of 30 Rock requested that three 30 Rock episodes be removed from streaming because of blackface episodes. The creator of Scrubs also requested that three of their episodes be removed due to blackface episodes.  This of course is as we’ve always suspected; blackface always comes in threes.

These are mini-tragedies since none of these episodes were racist and actually handled the entire blackface issue in show (spoiler-it’s NOT OK!).  But what really got me in the gut was the removal of the “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” episode of Community.

The 21^st Century has not been kind to the venerable television format of the sitcom.  Partially, it’s because the format is just tired.  Since the 1950’s almost every possible permutation has been done; and then done again…and then again, and again, and again.  Also as a general rule, TV writers and creators have not gotten any smarter or more creative. So a show like Community, when it premiered in 2009, was quite a revelation.  Not in ratings of course, but in tight writing, quirky characters, and good laughs.  Think of it, a sitcom that was actually funny.  Believe it or not, that used to actually be a thing.

The actual episode wasn’t of course about race, Advanced Dungeon’s and Dragons, as Wikipedia described the episode, was about…

“The episode is introduced in flashback, narrated by a female narrator who explains the plight of Neil, a student at Greendale who had hoped that the stigma of teasing and name-calling from other schools would not carry over to Greendale. However, he soon became known as “Fat Neil”, causing him to become very depressed. Jeff observed his change and tried to cheer Neil up by feigning interest in Neil’s favorite pastime, Dungeons & Dragons. When Neil gave Jeff all his Dungeons & Dragons books, saying that he didn’t need them any more, Jeff worried that Neil had become suicidal. Jeff worked with the rest of the study group to invite Neil to play a game of Dungeons & Dragons with them to cheer his spirits. The group specifically did not invite “Pierce the Insensitive”, worried that Pierce would tease Neil.”

So it’s an episode about depression, told through the gameplay of Dungeon’s and Dragons, years before shows such as Critical Role began integrating a D & D game into episodic television, and it was done brilliantly, combining both the round-the-table gameplay with the actual story being told through the game.  It was easily in the top 10 Community episodes, and now it’s gone.

But wait you ask, what about the blackface?

Señor Chang (Ken Jeong) shows up dressed as a Drow, or Dark Elf.  Get ready, here it is!

 

So for that, we lose this episode to the memory hole.

So it’s not blackface at all, but a character cosplaying an imaginary species that doesn’t exist. But who has time to figure out what’s offensive and what isn’t?  Ban it all!

Since all of the episode-vanishing, statue vandalizing, history vanquishing, and imaginary noose hysteria has nothing to do racism or solving any racial issue, my prediction is that no racial issue gets solved no matter what you throw off the ship.  Even burning the entire Western canon isn’t going to satisfy a mob, either a real torch bearing one or a twitter one, because a mob can’t be satisfied, they’re a mob.

Batwoman Crashes and Burns

I didn’t know who Ruby Rose was when she was cast as the main lead in Batwoman. She didn’t seem to have the physicality for the role (too thin) and was covered with weird, grotesque tattoos, but I thought, “Eh, I’ve been wrong before in casting choices,” so I was content to see how it played out.

Not that great in my opinion.  I realize official fan reaction was enthusiastic; with “official fan” being defined as the editorial guidance of nerd fan sites.  Greg Berlanti, the father of the CW Arrowverse and gay himself, specifically was looking for an LGBT actress to play the role.  Unfortunately that narrows down the choices available, so I imagine that’s how he ended up with Ruby Rose.

The show itself was so gay that Will & Grace looked straight by comparison.  Almost every subplot was gay related. Kate Kane gets kicked out of military school after being caught in flagrante delicto with her girlfriend, comes back to Gotham years later after training herself up to Bat-standards, runs into her old girlfriend who’s now married to a guy, and proceeds to try to break up her marriage and get her back.  She successfully breaks up her girlfriend’s marriage (but doesn’t get her back), starts a gay bar, romances several other girls, listens to Rachel Maddow… it’s just one rainbow flag after another.

Oh and also fights crime.

