The finale of the second season of Dark Matter, up on Apple TV, was many things: a short, ferocious battle scene in an alternate Chicago (one of the best in the series); the reunion and stranding of characters; the surprising death of others -- though, as I said last week, there inevitably are an infinity of killed characters left in existence in an alternate reality story like this -- all of this and more lit up the fast-moving final episode of the second season of this series.
But my favorite was the lesson in media determinism that Olu delivers to Leighton as they argue about whether to destroy the pyramid and therein the network of boxes. After Leighton gives a list of all the terrible consequences these boxes have brought into being, Olu tells his alternate self that all technologies have destructive unintended consequences.
"Even the printing press triggered wars, genocide," Olu observes. Yes, indeed. That's what media and all technology do. I wonder if versions of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan and their path-breaking work about media and their impact were known by Olu in the reality he came from. I certainly hope so, if only because their works were the impetus for my own 1998 book, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, which explained how the Protestant Reformation, the rise of national states, the European settlement of America, the scientific revolution, and the rise of public education and democracy, to name just a few, were products of what Gutenberg brought to Europe and the world.
But in the context of Dark Matter -- which in addition to all its other merits is a philosophic picnic -- Olu's point may miss the point that Leighton was trying to make. All of the non-fictional results of the printing press and other media and technologies in our world don't hold a candle to what Jason Desson has brought into being and Leighton Vance has vastly extended. A world of infinite worlds, a universe of infinite universes, holds infinite possibilities, good and bad. So far, we have seen just a tiny, two-season sample of what such an infinity of worlds and carbon-copy characters could bring.
In principle, that could be mean that Dark Matter could be an infinite series. But I'll gladly take that one season at at time, and look forward, for now, to season three.
See also See also Dark Matter 2.1: Who's Who in the Infinite Bucket ... 2.2: Sam Spade Back in Action ... 2.3: Can Two Couples Be in Two Different Places at the Same Time? ... 2.4: "There's No Entrance to the Diner" ... 2.5: Canterbury Realities and Proust ... 2.6: The Harptones in the Multiverse ... 2.7: "Through this door ..." ... 2.8: Amanda's Smile and Laurel's Singularness ... 2.9: Good News for Actors
And see also Dark Matter 1.1-1.2: Break-Neck Action and Philosophic Contemplation ... 1.3 Missing Fingers ... 1.4 The Multiverse Unveiled ... 1.5: The Lesson ... 1.6 "A Bunch of Chicagos" ... 1.7: Obama Tower ... 1.8: A Bevy Of Jasons ... 1.9: Science Fiction and Horror
No comments:
Post a Comment