"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Thursday, December 31, 2015

My List of the Top 10 Television Series of 2015

This is the first time I've made a list, which includes television on network, cable, and streaming.   Runners-up - superb but not quite making this list - include Chicago Fire (NBC) and Vikings (History Channel). Also worthy of Honorable Mention this year are Empire (Fox) and American Crime (ABC). But here's my Top 10 for 2015:

10. Deutschland 83 (Sundance): An unwilling East German spy undercover as a West German soldier at the height of the Cold War, i.e., 1983, and much easier to buy than The Americans. Outstanding.

9. Humans (AMC): The best android story ever on television, and likely in the movies.  Isaac Asimov would've loved this.

8. Rectify (Sundance): He has the heart of a poet and the native literacy of a Dylan.  Is there any chance he's guilty of the murder for which he's been released from death row on a technicality?

7. Mr. Robot (USA Network): A hacker show in a class by itself, that'll keep you on the edge of your seat in extreme suspense when you're not chuckling at the dark humor.

6. House of Cards (Netflix):  Not its best season, but still a masterpiece of political intrigue including murder.

5. Nashville (ABC): What can I say?  I just love the music.

4. The Good Wife (CBS): Easily the best show on network television, mixing up-to-date 2016 Presidential politics, NSA, courtroom drama, and romance, with its best season so far (sorry Will).

3. Fargo (FX):  Very loosely derived from the movie, but staking out a wacked-out intensely compelling territory all of its own.   This past season, for example, which had little in common with the first, had Ronald Reagan and a UFO as crucial parts of the story (well, the UFO anyway).

2. The Affair (Showtime):  The writerly life as realistically as it's ever been portrayed on television - plus a top-notch whodunnit, and then there's that hot affair.

1. The Man in the High Castle (Amazon):  Philip K. Dick's masterful alternate history of the Nazis and Japan winning World War II brought to the screen so effectively that, when you look away, you can almost believe that the reality we're now living in is the dream.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Quibbles with The Hateful Eight (with Spoilers)

I raved on about The Hateful Eight the other day - the eighth movie of Quentin Tarantino, and I'd say second only in excellence to his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, which in my book is high praise indeed. But I did say in that review that I saw a plot hole or two, and there were a couple of scenes I wasn't thrilled about, so I thought I'd list them here, with a spoiler warning ...

SPOILERS follow ...

I probably missed these two points, because I was so engrossed in the plot, if that makes any sense, but -

1.  How did Walter Goggins' character (Chris Mannix) know so quickly and certainly that Samuel L. Jackson's (Major Warren) letter from Abraham Lincoln was a phony?   This just seemed a little odd, especially after Kurt Russell's hardbitten John Ruth seemed so sure it was real.   Was it just so obvious that the letter couldn't be real - but if so, what was Ruth's problem in not seeing that?

2.  Similarly, how did Warren know at the end that Michael Madsen's Joe Gage was the poisoner, and not Tim Roth's Oswaldo Mobray?  I have a feeling I missed something there, but on the other hand, I can't recall when Gage rather Mobray was revealed by his own hand.

And here are two scenes I could have lived without into this otherwise superbly rendered movie -

1. Actually, a few scenes without blood or bruises on Daisy's (Jennifer Jason Leigh's) face would have been nice.   The blood and bruises became a little tedious.

2.  And I would have been fine with the schlang-sucking scene (that's right Trump, don't pretend you don't know what that means) being a little less explicit.   And, actually, I thought the whole General Smithers' (Bruce Dern) thread was superfluous to the overall narrative, much as I thought Dern put in a commanding performance as always (as did everyone else in the movie).

But these are small quibbles indeed, considering how good the rest of the movie is.   Here, again, is my full review, for more of that.




Tuesday, December 29, 2015

The Hateful Eight: Reservoir Dogs meet Agatha Christie Out West

I saw The Hateful Eight in New York at my son's invitation tonight, completely different from The Magnificent Seven, as the name suggests, and like all Quentin Tarantino movies, not without flaws, but deeply memorable - and highly enjoyable.