Now imagine if there was a show about a Bat crime fighter, only instead of a proud and out lesbian, it’s a straight man (I know, crazy right?  But just pretend for a minute).  This “Bat-Man” tracks down an old flame, tries to break up her marriage, and continually stalks her throughout the season, all the while developing a side business of a hook up bar and listening to Manosphere podcasts.

He would be a Bat-creep right?  But it’s different when she does it…

So with the conclusion of Season 1, Ruby Rose abruptly quits the show for reasons, and Warner Brothers thanks her for service and immediately vow to recast the character:

“…look forward to sharing its new direction, including the casting of a new lead actress and member of the LGBTQ community, in the coming months.”

So they are vowing to repeat their dumb mistake, and limit their choices once again.  Although… I admit I might really look forward to Ellen Degeneres as Batwoman, but it doesn’t seem like the producers would find that as funny as I would.  Hopefully Rue Paul is still in the running…  I don’t think the record on recasting the lead character on television shows is a particularly good one, but this seems to be an ideological imperative.

So I’m very much in the minority on this, but I regard Batwoman Season 1 as a failed experiment.  I wouldn’t recommend recasting your lead and doubling down on the same mistake.  If it were me, I would:

1. Have another character take on the Batwoman mantle.
2. Turn the show into a more ensemble show of a team of many Bat-related characters.

Obviously the producers are not going to do that since it would be an admission that season one was in fact a failed experiment, but in both scenarios, there is a rather large Bat-family of characters to draw on, including one already on the show, Camrus Johnson plays Batwoman’s man Friday Luke Fox, who in the comics becomes Batwing.  Both options allow for a long term “whatever happened to Kate Kane?” storyline.  And of course, the show should keep the villain ‘Alice’, played by Rachel Skarsten.  Skarsten’s performance as the crazed Alice was one of the few highlights of the season.

Whatever they decide, we won’t see the finished product until 2021, so they have plenty of time to tweak the concept (which they won’t).  It seems like a lot of trouble to save a show that last saw over a million viewers during the Crisis crossover. But I suppose sometimes it’s about making a statement, even if the statement is a dumb one.

 

 

Face Mask Madness

My favorite morning show has usually started off the opening of each show with a litany of “so what did you do last night” openers; the type of conversation starter used to kick off large cast morning shows for years.  That usually leads to some story highlighting drinking or some other stupidity to last until for the first commercial break.

But that was in the before times.

Now, the daily opening topic of conversation revolves around “I went to [fill in the blank] last night and so many dum dums were not wearing masks!”  Usually followed by a “hrrmph,” or “my word.”  The Karen’s in the Morning are only a symptom of how quickly the science and social convention have flipped on face masks.

Let’s step back into the wayback machine to that long ago era of less than two months ago.  It seems like a different age, but at that time the Surgeon General, back on March 2^nd said:

“You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider,” Adams said. “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus,” he added.

Adams’ comments Monday reiterate his blaring tweet from the weekend, urging people to “STOP BUYING MASKS.” He said that they were “NOT effective” to the general public and noted that the increased demand in masks puts medical professionals at risk.”

Besides the Surgeon General, the CDC agreed with the boo masks policy.

“The CDC said last month it doesn’t recommend people use face masks, making the announcement on the same day that first case of person-to-person transmission of coronavirus was reported in the U.S.”

So that was the state of SCIENCE (PBUH) just a few weeks ago.  Masks were for dum dums.

But that was then…

Now of course, we live in a different age, in which to mask or not to mask has great social and legal significance. In Philadelphia the cops dragged a man off a bus for not wearing a mask, and there have been several fights over to mask or unmask.  At this stupid point of societal change, the face mask is a social statement.  The good people wear masks, and the ne’er-do-wells have none.

Mask shaming has elevated the nation’s Karen’s, who a mere two months ago were a mocked and derided group, into America’s version of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, seemingly authorized to wave their fingers in the face of any unmasked person and of course, waving the threat to call the manager.

