Heroes Season 4 Resumes: Quieter But Deeper

I've been saying for a while that Season 4 of Heroes is its best since that magical first season. The two-hour resumption of Season 4 on NBC tonight did not disappoint, offering a surprisingly effective, contemplative double episode, with interactions and conversations that went a long way towards weaving a powerful story.

Among the highlights -

1. Hiro, whose mind may be addled by his brain tumor, is speaking in riddles ... which ratify the position of Heroes in the science fiction, mystery, and fantasy genres. Among the stories Hiro draws upon in his attempt to characterize the dangers that he sees are Man of La Mancha, Sherlock Holmes, Star Wars, and Caprica. Yes, you have to give Heroes credit for having Hiro speak of Cylons and Caprica, which will debut on the SyFy Channel this January 22. If Fox can devote almost a complete episode of Bones to Avatar, NBC (part of the same corporate conglomerate as the SyFy Channel) can certainly slip in a mention if Caprica. I like those sorts of cross-references - they may be product placement, but they also give the narrative a nice realism.

2. Heroes also addresses the effectiveness of torture as a way of getting accurate information. Noah Bennet, on the verge of torturing fast-man Edgar for information, is persuaded by Lauren to use a kinder approach - which works, sort of. Noah's better than Jack Bauer (Keith Olbermann is cheering somewhere) - or, depending on your point of view, Noah's no Jack Bauer. Though, Jack has been getting a little gentler in his treatment of suspects in the past season or two of 24. Which will be premiering its new season on Fox next Sunday and Monday, and then will settle into its Monday night slot right opposite Heroes: good thing there's such as thing as TiVo and DVRs.

3. Good stories aborning for Sylar, who ends up menacingly at Claire's window ... for Peter, who wants to get in touch with Claire's flying old boyfriend from Texas, as Peter yearns to get more in touch with Nathan, now that he's gone (presumably) for keeps ... Samuel, who continues to be one of the best villains in the history of Heroes, in part because he manages to seem a decent, caring human being most of the time ... and a brand new character, my favorite heroic addition this season, someone who can literally breath life into the earth ...

A whole lot of good shakin' going on here, and I'm looking forward to more next week.

6-min podcast review of Heroes


See also Heroes Season 4 Premiere: Metaphysics, University, Carnival ... Heroes Meets The L Word in 4.5 ... Heroes 4 Mid-Season Finale

See also reviews of Season 3 Heroes Gets Lost ... Heroes 3 Begins: Best Yet, Riddled with Time Travel and Paradox ... Sylar's Redemption and other Heroes and Villains Mergers ... Costa Nuclear ... Hearts of Gold and the Debased ... Seeing the Future Trumps Time Travel ... Superpowered Chess with Shifting Pieces ... Villains and Backstories ... The Redemption of Sylar ... Thoughts on the Eclipse, Part I ... The Lore of the Comic Book Store ... Hiro's Time Traveling Closure ... Augmented ... Shades of Recalibration ... Baby, Rebel, and Last Fantasy ... All that Shape Changes Remains the Same? ... Season 3 Finale: Hopeful Deceptions

Reviews of Season 2 Heroes: Episode 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 7. Heroes Meets 12 Monkeys ... 9. How Immutable Are Fate and Isaac's Futures? ... 10. Penultimate for the Fall ... Heroes 2 Finale: Heroes Who Didn't Survive

And from Season 1: Heroes in Focus ... Heroes Five Years Gone: Triumph of Time Travel and Comics ... Heroes the Hard Part: Only the Pictures Not the Words ... Heroes Landslide: Winnowing and Convergence ... Heroes Volume One Finale

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Wells, Clarke, and District 9

Continuing to catch up on 2009 science fiction movies, with nothing playing on first-run television this week, I saw District 9 the other night. The applause is justified.

First contact stories, aliens landing on Earth, have been a staple at least since H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds at the turn of 19th into the 20th century and continuing with Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End in the 1950s, V on television in the early 1980s (and again this year) and the Alien Nation movie in 1988. District 9 manages to tell such a story in an original, heart-tugging, humorous way. The aliens seem bedraggled, pathetic. They're kept in filthy camps after they arrive. And they're about to be deported to even worse conditions. With all of this happening in South Africa, the parallels to apartheid are obvious and well taken: we treat others badly, that seems to be in our human nature.