Indeed, The Hateful Eight comes closest to recapturing some of the pattern of Reservoir Dogs, which I still consider Tarantino's masterpiece and best movie.   An ensemble of characters with quirks and patter written by a Shakespeare of the clever line, which is what Tarantino is.   And the plot is pretty good, too.   Since I'll keep this review spoiler free, I won't say much about the whodunit, except that the solution is analogous to the misdirection and ensemble cast we find in some of Agatha Christie's best works.

We saw the movie in 70 mm (wide-screen high-resolution format) - a "special roadshow engagement," as the glossy program which was handed out tells us.   This is a bygone kind of movie making with long screens - employed in Ben Hur, for example - and especially suitable for a stage coach trying to outrun an impending blizzard in the beautifully desolate Wyoming landscape a few years after the Civil War.  Except - well, there was maybe about 10 minutes of the stage coach, total, in the three-hour movie (with an intermission), the rest of which mostly takes place in a single room (which was wide, however, with important characters at the edges).   Indeed, The Hateful Eight could easily have been a play on a stage, and maybe someday it will.   It would certainly work on television, even the old square-screen kind, and at one point in the movie Tarantino even seems to make this very point, by giving us a scene seen through an open barn door, a square image on the wide screen.

Ennio Morricone wrote the score - he's 87 now, and has all the talent he had when he wrote the score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly released in 1966, except there wasn't much good, but plenty of bad-ass and ugly in The Hateful Eight.   Tarantino, in an especially cool touch, begins the movie with a three-minute overture from Morricone.

The actors and characters are all vintage Tarantino, which is to say excellent and welcome.   Some of the acting talent - such as Tim Roth and Michael Madsen - reaches back to Reservoir Dogs.   Samuel Jackson who was so iconic in Pulp Fiction plays a major role (the last chapter of The Hateful Eight - yeah, it has chapters - is entitled "Black Man, White Hell").  Kurt Russell, who in addition to an award-winning career appeared in a few less-renown Tarantino movies a few years ago,  puts in a suitably stalwart performance. And Walton Goggins, unforgettable in his television roles in The Shield and Justify, and a Django alumnus, is on hand with his patented delivery, too.  Tarantino newbies Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Demián Bichir (who was so effective in Weeds and The Bridge on television) complete the hateful eight nicely (well, "nice" might not be the best word here, especially for Leigh's character, who barely has a scene without blood on her face).

There are inevitable plot holes, characters realizing things a little too quickly, but that's a small quibble about a fine movie - the "8th Film by Quentin Tarantino," as he bills The Hateful Eight - but not hateful at all, except for maybe one or two scenes, and among the best we've seen from Tarantino in the past few decades.

===
Here is my brief list of things I wasn't thrilled about in the movie - with spoilers.



Sunday, December 27, 2015

The Bookstore with Just One Book

The Guardian carried an article the other day by Alison Flood about a bookstore in Japan that stocks and displays only one book at a time - and I couldn't help thinking about McLuhan's observation that new technologies turn outmoded technologies into art forms.

This has always been one of my favorite of Marshall McLuhan's discoveries.  In his day, the impact of motion pictures on the theater, once a mass medium, now the "legitimate," i.e., culturally elite stage, was a prime example.  As was penmanship, once a necessity, converted by the typewriter into an admirable talent.   And, of course, poetry, in Homer's time a pneumonic necessity, had since the invention of easy writing with the alphabet long since become a high-art form.

Examples abounded.  In my Digital McLuhan, I offered some of my own.  Delicatessen, once treated with spices and preservatives natural and artificial to preserve the meat, became in the age of refrigeration something to be sought after for its taste.   And speaking of cool, the convertible car, once driven so the driver and people in the car could be physically cool, was transformed by air conditioning into something driven to look, i.e., be culturally, cool.

