Woke of the Rings?

(Some spoilers for episodes 1 & 2)

My opinion, when I first heard that Amazon was going to create a Tolkien based Lord of the Rings sequel was very similar to that of Jeff Bezo’s son, who was reported to have told his dad, to not “eff up” this show.  After watching the first two episodes of the show, I think it’s too soon to tell if it’s going to be effed up, but I can already tell this is not going to be your father’s JRR Tolkien.

Amazon Prime isn’t adapting some other Tolkien book, they are literally making up their own story within the notes and histories of The Silmarillion. However, they are making up a story as 21^st century Hollywood TV and Movie producers, not as a 20^th Century English professor haunted by World War I.  So, it’s inevitable that there are going to be wildly different takes on Middle Earth. Taking place thousands of years earlier than the time of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the only real character connective tissue are the two elves, Elrond and Galadriel. 

At least so far Galadriel is a far more prominent character than Elrond.  But Galadriel’s portrayal is in stark contrast to her Lord of the Rings ethereal Elven Princess, this Galadriel is a hard charging girl boss, on a military mission of vengeance.  Her brother, killed by the dark lord Morgoth, puts Galadriel on her path.  Frankly I was a bit surprised they didn’t go in for the crane shot over her brother’s body and her holding a sword up vowing her revenge.  The scene was more NCIS than Schwarzenegger, but this leads Galadriel on a centuries long military mission to hunt down the forces of evil with zero success. 

It’s quite a contrast between the steely eyed Galadriel and her mewing male elf soldiers, always complaining about how cold it was or the mission is worthless.  If she had called them a bunch of girls it wouldn’t look out of place.  When they finally run into a “snow troll” in an abandoned fortress, the male soldiers get wacked by the troll, while Galadriel does a couple of acrobatic “Bring it On” moves including facing away from the creature while dispatching it with a sword. 

Girl Power.

Of course, Galadriel gets promoted upwards to get rid of her, so the King sends her to the West, which is sort of elven heaven.  While sailing out to sea with other chosen elves, she has a change of heart and instead of getting taken up by the white light, she jumps over board, in the middle of the ocean, and decided to swim back to Middle Earth.  It’s hard to describe how ridiculous this scene seemed to me.  I realize this is a fantasy and there is magic in this world, but even elves can’t swim across the ocean.

There are other subplots of course, such as the multi-racial tribe of Harfoots (pre-Hobbits) discovering a man who fell to earth and a Puerto Rican Black Elf having some sort of will-they-or-won’t-they relationship with a human single mom (Hey Elf, she’s a single mom, run away).  This of course brings us to the issue that sent deep Tolkien fans on high alert when some of the early images of the show came out

Hmm that’s not how Tolkien described dwarves, particularly female ones (where’s the beard?).

Hmm and that’s not how Tolkien described Elves!  What’s going on?

What’s going on of course, is the 21^st Century.  The Vanity Fair look at the show back in February made clear what the goal was:

 “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”

Of course, this is about reflecting what the world of today is like!  Why didn’t that occur to me?

Naturally this sent Tolkien fans on high alert.  To be clear, that doesn’t describe me.  I enjoyed reading The Hobbit and the Lord of The Rings books when younger, and enjoyed the Peter Jackson movies, but I’m not deeply invested in this world in the way that some fans are.  I’ve never read, or had the inclination to read, The Silmarillion, which is the world building volume that the scenario of The Rings of Power is taken. So how was I supposed to know that Tolkien described his elves as “fair?”  I mean it makes sense.  Tolkien was writing a mythos based on Britain and Northern Europe, not describing a Tuesday shopping crowd at the Mall of America.

But in the current year, did the TV producers have much choice?

Answer:  They did not.