But, from the very beginning, there should have been a nagging question for we humans: if the aliens are so pathetic, how did they manage to build a huge star ship and get here?

As the eviction continues, we start to see some of the scientific brilliance of the aliens. Meanwhile, one of the relocation officers, Wikus, is exposed to an alien chemical that gradually transforms him into an alien. This brings District 9 into another classic science fiction category - humans transformed into aliens - which we saw to excellent effect less than two weeks ago, in Avatar. In Wikus's case, he wants to stop and reverse the transformation, and this leads to an alliance with an alien scientist on Earth and his son, and a breathtaking last 30 minutes of the movie.

District 9 does a fine job of continuing the tradition of Wells and Clarke, and makes a memorable contribution to the canon. I'm definitely up for a sequel.


4-min podcast review of District 9

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Ninja Steampunk 21st Century Sherlock Holmes

Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes on the screen in 2009 was not just the cerebral Holmes played by Basil Rathbone from 1939-1946, or the hipper Holmes of Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution novel made into a movie in 1976. Downey's Holmes in Guy Ritche's movie had all of this - a brilliant mind and far more than a droll sense of humor - in a ninja, James Bondian warrior who could take out the most physically intimidating bad guys with the best of them.

This Sherlock actually did have an opponent who could have come straight out of Bond - a giant French guy, who reminded me of Jaws, the Bond bad guy with the teeth - as well a proximate master villain (Blackwell) whose extinction in the end by Holmes only cleared the way for the true master (that would be Professor Moriarty), just as Bond's vanquishing of Dr. No only led to Blofeld. Throw into this Lord Blackwell's evil magic - shades of you know who in Harry Potter - and you have an altogether satisfying, excellent adventure.

But Holmes' logic strips away the magic, and shows it be clever use of science, circa the late Victorian age, and this gets to the heart of this movie and its ambiance: a great steampunk movie, one of the best of its kind. Shot with a keen eye for the dawning of electrical power, for the industrial revolution flexing its keening, massive weight, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes takes us back to a world which movies made much closer to Sherlock's original time couldn't show us. In a way, Sherlock Holmes is this steampunk world is like the Avatar Garden of Eden world in space - two convincing, immersive, other-worldly creations.

The movie also provided palpable updates of women menaced by buzz saws that hearken back to silent movies, and the story was pretty good, as well. Sherlock is desired by sexy Irene Adler, who gets to kiss him only after she's drugged him. This continues the essentially asexual Holmes of Basil Rathbone, and obviously is decidedly unBondian. Dr. Watson, powerfully played by Jude Law, is also unlike the bumbling sidekick Watson of the 1940s, and can throw a mean punch of his own (including once at Holmes). This Dr. Watson also reminded me for some reason of Bones McCoy in Star Trek - "I'm a doctor, Jim!" - which is all to the good.

It's no easy feat to bring back of cast of characters from so long ago with so many incarnations. With little more than a voice for Professor Moriarity in this movie, it's clear that the adventures of this new Sherlock Holmes have just begun.

6-min podcast review of Sherlock Holmes

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Avatar in Science Fiction Perspective

My wife and I just came back from Avatar in iMax-3D. I guess I'm partial to any stories about Alpha Centauri - my second novel, Borrowed Tides, is about a one-way trip there, and Pandora in Avatar is a moon thriving with life around a gas giant planet circling Alpha Centauri A - but I think Avatar sets the gold standard for sheer beauty, visual imagery, and excitement in a science fiction or fantasy movie, standards previously held by the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings sagas. The attention to botanic detail, and for that matter all the beings, sentient and nearly so on  Pandora, was a breathtaking sight to behold.