Which brings us to the bookstore in Japan, which just opened this past May.   Japan has long been known as a place in which single paintings are hung a wall, so they can be admired without competition, and eventually replaced by another painting.  Under the pressure of the Kindle, which makes a myriad of books all but instantly available, the printed book has now become something more than it once was - an object to be displayed, like a work of art, before it is read.  The Kindle, in other words, has turned the printed book into an art form - at least, in Japan.

For further application of McLuhan's thinking to our current age, see

Friday, December 25, 2015

The Knick Season 2 Finale: How Final?

The Knick shuttered its doors on its second season last Friday, and closed a lot more than the at-turns cutting edge, guerrilla medical establishment that we've come to know, love, and sometimes be repulsed by.

First and foremost is the permanent shuttering - for the season being over is not the same as the series ending - of Clive Owen's magnetic Dr. Thackery.  Why the other doctors in the room didn't move a little more quickly to disobey his repeated orders and intervene to save him is not clear, and not satisfyingly explained by their fear of going against his commands.   On the other hand, there was likely little if anything they could have done after he nicked so crucial an artery.  And so the anti-hero hero of The Knick dies of a nick self-inflicted.

The other big event was the marriage of Cleary and (former) Sister Harriet, which happened off-camera - actually, she put on his ring, which I suppose makes them married - but was the nonetheless a triumphant event.  Or, would have been, had not we learned a little earlier that Cleary, in his love for Harriet, had told the police about the abortions she had been performing, in the hope that exactly what happened did indeed happen - she would be thrown out of the sisterhood and into his arms.  On the other hand, it was an act of desperation born in true love, so perhaps there's a little nobility in it after all.

There's no nobility in eugenics, and the talk of taking the ocean liner to Germany to further that work was chilling indeed.   So was the the way people get away with murder in this narrative, not only in the finale but throughout this season.

But there's hope for Algernon, whose wounded eye will not let him resume his profession as a surgeon but leaves open a career in the new psychotherapy, which promises all kinds of possibilities for the next season.

Assuming there is a third season, which hasn't been formally announced as yet.   I'd certainly like to see one - and hey, given that no one cut Thackery's head off, it's even possible that we may see him alive again.

See also The Knick 2.1: Playing Off Our Present ... The Knick 2.4: Spirochete

And see also The Knick: Paean to Scientific Method ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.8: Good Loving, the Fix, and Typhoid Mary ... The Knick Sneak Preview Review 1.9: Sacrifice ... The Knick 1.10 Sneak Preview Review: Fallibility

 
deeper history

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I'll Be at Fourth Annual Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City


When you think of powerhouse, intellectually brilliant science fiction on the screen that came from the printed page, Philip K. Dick is in a class of his own. Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, the list just keeps growing, and reaching television and streaming as well as movie screens, with The Man in the High Castle which I reviewed last month, and found to be one of the most provocative series ever on television.  (See this Top 10 list in Omni for Philip K. Dick movie adaptations, compiled in 2014 or prior to TMITH, for more.)

I'm thus delighted to be attending the Fourth Annual Philip K. Dick Film Festival here in New York City, January 14-17, at the Village East Cinema. I'll be on a panel 3-5pm at the Lovecraft Bar, 50 Avenue B, on January 16 , discussing that alternate history masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle, and how the screen version compares with Dick's 1962 novel.

I'm also one of the judges for the short-film competition, and, let me tell you, some of those movies are peerless, and all are excellent.  There will of course also be full-length movies, and, apropos Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer's Clones will be showing on Friday night.

I was just quoted in the Christian Science Monitor early this month in an article by Molly Driscoll about how, as convenient and satisfying as it is to stream narratives on screens at home, there's something special and appealing in the sense of community you get when you see a movie in a theater.   I just had that in the theater watching Star Wars.   Hope you can come to Village East Cinema in New York in January and get that for Philip K. Dick.