Amazon Studios has an inclusion policy unlike any I’ve heard of.  I imagine some variation of this will become standard across all studios because…diversity, which of course is any studio’s strength.  Let’s take a look:

Point 2 almost seems like a get out of jail free card until you realize what they mean.  They want a gay actor to play a gay character, no straights allowed.  An Indian character needs to be played by an Indian (sorry Ben Kingsley!) and so on.  John Leguizamo would be favored to play Fidel Castro over James Franco, even though Franco actually looks like Castro and Leguizamo isn’t even close. So, I’m curious who is going to turn out to be the LGBTQIA+ character in this series, but it’s sure to have one.

We might never really know how good this series is because there won’t be any honest reviews of the show (except by nobodies like me).  Amazon has suspended reviews on this show because, in a bit of irony, they are worried about trolls.

Sometimes the comedy just writes itself.

Will Amazon’s “inclusion” policy be enough to wreck the show?  Again, I can’t speak for the hardcore Tolkien fans, although a trans hobbit might be too much for me to take, but the real danger is from the TV producers and showrunners themselves.  Game of Thrones is instructive.  The show was phenomenal while it was still running on GRR Martin fumes, but when the show ran out of material for the last two seasons and the TV people steered the ship; the differences were stark (no pun intended).  With Rings of Power, it’s all TV people all the way through.  They’re not adapting anything; they are doing their own thing.  So, if you liked the last two seasons of Game of Thrones, this show should be just fine.  However, if you are a die-hard Tolkien fan, be warned, this show is not for you.

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…?

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Star Trek Picard: Is it Real Trek?

I’ve really enjoyed the Star Trek Picard show since it dropped on CBS All Access and in the world of Star Trek television (which is surprisingly a going concern) it’s one of the best going; better than Star Trek Discovery.  But some fans are really annoyed, dismissing the show as “not Star Trek” like these two hate watchers.

But what is and isn’t Star Trek goes back to the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation, back in 1987.  No Kirk? No Star Trek the thinking went.  And that sort of thinking has accompanied every new Star Trek show.  There was at least a good reason to think that when Star Trek Deep Space 9 came out.  That was a show totally different from the previous two shows, featuring a stationary space station on the edges of the Federation where the Federation and Starfleet only had a toe hold, and aliens set the agenda.  But…as the show grew it produced some of the best Star Trek episodes ever.  However that only happened because Gene Roddenberry died in 1991 before Deep Space Nine premiered in 1993, allowing the show to evolve without Roddenberry’s rigid guidance.

A case was also made that Star Trek: Discovery also, wasn’t Star Trek.  Set 10 years before the original series, it looked and acted nothing like the original series and just didn’t even look as if it was set in the same universe.  The “Klingons” were remade to look like…some other kind of alien.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had progressively gone more nutso commie from the time his Original Series came out as a space western until The Next Generation came out, where the Federation was presented as some sort of utopian commie empire in which society, and the people in them, had reached perfection. This cut into a lot of drama since Roddenberry’s script guidance in TNG was that there could be no interpersonal conflict among crew members because hey, in the future, we all get along. That ridiculous script guidance started to fade before TNG ended its run and wasn’t a factor in subsequent Star Trek outings.  That wasn’t the worst of Roddenberry’s delusion.  As I noted while reviewing Star Trek Beyond:

“Roddenberry’s “vision” was of a communist utopia that even in the realm of science fiction, made no sense.  It was easier to make up the technobabble of transporters, holodecks, and faster than light travel then explain why they don’t need money and no one is drawing a paycheck, but still showing up for work every day.”

One day, I may take up the challenge of designing a Federation economy, and see if I can squeeze Roddenberry’s dumb view of economics into some sort of technobabble shape, but not today.

So Star Trek: Picard takes place in a far less utopian time in Federation history.  Set approximately 20 years after the events of the last TNG movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, the universe, in Picard’s view, has gone to hell in a handbasket.  Fourteen years earlier, the supernova of the Romulan homeworld’s sun (which kicked off the events that lead to the “Kelvin timeline;” the three JJ Abrams Star Trek movies) had the Federation engaged in a massive refugee relief effort to evacuate Romulans from their doomed system.  The effort was aborted by an android terrorist attack on the shipyards of Mars, killing 92,000 people.  The androids, called “synths” were based off Commander Data’s basic design, and were quickly banned throughout the Federation and the refugee evacuation was halted.