Avatar's story has a lot in common with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, too. Good people or beings, in tune with nature, beset by a cruel, military force bent on taming, and if not, destroying the gentler souls. Indeed, many of the best battle scenes in Avatar come right out of Star Wars, and the single star fighters taking on huger cruisers, and Lord of the Rings, with Frodo and allies fighting the bruisers and monsters hurled against them by the evil lords, and the good beings all rallying in the end. There are echoes of Harry Potter as well as Lord of the Rings, too, with heroes flying great winged creatures, and of Terminator, with killing machines which also recall what the Empire used to attack the Ewoks in Star Wars.

In Star Wars, humans are pretty much equally distributed between heroes and villains, and the same is true of magical beings in Lord of the Rings. In Avatar, the humans are mostly bad, and the in-tune alien Navi on Pandora are all good.

This has led some critics to characterize the movie as an attack on humanity, and, because the ugliest Marines in the movie all have American accents, as an attack on America and American values. If this is so, it would be an attack on America in the 19th century, when Americans of European descent subjugated and wiped out most of the Native Americans on behalf of our selfish commercial interests. In that sense, Avatar was in many ways more like a Western, a cowboy and Indian movie, than a science fiction story - though the two genres are closely related. But seeing as how America in the 20th and 21st centuries has for the most part only gone to war when first attacked, or in attempt to preempt an attack, rightly or wrongly foreseen, the bad guys in Avatar bear little resemblance to us, and certainly not much to our current, professed ideals.

The most original part of the story concerned humans taking alien form, itself a science fiction chestnut in many a story, novel, and Star Trek episode. In fact, the story told in Avatar seemed more like an extended Star Trek episode than any of the individual Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movies. The human dynamics were also reminiscent of Star Trek, with Jake (the human hero) disobeying orders much like Kirk, and also falling in love with an alien.

But the women in Avatar were stronger than the women in Star Trek, and the heroine reminded me of Padme in Star Wars, especially when she literally lent a hand to killing the vicious Marine colonel. Speaking of Marines, that aspect of Avatar was reminiscent of Starship Troopers, though in that movie our Marines were all good guys, fighting marauding tank-sized and bigger bugs that attacked humanity.

So, all in all, James Cameron's Avatar was a splendidly rendered, multi-derivative science fiction movie - well worth seeing, in iMax-3D if you can, if your eyes and soul delight in visual magic, and/or if you just like science fiction. And, hey, Lost fans - you'll love seeing Ana Lucia in action again.


6-min podcast review of Avatar

*Note added January 17, 2009:  Delighted that Avatar just won the Golden Globe!

**Note added January 18, 2009:  See The Planets of Alpha Centauri: The Hunt for Pandora for a good summary of current attempts to find real worlds there. 
 

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Bones 5.9 meets Avatar and Videogamers

There was almost as much Avatar as Bones in episode 5.9, but that was ok, in fact pretty enjoyable, because we got to see a good story with Sweets, Jack, and Colin on the line in front of the Avatar theater, or, to be more precise, a good story with Sweets and a girl straight out the summer of love on the movie line.

First, what was Avatar - to open on December 18 in movie theaters, for real - doing so prominently on Bones? Well, Avatar is a Fox movie, and Bones is on Fox, so this was product placement par excellence. I have no problem with that - it worked well in the story. And it was good seeing Sweets - and then Colin - with the neo-hippie, and Jack give all of that some of his best knowing smirks, as well as some good older brother advice about women and life to Sweets.

Meanwhile, Booth and Bones had a pretty good case involving video gamers, in particular a murder that takes place over what I think (but I'm no expert) is a fictitious video game, Punky Pong. I have been involved in some learned debates, though, over whether playing video games engenders violence - I say they do not, see my CNBC debate with crusader against video games Jack Thompson, below (it's received more than 90,000 views on YouTube) - so I was happy to see that the violence in Bones was not the result of video games, but an over-protective father.

Booth and Bones get a little good time together at the end of the story, with Booth arguing the emotional, and Bones the logical, the ying and yang of their relationship which never grows old. They play a game of Punky Pong. In a sense their as yet incomplete relationship is as fictitious as the video game - or will remain as fictitious, until it's realized - but characters on television series are themselves avatars, subject to a logic all its own.


I'm actually on the left, and Jack Thompson on the right, in the above

6-min podcast review of Bones


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" ... Bad Santa, Heartwarming Bones 5.10

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!