I was always struck by these words of Thomas Gray -
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Come see some of those gems in New York City, January 14-17, 2016



Fargo Season 2 last few episodes: UFOs, Protocols, and yeah, Heartwarming

Fargo concluded its second season earlier this month with a few episodes that were, literally, just out of this world.  Well, one was, anyway.

In the next-to-last episode, which featured one of the best shoot-outs ever on television, with lots of evil characters getting their just deserts, and some not-evil characters, too (like that brave lady cop), which I guess makes their deserts unjust, we have a resolution of that shoot-out, a saving of the day for Lou - which had to be saved, since we know older Lou from Season 1 - by a UFO.

So does this mean UFOs exist in the Fargo universe?  Is Fargo, in addition to all of its other merits, science fiction?

Not necessarily.  No one interacted with any alien.  And reports of UFOs are common enough in our reality and world.  So whatever was seen at that shoot-out was just light in the sky, which was caused by some contraption, which may or may not have been an alien ship.

Even if it was, would that be so bad?  Well, certainly not for me, seeing as how I'm a big fan of science fiction, having just reviewed Childhood's End (and I reviewed most of Falling Skies), speaking of UFOs.  I've even talked about them on the History Channel.



But there is what literary critics call a protocol issue, if UFOs with aliens are suddenly introduced into a series like Fargo.  If you have a dead body, murdered, in a room with a door locked from the inside, this makes a classic whodunit.   If you solve it by discovering the murderer beamed into and out of the room, that kind of solution can anger mystery fans by violating the expectations of the whodunit genre.

On the other hand, there has always been an aspect of Fargo that almost seems out of this world, anyway.   Hanzee, the "Gerhardt Indian" and one of the best characters in season 2 (well played by Zahn McClarnon, who also stood out in Longmire), has even been suggested to be an alien.  And, let's face it, that cold snowy terrain sometimes looks like a scene from another world, even when there isn't a gunfight at the OK Corral to liven up the night.

As is the case with many top-notch television series these days, the next-to-last episode was better than the finale, which tied things up, but with far less energy than the previous episode.  Still, it was great to see that Lou's wife Betsy survived, and her collapsing was because of the treatment the she had indeed been receiving, thus giving this finale a nice, unexpected silver lining which also is an intrinsic part of this series, and therefore not completely unexpected, I guess, but heartwarming and welcome.

Looking forward to next season on Fargo.

See alsoFargo 2.1: Good to be Back in the Freezer ... Fargo 2.6: Just Superb

And see alsoFargo Debuts with Two Psychos ... Fargo 1.7: The Bungling and the Brave ... Fargo 1.8: The Year ... Fargo Season 1 Finale: The Supremely Cunning Anti-Hero



A story about another kind of killer ...  The Silk Code

#SFWApro

Bones 11.10: Shake-Up

Well, I finally caught up with Bones this season, and the final episode of the Fall, 11.10, was a strong one indeed.

Aubrey and Hodgins are both injured in a bomb blast.  It looks as if Aubrey is more seriously hurt, at first, as Hodgins walks out of the hospital saying he's ok just all sore.  Aubrey recovers, but Hodgins collapses - shortly after he tells Angela that he now wants to have more children, something he realized after his brush with death.  And Hodgins collapses just as Cam, in another room, is likely about to tell Arastoo that they're finished.

This is a pretty good shake-up and set-up for the Spring.  Hodgins' collapse is presumably not life-threatening, but the doctor tells our assembled group that he's paralyzed.   Significantly, no asks if the paralysis is reversible, and this opens up a variety of possibilities.  Hodgins continues in a wheelchair but pursues some kind of cure is the most likely.

Bones needed to shake things up.   The replacement of Sweets with Aubrey has helped the series, as much as I liked Sweets, because Aubrey has brought new cards to the table.  I would have hated to see any other of out major characters killed, but Hodgins in this new condition will change the nature of the Jeffersonian, giving it an Ironsides quality.

