Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

The Simpler Times of Early X-​​Files Episodes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Alien inva­sion, gov­ern­ment con­spir­acy.  Feathered hair.  I’ve been watch­ing a lot of X-​​Files (up to sea­son 3 right now) on Netflix, and it’s mak­ing me very nos­tal­gic for the 90s.   Despite being a show about evil con­spir­a­cies, it still has this inno­cent vibe to it, a feel­ing that the world was sim­pler then.  It was still con­sid­ered dark fic­tion that the gov­ern­ment would tor­ture peo­ple, for instance. America pre-​​2001 really was a dif­fer­ent place. 

It takes watch­ing a show like this to really remind me of that.  There’s a scene in which Scully pre-​​buys an air­plane ticket to one loca­tion and then, at the ter­mi­nal, buys a new ticket for another des­ti­na­tion, and the attendee doesn’t bat an eye.  No iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is shown.  Off she goes.  Shocking!  And yet I can remem­ber how in high school I took the place of another stu­dent on the Model U.N. team and flew to Chicago on his ticket, in his name.  No prob­lem at all.  I held the ticket and that’s all I needed to board.

Certainly, the show reminds us of the olden days, but not always in good ways.  I’m appalled at how often Scully is used not as a pro­tag­o­nist but as a moti­va­tor or plot point.  It seems like she’s being kid­napped or held hostage in every other episode, and it’s always up to Mulder to save the day.  There was finally a moment where Scully was in peril, about to be devoured by a fat-​​sucking vam­pire when, out of nowhere, the mon­ster is shot.  And it’s not Mulder!  It’s the other woman who was about the be the vampire’s vic­tim.  The scene shocked me for no rea­son other than how it broke the for­mula finally.  I imag­ine it passed with­out notice when the episode aired, but it seemed like a move for­ward as far as the gen­der roles.  Additionally, the episode fea­tured an old-​​fashioned detec­tive who doesn’t think women like Scully should be work­ing such cases, and he gets eaten by the mon­ster in the sec­ond act. Methinks the writer of that episode knew what he or she was doing when they wrote it.

On another tan­gent, I learned that the writer of my favorite episodes, the ones with darkly comic sen­si­bil­i­ties, Darin Morgan, now con­sults on Fringe.  This guy wrote bril­liant, hilar­i­ous episodes such as “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” (in which a psy­chic sug­gests that Mulder will die via auto­erotic asphyx­i­a­tion and that Scully never dies), or my all-​​time favorite, “War of the Coprophages” about cock­roaches.  Digging around on Wikipedia revealed to me that not only did he write for the show—he got his start play­ing the creepy fluke man in an early mon­ster of the week episode.    Darin Morgan, if you’re out there listening—you’re a hero of mine and have had a huge impact on my sense of humor.  Sorry you had to spend so much time dressed up as a human fluke.  That episode gave me and count­less other kids night­mares though, so you could say it paid off in a way.

This is how I know I’m get­ting older.  I begin to obsess about things from the past more than I do about mod­ern things.   Nostalgia is not a young man’s emo­tion.  But I miss those days when the biggest worry we had was that the gov­ern­ment was lying to us about the exis­tence of extrater­res­tri­als. I miss the days when I was cred­u­lous enough to believe in UFOs, ghosts, and the like. The world was both more sim­ple and more won­drous then.  As I grow older, the world merely grows more com­plex.  But per­haps that’s my own fault.  Wonder is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.

My 10 Second Impression of Fringe

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My super-​​quick impres­sion of the TV show Fringe:

SHOW INTRO

Ridiculous and bad sci­ence premise  results in some­one being gorily mur­dered, often involv­ing slime and/​or blood.

CREDITS roll.

OLIVIA

(stares emo­tion­lessly)

WALTER BISHOP

Something off the wall, either grossly inap­pro­pri­ate or involv­ing food, while exam­ing some grotesque CG crea­ture or corpse.

(The audi­ence laughs and shakes their heads).