I’d like to say that it takes a nation of Karen’s to keep me down, but in the past week I’ve twice had to go to places that required the mask, and…I wore the mask, fully aware that I was participating in a weird sort of face mask theater, where my wearing the mask was a social marker of approval more than any medical one.  I just find it bizarre how public attitudes can turn on a dime. Who knew it was so easy to manipulate human behavior?

Well they know now.

 

Quick HBO Reviews: Post Game of Thrones Edition

A year ago, watching the season finale of Game of Thrones with my wife, I watched Jon Snow knife his aunt/lover Daenerys, watch as a dragon flew Aunt Dani’s body to who knows where, watch a council of randos decide the future of the 7 (now 6) Kingdoms, and finally, in a case of Law & Order: King’s Landing Unit, see Jon Snow plead down regicide to exile.

Me: “Well that was nice, time to go to bed…”

Wife: “Noooooooooooo!”

Me: “Be sure and cancel HBO in the morning.”

In spite of the betrayal of my wife and millions of others at the hands of the Game of Thrones showrunners (she read the books, poor thing), she did not in fact, cancel HBO, in spite of my monthly requests for her to do so upon receiving the cable bill. So in the year since GoT went off the air, millions of HBO subscribers have wondered, “With Game of Thrones gone is HBO worth it?”  My response to my wife right after GoT wrapped was clear.

So a year later, we still have HBO. I’ve watched a couple of the shows the network has tossed up just to justify the fact that we’re paying for even more TV in an age in which we’re inundated with content from streaming services and already have more to watch than we have actual free time to do the watching.

Years and Years

From the time I saw a trailer for this BBC/HBO limited series, I knew that the only reason this show existed was because of, who else, Trump.

The show tracks a dysfunctional family in the UK over a series of decades in the future; a future created by Trump engaging in a nuclear attack because, of course he would. The show can be summarized as, in the future everyone is gay and refugees are good, with a few Black Mirror-like touches thrown in.

Rating: Garbage Pail

Euphoria

Compared to Euphoria, Years and Years is good, wholesome family fun.  One almost never finds a reason to use the word “degeneracy” in our degenerate times.  When everything’s degenerate, nothing is, but this show, yeah is degenerate. So naturally it’s renewed for season 2. If you’ve always felt that what television lacks are gym scenes with 20 or so wagging penises, this is the show for you.

Rating: Bleech

His Dark Materials

 

This fantasy show is based on series of books by Philip Pullman, which I admit, I don’t get.  I saw the movie, The Golden Compass; found it boring, and watched this TV treatment, and also found it boring. Verdict?  The show is true to the source material.

Rating: Zzzzzzz

 

Avenue 5

This is supposed to be a SF comedy.  Well, I guess technically It’s sort of science fiction, but the comedy is thin, unless you think a crowd of stupid people yelling at each other is funny. The premise is that in the near future, a space cruise ship, through a series of unfortunate events, goes off course and is not able to return to earth for 6 years.  Since the ship is filled with typical cruise ship passengers, every interaction between crew and passenger is both annoying and stupid. They even managed to stretch the Karen meme (I want to see the manager) for the entire season. Great cast, but they are totally wasted in this pay cable Love Boat in space.

Rating: Loud Screeching

Westworld (Season 3)

After the debacle of season 2, I had no intention on wasting any more time with Westworld.  I should have learned my lesson many JJ Abrams shows ago, but then I saw some of the trailers for season 3 and thought to myself, “man that looks pretty good.”

So they sucked me back in.

Well fool me once, shame on you JJ Abrams, but fool me a couple of times…then I have to own this one.  The first few episodes started off promising, as if the show was really going somewhere substantial, but the closer it got to a payoff, the quicker it degenerated into the typical JJ Abrams no-idea-where-this-is-going, so just have some good special effects.  Ultimately, little of this made sense, just like season 2.

Rating: Cruelly Disappointing

 

The Outsider

If there was one saving grace from the past year of HBO shows, it would be The Outsider.  Based on a Stephen King novel, this show starts in a small Georgia town as a local paragon of the community is accused of a brutal child murder only to have contradictory accounts showing he seemed to be in two places at once.  Great story; great cast, and satisfying conclusion.