This season, so far, has been good.  Booth and Bones as cowboy and cowgirl in episode 11.09 was a delight, and the NSA story in 11.08 was excellent, giving Booth, Bones, and Aubrey a chance to expound on their views of Edward Snowden (whom I happened to see on Skype at Bard College in October).

The series still has a lot of juice, and I'm looking forward to more.

See also Bones Back for Season 11: Aubrey and 'Audrey' ... Bones 11.2: Back in Place ... Bones 11.5 Meets Sleepy Hollow 3.5: Time Travel

See also Bones 10.1: The Fulcrum Changes ... Bones 10.2: J. Edgar and the DNA Confession ... Bones 10.3: Meets Rush and a Dominatrix ... Bones 10.4: Brennan and Angela on a Bench in the Playground ... Bones 10.5: Two Jokes and Three Times ... Bones 10.6: A Thousand Cuts ... Bones 10.7: The A-Word and Quarks ... Bones 10.8: Daisy's Doula ... Bones 10.9: The Milgram Experiment and the Birds ... Bones 200: 10.10: Just like Bogey and Bacall ... Bones 10.11: Life after Death, and Sweets in Wonderland ...Bones 10.12: The Digital Revolution ... Bones 10.13: The Almost-Serial Killer ...Bones 10.14: meets La Parure ... Bones 10.15: Cards in Hand ...Bones 10.16: Hodgins' Money ... Bones 10.17-18: Bullies and Capital Punishment ... Bones 10.19: Do You Buy Booth's Gambling Addiction? ...Bones 10.20: Intimations of a New Jeffersonian ... Bones 10.21: Ten Years Isn't Enough ... Bones Season 10 Finale: Rehearsals for Retirement?

And see also Bones 9.1: The Sweet Misery of Love ... Bones 9.2: Bobcat, Identity Theft, and Sweets ... Bones 9.3 and NCIS 11.2: Sweets and Ziva ... Bones 9.4: Metaphysics of Death in a Television Series ... Bones 9.5: Val and Deep Blue ... Bones 9.6: The Wedding ... Bones 9.7: Watch Out, Buenos Aires ...Bones 9.8: The Bug in the Neck ... Bones 9.9: Friday Night Bones in the Courtroom ... Bones 9.10: Horse Pucky ... Bones 9.11: Angels in Equations ... Bones 9.12: Fingernails ... Bones 9.13: Meets Nashville, and Wendell ... Bones 9.14: "You Cannot Drink Your Glass Away" ... Bones 9.15: Hodgins' Brother and the Ripped Off Toe ... Bones 9.16: Lampreys, Professors, and Insurance Companies ... Bones 9.17: Spartacus in the Kitchen ... Bones 9.18: Meets Day of the Triffids ... Bones 9.19: The Cornucopic Urn ... Bones 9.20: Above the Law ... Bones 9.21: Freezing and Thawing ... Bones 9.22: Promotion ... Bones 9.23: The New Intern ... Bones Season 9 Finale: Upping the Ante

And see also Bones 8.1: Walk Like an Egyptian ... Bones 8.2 of Contention ... Bones 8.3: Not Rotting Behind a Desk  ... Bones 8.4: Slashing Tiger and Donald Trump ... Bones 8.5: Applesauce on Election Eve ... Bones 8.6: Election Day ... Bones 8.7: Dollops in the Sky with Diamonds ...Bones 8.8: The Talking Remains ... Bones 8.9: I Am A Camera ... Bones 8.10-11: Double Bones ...Bones 8.12: Face of Enigmatic Evil ... Bones 8.13: Two for the Price of One ... Bones 8.14: Real Life ... Bones 8.15: The Magic Bullet and the Be-Spontaneous Paradox ... Bones 8.16: Bitter-Sweet Sweets and Honest Finn ... Bones 8.17: "Not Time Share, Time Travel" ... Bones 8.18: Couples ... Bones 8.19: The Head in the Toilet ... Bones 8.20: On Camera ... Bones 8.21: Christine, Hot Sauce, and the Judge ... Bones 8.22: Musical-Chair Parents ... Bones 8.23: The Bluff ... Bones Season 8 Finale: Can't Buy the Last Few Minutes

