Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing 3 Body Problem; Black Doves; Bosch; Citadel; Criminal Minds; Dark Matter; Dexter: Original Sin; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; House of the Dragon; Luther; Outlander; Presumed Innocent; Reacher; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Surface; The: Ark, Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Way Home; You +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Saturday, June 30, 2018

12 Monkeys 4.7-9: One-Bettering The Movie

I've been saying for years - well, since 1995, when Terry Gilliam's movie, starring Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe first came out - that 12 Monkeys (based on the 1962 short, La Jetée), is the best time-travel movie ever made. This gave the television series, which came out in 2015 and I've been reviewing here ever since, a lot to live up to. Up until tonight's penultimate three episodes (4.7-9), the best it did was sidestep the movie, and tell us other time-travel stories. Especially in this final season, some of these stories were as good, in their own ways, as the movie.

Tonight the tv series did something very different. It took the mind-blowing, gut-wrenching, paradox-respecting ending of the movie [spoilers ahead] -- in which time-traveler James Cole, haunted all of his life by something he saw happening at the airport, discovers that what he saw as a little boy was his own death, of his older self, trying to stop the plague, as a horrified "Kathryn" Railly who loves him holds him in her arms and can do nothing more than exchange glances with the little boy - and daringly throws this ending in our faces and turns it on its head. By which I mean: in the three hours on tonight (actually, the third hour, 4.9, which was one superb hour of television), Cole and "Cassandra" Railly (the same character as in the movie, with a new first name) realize that in order to stop the Witness and her plan to end all of time and existence, they must not stop the plague but make sure it's set loose in the airport (changed in the TV series to JFK from whatever the name of the airport in Philadelphia in the movie). The Witness knows this and tries her best to stop this by killing Cole - which she fails to do because Cole's mother takes the assassin's blow and dies in his stead. So, Cole dying in Railly's horrified arms in the movie is replaced by Cole's mother dying in Cole's arms and Railly looking on horrified in the TV series. Now that's what I call a pretty good twist - with sensitive acting by Amanda Schull as Railly, Aaron Stanford as Cole, and good work by Brooke Williams in the pivotal Hannah role. (Ok, maybe not better than the movie's, but certainly in the same league.)

The other part of this twist is that Hannah not Emma is Cole's mother. I did see this coming. I'm not sure why, but when Hannah and Emma were making their escape (again, from the Witness's assassins), it popped into my head that, hey, if Emma is killed it could well be that Hannah is Cole's mother. This of course makes for a much more meaningful and satisfying lineage, with Jones being Cole's grandmother.

So here's where we are for the two-hour finale next week. Deacon and Hannah are gone (with heroic deaths by both). The plague was released and kills seven billion. And Jones doesn't have much longer to live. I'm routing for the plague not to be released (I'm with Cassie and her reticence to release it - she's a doctor, but any normal human being should feel that way), and for Jones to somehow recover. That, of course, in addition to the Witness being stopped.

And I'll be back here next week to let you know what I think of how this all turns out.

Available on Prime

Friday, June 29, 2018

Humans 3.4: Sam

A big development in Humans 3.4, one which puts Sam very much in the spotlight of this narrative. It was a logical move, putting him right in the middle of our central characters, but one which I was not happy to see.

That would be the killing of his synth mother, Karen, at the hands of a brutal human mob (who, I can't help saying, remind me of the people at Trump rallies). On the one hand, she was always a marginal character, never quite in the center of this narrative. On the other hand, she was a very appealing and powerful character, well played by Ruth Bradley. I'll miss her.

But her death means that Joe will taking charge of Sam, which inevitably means Laura and family will be brought into his life, all the more significant in that this family now includes Leo and all of his knowledge. Does Leo know about Sam? Not clear. Indeed, I can't recall who else among our originally sentient synths know about Sam - maybe none of them.

As I said in an earlier review, Sam's very existence raises all sorts of interesting questions, first and foremost being will he age, or be an ageless Peter Pan? The actual construction of all the synths is far from clear. Clearly they have the stuff of circuits inside. We know from season one that they don't digest their food - they live on electrical energy. But it's still not clear if any of them age. Probably not. Which would make Sam an especially significant character.

One of the best things about Humans is the way it mixes interpersonal and philosophic issues, along with the action which keeps the story moving. Karen was a victim of this action. It's result has now put Sam on center stage.

photo THECONSCIOUSNESSPLAGUE5_zps8e1b18e3.jpg

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Monday, June 25, 2018

The Affair 4.2: Meanwhile, Back on the Island

Episode 4.2 of The Affair last night, was a pretty good, even excellent, standalone episode, though it had little to do with the central themes which animated the three previous seasons. If an overall series is a book, and each season a chapter, Cole and Alison's half hours felt like chapters in a new book, a sequel, published some years later.

The two different takes on the same story still worked well, though actually there weren't too many scenes in which Cole and Alison were together, making 4.2 almost two half-hour standalone stories. But my favorite was Alison saying "fuck" in her rendition, with the expletive absent in Cole's.

Alison's story was the more compelling and unusual. In her half hour, which came second, we see her at work in a center that offers peer-to-peer counseling for parents who lost a child. She meets a guy who saves her from a father suffering from a kind of PTSD - literally saves her life, from the guy who is choking her - and this proves to be the beginning of a longterm romance (also literally longterm, since the guy is in a program, too, which won't let him have romantic erotic relationships for another five months and x number of days and hours). Hey, were it me, I'd have left the program to go out with Alison - but, then, I wouldn't have joined such a program in the first place. Not drinking is one thing. Not being allowed to have relationships is ... well, I'd say counterproductive at best.