Naturally Picard throws a fit and thinking he could pull opinion at Starfleet (“do you know who I am?”) throws his position on the line, and Starfleet, to Picard’s surprise, takes it, effectively forcing him into retirement.  This is the scenario that actor Patrick Stewart likened to our current age:

“[The show] was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump and feeling, ‘Why hasn’t the Federation changed? Why hasn’t Starfleet changed?’ Maybe they’re not as reliable and trustworthy as we all thought.”

This is, of course ridiculous.  Both Patrick Stewart and his avatar, Jean-Luc Picard are wrong on this.  This isn’t about Brexit or Trump, it’s more about 9/11, and how you respond to a massive terrorist attack when you don’t know the real cause.  Did the Synths just get together and decide to go full Skynet?  Was it some sort of major malfunction?  Did some other nefarious group reprogram the Synths as an attack on the Federation?   Immediately after the attack, nobody would know, so the prudent thing would be to do exactly what the Federation did, ban Synths and halt the Refugee program.  With the Utopia Planitia Shipyards destroyed, you can’t tie up all of your remaining ships on some do-gooder adventure when you have no idea if or when the next attack is coming.

Why the Romulans couldn’t evacuate their own people is never explained.  They ruled a massive star empire covering many worlds.  It would seem they would have plenty of resources to throw at the problem much closer to home.

But to the question, is Star Trek: Picard “Star Trek,” my answer is unequivocally yes.  In fact, I would argue that it is the most “Star Trek” show since Next Generation.  Picard is a nice coda to TNG.  It’s a “where are they now” view of what happened to the Next Generation crew as well as Star Trek: Voyager and answers the question what happened to the galaxy and the universe of Star Trek since those shows ended. Unlike a show that has Easter eggs, the entire show is one big Easter egg. That’s not an answer that will please some Star Trek fans that have never been able to move on from the original series, but almost never does a successful TV show like TNG gets a series that functions as an aftermath.  Fans should enjoy this.

TV Show Pitches: Black History Month Edition

A few years ago, I wrote about a science fictionTV show pitch about Space Pirates, and sure enough, I actually got a show very similar to my description in The Expanse.  Since then, I’ve had several show idea’s that have bubbled around the old noggin.  I’ve not yet started to write them down (until now), but I’ve pitched them to various friends and acquaintances with; shall we say; mixed results.  I don’t care though.  I did get The Expanse on the air.

And also, it is Black History Month, and I’ve been meaning to jot something down about that ever since the last Black History Month. However the idea I’ve been mulling over is real history, so I don’t want to go with that until I’ve double checked my real history.  In the meantime, here’s something that is both Black related and History related, although maybe more history adjacent than actual history.  So here are two TV show pitches that should appeal to The Woke (which seems to be a requirement these days to get on the air):

 

Working Title:  Blacklander (this title needs work)

Genre:  Fantasy, Romance

Hot Take:  Outlander meets Roots

Premise:  I wrote a review for the show Outlander a few years ago.  The premise of that show is that a World War II nurse ends up going back to the 16^th century via magical Druid stones.  She meets a dashing Scottish rogue, falls in love, yada yada yada.  My idea is for 21^st century Medical resident at a Virginia hospital, while leaving work after a late shift has her car hit by magical lightening (there is a lack of magical Druid stones in Virginia), goes off a bridge into a river, and when she swims to the surface finds herself in pre-Civil war Virginia, where she is promptly arrested by a slave patrol hunting a female runaway slave.