And see also Bones 7.1: Almost Home Sweet Home ... Bones 7.2: The New Kid and the Fluke ...Bones 7.3: Lance Bond and Prince Charmington ... Bones 7.4: The Tush on the Xerox ... Bones 7.5: Sexy Vehicle ... Bones 7.6: The Reassembler ... Bones 7.7: Baby! ... Bones 7.8: Parents ...Bones 7.9: Tabitha's Salon ... Bones 7.10: Mobile ... Bones 7.11: Truffles and Max ... Bones 7.12: The Corpse is Hanson ... Bones Season 7 Finale: Suspect Bones

And see also Bones 6.1: The Linchpin ... Bones 6.2: Hannah and her Prospects ... Bones 6.3 at the Jersey Shore, Yo, and Plymouth Rock ... Bones 6.4 Sans Hannah ... Bones 6.5: Shot and Pretty ... Bones 6.6: Accidental Relations ... Bones 6.7:  Newman and "Death by Chocolate" ...Bones 6.8: Melted Bones ... Bones 6.9: Adelbert Ames, Jr. ... Bones 6.10: Reflections ... Bones 6.11: The End and the Beginning of a Mystery ... Bones 6.12 Meets Big Love ... Bones 6.13: The Marrying Kind ... Bones 6.14: Bones' Acting Ability ... Bones 6.15: "Lunch for the Palin Family" ...Bones 6.16: Stuck in an Elevator, Stuck in Times ... Bones 6.17: The 8th Pair of Feet ... Bones 6.18: The Wile E. Chupacabra ... Bones 6.19 Test Runs The Finder ... Bones 6.20: This Very Statement is a Lie ... Bones 6.21: Sensitive Bones ... Bones 6.22: Phoenix Love ... Bones Season 6 Finale: Beautiful

And see also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles ... Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby ... Love with Teeth on Bones 5.13 ... Faith vs. Science vs. Psychology in Bones 5.14 ... Page 187 in Bones 5.15 ...Bones 100: Two Deep Kisses and One Wild Relationship ... Bones 5.17: The Deadly Stars ...Bones Under Water in 5.18 ... Bones 5.19: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.20: Ergo Together ... Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings ... Bones Season 5 Finale: Eye and Evolution

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the Sierra Waters time-travel trilogy


Wednesday, December 23, 2015

My Concern about Trump: A Scenario

Trump is now leading in the GOP polls, by as much as 20 percent over his Republican rivals.  One way of making ourselves feel not that worried about this is to point out that polls are not the same as ballots cast in an actual election, and polls have been wrong before.

So, what would happen if Trump were to lose the first few Republican primaries, despite leading in those states by sizable margins in the polls?   Again, a common prediction, that makes those who oppose Trump feel better, is that faced with such results, Trump would fold up and go home.  His ego would not allow him to continue in the race as a loser.

But what if his ego leads to another result?   Imagine Trump losing in Iowa, then in New Hampshire, then in South Carolina.  His supporters would go ballistic.  They might well scream that those elections had been rigged - that the votes were wrongly counted against Trump by the GOP establishment.

What would Trump's response be to such a groundswell of rage?  Would he tell his supporters, no, they need to calm down and accept the reality that Trump had lost?  Again, that is what we'd like to think, but -

Let's say Trump, still riding high on the adrenalin of all that vocal support, decides to buy into what his supporters would be screaming - that the elections he had lost had been rigged?  With his billions of dollars, he could go to court, and petition the courts to overturn the primary results.

Eventually, that could well go to the Supreme Court, which would need to hear those cases in a hurry.And, as in the election of 2000, the Supreme Court would again be in a position to decide on the American Presidency - who would next hold the office.

Far-fetched?  Probably ... maybe ... but it did happen once before.