But still, it doesn’t justify paying for HBO for an entire year.  So if it’s not obvious by now, this entire post is a passive aggressive plea to my wife to save us some money and cancel this darn thing.  You don’t even watch HBO!

Picard Season One Finale: A Bad Copy

A few weeks ago I posted about the Star Trek: Picard series streaming on CBS All Access. I addressed the usual super fan complaints that accompany any new Star Trek venture, “Is this Star Trek?” and of course, “this sucks.”  I concluded that yes indeed, this was a Star Trek show, and a good one.  I was really enjoying it!

I was wrong. I apologize.

For me everything was going great until the two part season finale, Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1 & 2.  So be warned, everything beyond this point is super spoiler territory.

Although I was not on board with every decision along the way to get to the season finale, such as the whitewashing of the murder of Bruce Maddox by Dr Jurati, I assumed that in the finale things would wrap up in a satisfactory way.  Nope.  Instead…

Doctor Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill):  As a cold blooded murderer, I expected either a redemption arc or a justice one.  Instead there was neither.  Jurati killed Maddox, the person that got the crew together to find in the first place, and then after promising to turn herself in, everyone just sort of shrugged and forgot about it.  She goes on to become a full-fledged member of Picard’s Scooby gang with no more mention that she’s a murderer and hey, maybe Maddox, a brilliant scientist, deserved some sort of justice.

Soji (Isa Briones): Soji started out as easily the most sympathetic character, a girl who didn’t understand what was happening to her, and then realizing that all of her memories were false and she wasn’t even human, but a sophisticated android. But then as her memories of her prior robot life return, the Soji that we’ve known through the series became effectively dead.  Soji 2.0 goes from being worried about whether she was human or not, to deciding to initiate galaxy wide Armageddon on biological sentient life by contacting the mysterious synthetic race that wipes out biological species that discriminate against robots.  That was a pretty quick turnaround from, “Am I human?” to “Destroy all humans!” Skynet would be proud.  And now she’s part of Picard’s Scooby gang.  I guess attempted genocide is an easily forgivable crime in the 24^th Century.

The Romulans:  Surprisingly the Romulans, in spite of being Romulans, come out looking pretty good.  Having lost their homeworld in the Supernova, the scary Romulan Star Empire is a shadow of its former self.  The “Romulan Free State” is a much weaker version, not even able to enforce the Neutral Zone any more.  For all intents and purposes, there is no longer a Neutral Zone.  And still, they are trying to save the universe from the utter stupidity of Picard and the Federation.  Their super duper secret police, the Zhat Vash, has known about the advanced genocidal synthetics all along, and have worked to suppress advanced AI and robotics anywhere and everywhere to avoid attracting their attention.  This explains the motivation of the Romulan spies Narek, Narissa, and Commodore Oh.  They want to keep the galaxy safe from a far superior race which has exterminated entire biological races before and apparently seem willing to do it again.

And yet they are the “villains.”

The Star Trek Ending:  I’ve complained before about the complete hand waving that seems to go along with closing out the conflicts of a Star Trek storyline by a Starfleet officer giving an impassioned speech, and suddenly the enemy lays down his arms and turns his swords into plowshares.  The power of a self-righteous Starfleet speech is apparently not to be underestimated, as I noted about the Discovery season one finale in which Burnham gives the Klingon Chancellor one and the Chancellor calls off the attack on Earth, even though at this point the Klingons had all but won the war and their fleet was just outside the solar system, ready for orders.  This highlights one of the major flaws of the Star Trek worldview, it loves diversity, but as I noted about the Discovery finale, ultimately doesn’t believe in it.

“…the solution to the war wasn’t found in delivering a decisive military defeat on the enemy, but by adherence to the Federation’s highest principles, and assuming (always correctly) that everyone else in the universe at some deep down level, shares those same principles.”

So Picard gives an impassioned speech to Soji, and she changes her mind about eliminating every biological species in the galaxy, just like that.

