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.

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.

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 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.

The crucial thing in this episode for me was Baltar getting the shit knocked out of him by that soldier, and the Six in his mind hauling him up and forcing him to take more of a beating. The first time she does so, we get a shot of Baltar alone and he looks conceivably as if he’s doing it himself–pulling a Fight Club so to speak.

But that second time, we get a shot of a clearly dangling Baltar. His knees are bent, and when he moves, it’s completely unnatural. The Six in his head appears to be an actual entity that can interact with the world.

The question of the Baltar-in-head and Six-in-head has been one of the central, fundamental mysteries of the show to me. We had the red herring that Baltar saw Six because he was a Cylon. We know now that he is not. Since then, the question of what these entities are, exactly, has been left open. I was working under the assumption that it was just a writer’s device mostly, Baltar’s subconcious or something like that.

The latest seems to confirm to me that they are real, and they are working towards a purpose. They appear to be agents of the one true God. Are they stand-ins for Angels? Is one an Angel and one a Devil? Remember in an earlier episode this season when Baltar saw himself, which previously, only the Six saw the invisible Baltar? What was that scene hinting at?

I remain convinced that there’s a third party in this war, and has been from the start. We have the Cylons and the humans and.… something else. Aliens, or a more advanced human civilization is what I am guessing. Apparently, there was something like this in the old BSG. Ship of Light?

I believe this third party is responsible for the return of Starbuck as well. I don’t believe Starbuck is a Cylon. Cylons wouldn’t make the mistake of sending her back in a pristine ship. Whoever revived Starbuck did so wanting the fleet to know that things were not normal. Why?

I am starting to think about the recurring motif of “this has all happened before, and before.” I have a developing theory that humans make cylons who eventually become humans and then make new cylons and there is this never-ending cycle of master/slave/freedom/rebellion that goes on. A struggle between Cylons and humans already happened on Earth, long ago. The humans fled, the Cylons pursued. Eventually the Cylons assimilated with the survivors and what we have is–the entire population of Kobol basically being human-cylon hybrids from an earlier creation. And then, the hybrids made new cylons, starting the cycle again.

Thoughts?