Bones 11.5 meets Sleepy Hollow 3.5: Time Travel


Catching up with the Bones-Sleepy Hollow cross-over show that was on around Halloween, about two months ago.  One might wonder what the two shows could possibly have in common, given that Bones is about hard forensic science and Sleepy Hollow is ghostly fantasy.

Well, Booth from Bones and Abbie from Sleepy Hollow are both FBI agents - and unorthodox, when need be - so there's that.  And, as Booth points out to James, Booth does have an usual first name, Seeley, which gives him something in common with Icabod.

But there was something even more intriguing running through the two hours.  The reality of Sleepy Hollow is that Icabod Crane has indeed time traveled from his origins in the American Revolutionary War to our present day.   Since time travel, as far as we know, is impossible - see my Tricky Business of Time Travel for more of why I think this is the case - Bones is confronted with an intractable paradox when confronted with irrefutable forensic evidence that Icabod has come from the past.

Drawing on Sherlock Holmes, she correctly says that when you remove everything that's impossible, whatever remains is likely the truth, however highly improbably that might seem.  In a crucial scene in the first hour, Bones is left with two highly improbable possibilities: (1) Icabod in 2015 had an ancestor in the 18th century with identical handwriting (something which she rightly says has never been seen before) and time travel (which we all know has so far never been seen, at least in no way that's been reliably recorded).

Since Sleepy Hollow is fantasy in many more ways than just time travel, Icabod's time travel is not so surprising in that universe or series.   But the world of Bones has, till now, been our world, including even the possibility of UFOs some seasons ago (unlike time travel, there's nothing paradoxical or explosive of logic in space travel by aliens).

But what about time travel?  Will its possible admission into the world of Bones result in its playing a role in some future Bones scenario?  Probably not, but good for Bones for even opening that door a little.

See also Bones Back for Season 11: Aubrey and 'Audrey' ... Bones 11.2: Back in Place

See also Bones 10.1: The Fulcrum Changes ... Bones 10.2: J. Edgar and the DNA Confession ... Bones 10.3: Meets Rush and a Dominatrix ... Bones 10.4: Brennan and Angela on a Bench in the Playground ... Bones 10.5: Two Jokes and Three Times ... Bones 10.6: A Thousand Cuts ... Bones 10.7: The A-Word and Quarks ... Bones 10.8: Daisy's Doula ... Bones 10.9: The Milgram Experiment and the Birds ... Bones 200: 10.10: Just like Bogey and Bacall ... Bones 10.11: Life after Death, and Sweets in Wonderland ...Bones 10.12: The Digital Revolution ... Bones 10.13: The Almost-Serial Killer ...Bones 10.14: meets La Parure ... Bones 10.15: Cards in Hand ...Bones 10.16: Hodgins' Money ... Bones 10.17-18: Bullies and Capital Punishment ... Bones 10.19: Do You Buy Booth's Gambling Addiction? ...Bones 10.20: Intimations of a New Jeffersonian ... Bones 10.21: Ten Years Isn't Enough ... Bones Season 10 Finale: Rehearsals for Retirement?

And see also Bones 9.1: The Sweet Misery of Love ... Bones 9.2: Bobcat, Identity Theft, and Sweets ... Bones 9.3 and NCIS 11.2: Sweets and Ziva ... Bones 9.4: Metaphysics of Death in a Television Series ... Bones 9.5: Val and Deep Blue ... Bones 9.6: The Wedding ... Bones 9.7: Watch Out, Buenos Aires ...Bones 9.8: The Bug in the Neck ... Bones 9.9: Friday Night Bones in the Courtroom ... Bones 9.10: Horse Pucky ... Bones 9.11: Angels in Equations ... Bones 9.12: Fingernails ... Bones 9.13: Meets Nashville, and Wendell ... Bones 9.14: "You Cannot Drink Your Glass Away" ... Bones 9.15: Hodgins' Brother and the Ripped Off Toe ... Bones 9.16: Lampreys, Professors, and Insurance Companies ... Bones 9.17: Spartacus in the Kitchen ... Bones 9.18: Meets Day of the Triffids ... Bones 9.19: The Cornucopic Urn ... Bones 9.20: Above the Law ... Bones 9.21: Freezing and Thawing ... Bones 9.22: Promotion ... Bones 9.23: The New Intern ... Bones Season 9 Finale: Upping the Ante