I wonder how that would have played out throughout history…

Starfleet vs The American Revolution

Picard:  As an opponent of Brexit, I implore you to lay down your arms and end this senseless conflict.  Think about the lives lost…the waste.

General Washington:  Your words have moved me Admiral.  We started this struggle because we were moved by the writings of enlightenment thinkers, and the very real threat to our right to have representation, but eh, whatever, God Save the King!

Picard:  Actually we’re replacing the monarchy with a Federation Council.

Starfleet vs Hitler

Picard: …and that is why, Herr Hitler, you must lay down your arms, cease this pointless conflict to conquer Europe, and stop killing people based on religion and ethnicity.

Hitler:  You have enlightened me Admiral.  I never realized that Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies shared the same hopes and dreams as Aryans.  I could have saved so many bullets if I had known that!  And yes, my dream of establishing a united Europe, a common market united under a single currency with open borders was a foolish hope.

Picard: Wait, what?  Hold up a second…

Starfleet vs Osama bin Ladin

Picard: …and that’s why, in spite of 9/11, you’ll find that people are pretty forgiving if you pen a sincere apology for your actions and resolve to do better.

Bin Ladin: Admiral you truly bring wisdom surpassing all of our Mullahs.  In fact, you’ve convinced me that not only are you wiser than our best religious thinkers, but that all religion is but primitive superstition and that mankind is ready to evolve into a more enlightened species, ready to achieve utopia on Earth via the mechanisms of advanced AI, automation, and universal basic income.

Picard: #Yanggang2020.

Data (Brent Spiner):  Although the character has been dead since the end of the movie Star Trek: Nemesis, his presence has loomed large on the show as Picard, even years later, still struggled dealing with the grief and guilt of Data sacrificing his “life” to save Picard’s.  So in the finale, Picard meets Data again, or at least a copy of his memories, in a computer simulation.  As a final chat, it’s rather touching, as Data requests that when Picard gets out of the simulation, he deletes the Data memory copy.  As a character who struggled with being human, he wants an ending to his story; “a butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all.”  It’s a nice speech in which Data makes a point that everything about life has value because it’s temporary, and it really seemed in tune with the entirety of the season, in which Picard is dealing with his own mortality.

Picard (Patrick Stewart):  Getting back to Picard’s impassioned speechmaking, after making his final one to Soji, he collapses and dies, finally succumbing under the stress to his long battle with Irumodic Syndrome.  His companions mourn him, and if the show had just ended there, all the other flaws could have been easily forgiven.  Instead, they copy Picard’s mind, spin it up in a new robot body, and robot Picard lives.  They even made one that looks like an 93 year old man that’s weak and will break down after a decade or two.  How thoughtful.

Not being a series finale like the Lost ending, it’s probably not fair to compare the two. Also the ending of Lost was simply a result of the writers not being half as clever as they thought they were and they simply wrote themselves into a corner.  With Picard, bringing him back to “life” as an android was a deliberate choice, a choice that made Picard’s character arc, as a man coming to terms with his mortality, and Data’s character arc, as a being who wanted to be human so much he was willing to die like one, essentially pointless.  And pointless as it was, Robot Picard had no trouble deleting Data.  Apparently the writers and showrunners saw not a bit of irony in that.

So the show ends with everyone on the bridge of the ship, Soji, the near genocidal monster, Doctor Jurati, a brutal murderer, and robot Picard, all ready to zoom off into the galaxy for more adventures. For a show and season that I had otherwise enjoyed, that was one of the most stunningly bad season finale’s I’d ever seen.  It’s hard to fathom the deliberate choice of making a mockery of Data’s death (or murder at the hands of robot Picard) and the entire premise of the show by having robot Picard plead for more years of existence to his makers.

I wonder if actual human Picard got a funeral, or did they just dump his carcass in the landfill?  With Picard dead, who gets his Chateau?  It’s a cinch that his Romulan housekeepers, Laris and Zhaban, are not going to consider robot Picard as anything but an abomination, a hideous copy of their dear friend. There is no crying in Star Trek but I do have to mourn what started out as great show and turned into merely a synthetic copy of one.