PETER BISHOP

(smirks mys­te­ri­ously)

THE END

And yet I love this show.  I want to start a Doctor Walter “Crazy Motherfucker” Bishop fanclub.

Still, the most recent episode had some painfully bad sci­ence.  The cold is caused by a virus.  Viruses are not cells.  Come on, Fringe, that’s first-​​year bio stuff.  Don’t embarass me like that again. Or I might just have to down­load Walter high­light reels instead of actu­ally watch­ing your show.

Mad Men: Sadomasochism For the Enlightened Modern Person

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This week­end, Sarah and I tucked into the first sea­son of the AMC series Mad Men.  The con­cept of the show is in essence a look at the lives of Madison Avenue adver­tis­ing exec­u­tives, their office staff, and their fam­i­lies.  Oh, and their mis­tresses.  Infidelity is the fuel that ran Madison Avenue, appar­ently.  The show begins in 1960—one the back­ground plots is the elec­tion of Kennedy vs. Nixon and the focal agency has to work for Nixon (with­out being paid).  In the first episode, the audi­ence wit­nesses enough social injus­tice in the form of sex­ism and racism to erase all ide­al­is­tic notions of the time period.  It almost crosses the line into par­ody ter­ri­tory, and per­haps for some it will.  I found myself rolling my eyes by the end of the first episode.  As the sea­son goes on, they tone this down a lit­tle bit (while crank­ing up the existentialism).

Much of the show’s appeal is the self-​​righteous indig­na­tion I feel when I see African Americans being treated like 3rd class cit­i­zens, chil­dren being slapped around by the neigh­bors, or women being com­manded by their hus­bands like ser­vants.   I sus­pect self-​​righteous indig­na­tion for the lib­eral may be in short sup­ply with our side tak­ing over things for a few years.  I rec­om­mend pick­ing up the DVD to every­one look­ing to keep the flames indig­na­tion burn­ing so as to not real­ize that your anger is all that makes you feel alive and fill the hole inside your soul!  It’s work­ing great for me so far.

Beneath the obvi­ous “oh my god, they were SO prim­i­tive and evil” aspect of the show, I sym­pa­thize with the exis­ten­tial dread that much of the cast feels.   No one is happy, despite hav­ing it all and liv­ing the American Dream.  The cen­tral the­sis of this show at least early on is that the American Dream is hol­low and mean­ing­less and has noth­ing to do with our true happiness.

I didn’t really have any inter­est in the show until I saw it par­o­died on Saturday Night Live in some of the bet­ter sketches they’ve done in the past few years.  Despite never hav­ing seen the show, and even through the layer of par­ody, I was intrigued by the premise of the show.  For me, it’s the best thing to come out of Saturday Night Live in years.

The Mainstreaming of Science Fiction on TV?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert
Lost (TV series)Image via Wikipedia

The ABC series Lost is, quite pos­si­bly, the most broadly suc­cess­ful sci­ence fic­tion tele­vi­sion show yet. While rat­ings have been on a decline in this, the fourth sea­son, the season’s pre­miere pulled in 16.07 mil­lion view­ers. Now, these are Nielsen num­bers, which I con­sider sus­pect at best, but it shows that the show is very pop­u­lar, and almost cer­tainly not just with tra­di­tional SF fans (those num­bers can­not be accounted for purely by fans). Current episodes have dealt openly with sci­ence fic­tion tropes (which I will not name exactly to avoid spoil­ers). You could argue about the true clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the show, but it most cer­tainly falls into sci­ence fic­tion, as well as maybe a cou­ple of other genres.

When the show first started, fans knew some­thing was unusual, but that was a bit sub­tle. Dozens of peo­ple had sur­vived a hor­rific plane crash, land­ing on a strange island. Compasses don’t work. There’s a weird radio trans­mis­sion. And there’s a mon­ster in the jun­gle that nobody can see.