The medical resident, we’ll call her “Claire” for now, is taken back to the plantation that the runaway slave was from.  The overseer recognizes that this isn’t the same person who ran away, but pretends that she is, otherwise the slave patrol will just sell her and the plantation will be out a slave.

Crying hysterical Claire, who thinks she’s going crazy, turns out to be worse than useless at actual slave work, but when one of the slave kids drown at the river, she uses CPR to resuscitate him.  This divides the slaves.  Half think she’s a witch, and half thinks she’s a great healer.  This firestorm winds up at the Master’s house, where the master is angry at the overseer’s deception, and intrigued by the medical possibilities.  The mistress of the plantation is ill with an undiagnosed disease which Claire easily diagnoses putting her at odds with her real doctor.  They argue over medical matters during which the doctor, although disagreeing with her diagnosis, is astonished by her apparent medical knowledge.  He offers the Master of the plantation a deal to take her on as assistant (these kind of transactions with skilled slaves were common at the time), ostensibly to train her to provide medical treatment to the slaves, but really to pick her brain about her medical knowledge.

So an unlikely friendship is formed.

Naturally a proper romance requires multiple suitors for the lady fair.  Chicks dig options.  So we have:

The doctor, with the dead wife.

The noble slave who’s back is scarred by multiple whippings (just like in Outlander).

The landowner’s son, who is the wily evil option.

Set in the 1850’s just before John Brown’s raid and the Civil War, Claire has the foreknowledge to change history.  In Outlander, that Claire found a deterministic universe, in which nothing she did made a difference.  In Blacklander, our Claire will find out she can change things.

Twist:  The runaway slave that the slave patrol was hunting winds up in the 21^st Century

Twist:  By the end of season one, Claire’s car is found in the river, confusing the locals.

 

And now for some lighter fare…

Working Title:  Toby’s Heroes

Genre:  Comedy, Steampunk?  Whatever Wild, Wild West was?

Hot Take:  Hogan’s Heroes meet…also Roots

Premise:  A few years ago I wrote about TV producer Kenya Barris (the creator of Black-ish) pitching a new diverse woke version of Bewitched. Although that show is still in development hell the idea of rubbishing through sitcom history and redoing the shows with a mostly black cast seems scrapping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to originality, but with enough diversity, you don’t need originality or creativity, diversity is our one and only value.

So if it’s that easy then let me pull Hogan’s Heroes out from sitcom history, set it during the Civil War, and have the “prisoners” actually be slaves on a plantation who are secretly helping the Union Army during the war, either by running sabotage missions, or helping run freed slaves and Northern spies and sympathizers through their underground railroad.  And why shouldn’t they have an underground tunnel system under the plantation?  Let’s see, a bumbling, vainglorious plantation owner, his wife, who is secretly having an affair with “Toby,” an overseer who “see’s nothing,” and occasional visiting Confederate troops, all seem to add up to woke hilarity.  Yes I know those two don’t usually go together, but that’s’ why I’m suggesting Hogan’s Heroes as the template rather than some of the more bland family sitcoms.

OK there are two good TV show pitches.  As usual, I only very humbly ask for producer credits and a percentage of the gross.  Let the racial healing begin!

 

My Netflix Reviews: Time Travel Edition

As a long time science fiction fan, I can tell you that traditionally, much of what passes for science fiction in movies and TV is crap.  Some of it campy crap, which can still be fun (like Sharknado) but most of it is just crap-crap; earnest low budget attempts that are just not well thought out and terrible.  However I’ve has a bit of good luck recently on Netflix with a couple of recent time travel related movies.  These are two I would actually recommend without embarrassment.

First up, In the Shadow of the Moon, begins in 1988 when a young Philadelphia cop, Thomas Lockhart, with a pregnant wife is on the trail of a seeming female serial killer who he corners in a subway station where she begins mentioning detailed information about his life, before being hit by a train and killed.  The police close the case and that’s that until 9 years later when the exact same type of murders occur, with an identical suspect.  Since I’ve already said this was a time travel movie, you can put two and two together and guess there is a connection.  However how the connection reveals itself gives us a moody drama as Lockhart’s life implodes as he becomes more and more obsessed with tracking down the serial killer and discovering the why of these victims.