And see also Bones 8.1: Walk Like an Egyptian ... Bones 8.2 of Contention ... Bones 8.3: Not Rotting Behind a Desk  ... Bones 8.4: Slashing Tiger and Donald Trump ... Bones 8.5: Applesauce on Election Eve ... Bones 8.6: Election Day ... Bones 8.7: Dollops in the Sky with Diamonds ...Bones 8.8: The Talking Remains ... Bones 8.9: I Am A Camera ... Bones 8.10-11: Double Bones ...Bones 8.12: Face of Enigmatic Evil ... Bones 8.13: Two for the Price of One ... Bones 8.14: Real Life ... Bones 8.15: The Magic Bullet and the Be-Spontaneous Paradox ... Bones 8.16: Bitter-Sweet Sweets and Honest Finn ... Bones 8.17: "Not Time Share, Time Travel" ... Bones 8.18: Couples ... Bones 8.19: The Head in the Toilet ... Bones 8.20: On Camera ... Bones 8.21: Christine, Hot Sauce, and the Judge ... Bones 8.22: Musical-Chair Parents ... Bones 8.23: The Bluff ... Bones Season 8 Finale: Can't Buy the Last Few Minutes

And see also Bones 7.1: Almost Home Sweet Home ... Bones 7.2: The New Kid and the Fluke ...Bones 7.3: Lance Bond and Prince Charmington ... Bones 7.4: The Tush on the Xerox ... Bones 7.5: Sexy Vehicle ... Bones 7.6: The Reassembler ... Bones 7.7: Baby! ... Bones 7.8: Parents ...Bones 7.9: Tabitha's Salon ... Bones 7.10: Mobile ... Bones 7.11: Truffles and Max ... Bones 7.12: The Corpse is Hanson ... Bones Season 7 Finale: Suspect Bones

And see also Bones 6.1: The Linchpin ... Bones 6.2: Hannah and her Prospects ... Bones 6.3 at the Jersey Shore, Yo, and Plymouth Rock ... Bones 6.4 Sans Hannah ... Bones 6.5: Shot and Pretty ... Bones 6.6: Accidental Relations ... Bones 6.7:  Newman and "Death by Chocolate" ...Bones 6.8: Melted Bones ... Bones 6.9: Adelbert Ames, Jr. ... Bones 6.10: Reflections ... Bones 6.11: The End and the Beginning of a Mystery ... Bones 6.12 Meets Big Love ... Bones 6.13: The Marrying Kind ... Bones 6.14: Bones' Acting Ability ... Bones 6.15: "Lunch for the Palin Family" ...Bones 6.16: Stuck in an Elevator, Stuck in Times ... Bones 6.17: The 8th Pair of Feet ... Bones 6.18: The Wile E. Chupacabra ... Bones 6.19 Test Runs The Finder ... Bones 6.20: This Very Statement is a Lie ... Bones 6.21: Sensitive Bones ... Bones 6.22: Phoenix Love ... Bones Season 6 Finale: Beautiful

And see also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles ... Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby ... Love with Teeth on Bones 5.13 ... Faith vs. Science vs. Psychology in Bones 5.14 ... Page 187 in Bones 5.15 ...Bones 100: Two Deep Kisses and One Wild Relationship ... Bones 5.17: The Deadly Stars ...Bones Under Water in 5.18 ... Bones 5.19: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.20: Ergo Together ... Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings ... Bones Season 5 Finale: Eye and Evolution





the Sierra Waters time-travel trilogy




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