It's gratifying to see Alison in such good shape - the best she's been in the entire series, I'd say, and much better than Cole, who seemed more pathetic than usual last night. I'm with his wife - what's he so unhappy about? I know, he was a harrowing backstory, too. But, hey, man, get over it - you have a good life now, including on the verge of being a millionaire. Does he love and unconsciously miss being with Alison that much? Maybe.

Very well acted as always by Ruth Wilson as Alison and Joshua Jackson as Cole, and I forgot to say the same for Dominic West as Noah and Maura Tierney as Helen last week, because that was true, too. The Affair was always a unique series, and I think I'm going to like the new turn it's taken this year.

the Sierra Waters time-travel trilogy

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Westworld 2.10: The Realest World

An extraordinary season 2 finale of Westworld just concluded on HBO. Herewith a few thoughts about what we just saw, with perhaps more to follow -

1. So Dolores not Ford made Bernard. Or, mostly so. And after Bernard kills Dolores and comes to regret it, he spirits her out of Westworld into our real world (that is, the world in which I am right now, writing this, and you presumably are, too, reading this). Bernard does this by making Dolores look like Hale (which is not as shocking as it may seem, and is actually not that major a part of this part of the story). And Dolores, not holding Bernard's killing of her against him too much, decides to help get Bernard into our real world, too, because she knows she'll somehow need his help in that big bad world (our world) out there. And this is where we'll see them, next season, not quite enemies, but not allies either, because their ultimate visions of what they want for humanity (guests) vis-a-vis androids (hosts) is quite different.

2. The Man in Black, at least at the very end, turns out to be a host! But he was not a host all along. He's rather an example of the attempt by Delos etc to perfect a kind of immortality, in which the human mind can live forever, in the body and code of a host (forever because, if the host is killed, he or she can be recreated, as long as their code persists somewhere).

3. The promised land that the Native American hosts and Maeve and her daughter were headed to turns out to be not our real world, but some kind of mega-virtual reality. Whether the hosts who made it there can come back to Westworld is not clear (although in an important sense, it's just another park - a very special park - in the Delos park system). Anyway, Maeve's daughter is there, with some kind of version of Maeve - so Maeve kept her promise to her - as is Akecheta and his true love. As to our Maeve - the main Maeve - she was killed, but, again, death is not death if there's any of her code still around, so we'll no doubt be seeing her around next season.

In general, this finale did a very good job of tying together some of the dangling loose ends we've been seeing all season - including the charging bull in the opening credits - as well as opening up some important new vistas. I'm looking forward to see where they lead to next year, or whenever Season 3 is up and running.

You know, there's actually a fourth world at play in Westworld, in addition to the parks, the promised virtual land, and our real world: it's the world that was just on the screen in this series called Westworld, which of course comprises all three but is also a world in itself, created by the writers, producers, directors, and actors. Hats off to them all!

Saturday, June 23, 2018

12 Monkeys 4.4-6: Warnings, Redemptions, Deft Workings of Time

12 Monkeys 4.4-6, which I saw last night, was so good on so many levels that I wanted to let it simmer, at least overnight, before posting a review. At this point, and on the basis of both these three and the first episodes of this final season, 12 Monkeys is well on the way to cementing itself as the best - most thoughtful and at the same time entertaining and exciting - time-travel series ever on television.

To start with a minor point, the dialogue is sparkling. Jennifer, interrupting Cassandra and Cole in flagrante delicto, warns them (on the dangers of having another child), "Butt stuff only!" - which draws a suitably outraged, slightly horrified mouth-open expression from Cassie. Jennifer, in general, had a great three episodes, highlighted by her serenading the Nazis in 4.6, which, by the way, was in itself one of the best standalone episodes in the entire series. Jennifer, true to her nature, can't resist killing Hitler. Good for her! Not only is changing history be damned, given that all existence and time and space themselves are now at stake, but in a nice narrative touch we see in a headline that Himmler has taken over, which shows that history was not (or would not) be all that changed, after all.

It was also great seeing Agent Gale back in action. As we saw in the first three episodes, a keynote of this concluding season is bringing deceased characters back to life, and this was possible with Gale without even any temporal manipulation. Not that there wasn't plenty of that in these episodes, as Cole, Cassie, and Jones (and Jennifer) deftly, sometimes accidentally, ply the levers of time travel to pursue their worthy goals. As a set piece, Cassie's saving of Cole from the poison in 4.5 will go down as a textbook case on how this can and should be done without running into yourself.

But, as I felt after seeing the first three of these concluding episodes last week, Jones was in many ways the most galvanizing character in this part of the narrative. Her performance with the Nazis in Paris was brilliant, and reminiscent of A French Village. Her sacrifice at the end of 4.6 - getting Deacon to take her as a prisoner to the Witness - can change everything. (Barbara Sukowa, by the way, is doing a great job as Jones, as is Amanda Schull as Cassie, Emily Hampshire as Jennifer, and Aaron Stanford as Cole - and, hey, great to see Christopher Lloyd inimitably back on the screen.).

And speaking of Deacon (well played by Todd Stashwick), though I found his joining the Witness in the first three episodes a little trite, Deacon was redeemed in these second three episodes completely - he's now a more powerful character than he ever was. (And good to see Jennifer earlier signaling this deeper alliance with a lingual click.)

As we move into third set of three - the final episodes in the series before the final set of two - the biggest interpersonal question is whether Cassie will work to save the world or her relationship with Cole. I'm hoping she'll manage to do both, and it will be fun to see how this happens.

Available on Prime

"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

42 reviews of The Plot to Save Socrates!