There are plenty of SJW points to be accumulated here as a white supremacy group plays a role.  This is the Trump era after all! However, the clever conclusion of the film more than makes up for whatever social justice points the writers are trying to score.  It’s still a well done story.

Time Trap was originally a video-on-demand film before Netflix obtained it.  An archeology professor who has spent years trying to find his hippie parents who vanished in the 1970’s discovers their old van, apparently untouched after all these years, outside a hidden cave system.  He goes into the cave exploring and…

…some of his students, trying to locate the missing professor, organize a little search party, find the van, the professor’s car and a cave system, go exploring and…

…and it’s a trap.  It’s no spoiler to say that time moves differently inside these caves.  That’s actually part of the movie description, but how that affects the characters, and how long it takes them to figure out what’s going on, is part of the fun.  They have either all the time in the world, or almost no time at all, to figure out the mystery.  That’s a matter of perspective.

Anyway both of these movies were surprisingly thought provoking and I give them two thumbs up.

 

Return to Krypton

So popular are super hero properties these days that they are actually making TV shows that don’t include any actual superheroes.  The long running Gotham concluded its series run this spring by finally showing Batman in its series finale, after 5 seasons.  Under development on the DC Universe streaming platform is Metropolis, a TV show set in Superman’s city without Superman.  And getting ready for its second season premiere, once again without any Superman, is Krypton.

But even among a group of odd takes on super hero locales sans actual super heroes, Krypton is different.  Taking place 200 years before the planet explodes the series revolves around the adventures of Superman’s grandfather, Seg-El. But rather than just being a Gotham-esque deep dive into DC history, the series has current Earth character Adam Strange (no relation to the Marvel sorcerer) somehow time traveling and space traveling to this pre-destruction era on Krypton.  Strange has a mission to save the timeline and Superman in the “present” by keeping the destruction of Krypton on course.

As a premise, this is messed up.  In the first season Strange and Seg-El team up, with Seg-El only half buying Strange’s story about being from another planet in the future, their team up is contingent on Seg-El not knowing that Strange is really rooting for Krypton’s destruction.  But then how would Seg-El ever find that out?  Enter General Zod (as in “kneel before…”- that guy), another time traveler, who most definitely wants to alter the planet’s fate.  If Superman is never born in the process; so much the better.

So putting yourself in the place of an average Kryptonian, or just a person in general, which is the more moral position? To allow or cause for an entire planet to blow up, killing billions, to make sure one man (Superman) is born or to prevent an entire planet from blowing up, saving billions, even at the cost of one man (Superman)?  The answer seems rather self-evident, placing the villain Zod as the guy with the moral high ground, while Earthman Adam, who just wants to save Superman, as someone trying to ensure genocide happens on schedule.

There are plenty of gaps in the basic premise big enough to drive the entire Fortress of Solitude through.

How did Adam, a scrappy kid from Detroit, get hooked up with the alien Sardath?  Why would Sardath pick Adam, of all people, to go back in time?  How did Sardath even know the timeline, and Superman, were in danger?  What exactly was the cause of that danger (never explained)?  Why did Adam assume that Kryptonians would care about Superman more than their own world’s destruction?  How did Zod end up going back in time and why?

And for season two, with the timeline changed, Krypton saved, no Superman, and Brainiac conquering Earth, why would any Kryptonian help Adam reset the timeline ( in other words, destroying Krypton)?  The entire series seems as if it went to production long before the basic premise was worked out with major gaps missing from the set up.  It’s a tribute to the production that I actually found the show very watchable in spite of the gaps in the premise.  Or, these guys are geniuses and all will be revealed, in a way that makes sense, over time.

Who knows?  But I’m interested enough to stick around for another season and find out.