Still, I sup­pose, many audi­ence mem­bers dis­in­clined to like SF could make the case for the show being in the thriller/​mystery genre. And it did have a heavy human, more dra­matic ele­ment in the form of each episode’s character-​​centric back story arcs. It wasn’t until late sea­son 2 that things really began to take a turn for the spec­u­la­tive. And even then, it was sub­tle, just a few ele­ments. But as the show has pro­gressed, it’s become clear that the entire foun­da­tion of what the show is about is sci­ence fic­tion (or at least sci­ence fantasy).

But as each sea­son has gone on, it has been increas­ingly impos­si­ble for even the most deter­mined to deny that Lost is, at its roots, a sci­ence fic­tion show. You could call the tech­niques they used to grab their audi­ence bait-​​and-​​switch, because the show cre­ators intro­duced the heavy spec­u­la­tive ele­ments slowly. I’d also call it the frog in a pot of boil­ing water accli­ma­tion method.

My coworker, the Lost fan

An anec­dote: I have a coworker who hates sci­ence fic­tion. In his words, he likes “real things.” He despises super­hero movies, and pretty much every­thing a SF fan loves. Early on, the show cre­ators of Lost said in an inter­view that every­thing pre­sented on the show had a ground­ing in real sci­ence (some­thing that at this point is highly debat­able). Still– my coworker clung to this state­ment like it was a life pre­server. It allowed him to keep watch­ing the show no mat­ter how fan­tas­tic things got, because it was still some­how “real.” At this point in the fourth sea­son, he’s pissed off, because he real­izes that state­ment was total bull­shit. But he’s still watch­ing, and still hooked.

The rea­son? A good mys­tery is com­pelling no mat­ter what other genre tropes you add to the stew of your story. The char­ac­ters, after 3 com­plete sea­sons, are sym­pa­thetic and well-​​known. All the foun­da­tions of a good story are there, to the point that, despite my coworker hat­ing every­thing there is to hate about sci­ence fic­tion, he is still a huge fan of the show.

This is a good exam­ple of how genre is becom­ing the main­stream. For those fans who would like to see the genre remain dis­tinct and sep­a­rate, I think this turn of events is going to be a mas­sive dis­ap­point­ment. Reviewing the past events of the show, it almost looks as if the show cre­ators delib­er­ately plot­ted out their intro­duc­tion of SF tropes to cre­ate the frog in a pot of boil­ing water effect.

What’s espe­cially fan­tas­tic in my mind is that Lost hasn’t given us SF-​​lite. It slowly intro­duced the ele­ments, yes, but they are not watered down to be more palat­able. We have full-​​fledged weird­ness here. This is a show that Charles Fort would watch and clap his hands with glee.

The poten­tial for new fans

By the time Lost com­pletes its arc, there is going to be a whole new audi­ence primed to accept our stranger ideas. New TV shows will come along to take advan­tage of this, but maybe, just maybe, SF pub­lish­ers can lure some of them in too. Frankly, you could do worse than adding even 1% of Lost’s fan­base to your read­er­ship. You could do a hell of a lot worse.

I’m sure there are down­sides to the main­stream­ing of SF tropes. It makes us feel less spe­cial and unique, maybe. But as a work­ing cre­ative, I will just have to swal­low my pride on that one. With this kind of poten­tial for fans out there, it gives me hope that we could actu­ally make a good liv­ing telling genre sto­ries, and not just the ones mar­keted to an aging, increas­ingly con­ser­v­a­tive SF fanbase.

But then, maybe I’m all wrong

But then, the decline in rat­ings that Lost is suf­fer­ing right now might be an indi­ca­tor that the broader audi­ence of Lost has been alien­ated by the spec­u­la­tive aspects of the show. For the week of May 4, the show didn’t even break the top 20. There may be many rea­sons why this show is falling in the rat­ings. And even if it is pop­u­lar by genre show stan­dards, it pales in com­par­i­son to real­ity shows involv­ing danc­ing and singing.

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