Somewhere Between: Frequency meets Awake

Somewhere Between debuted on ABC tonight.  It has possibilities, including exploration of time travel, always one of my favorite kinds of narrative.

The set-up is Laura Price, whose eight-year daughter is killed by a serial killer she's pursuing as a broadcast journalist.   Laura's understandably more than distraught, and seeks to drown herself off-shore.  But instead she comes to and finds herself back in time, about a week before her daughter was murdered.

So Somewhere Between has some immediate similarities with Frequency (movie and TV series), though at this point it's much less scientific or or even pseudo-scientific.  And it also bears some resemblance to Awake, and its story of a police detective living in two parallel realities, because unlike Frequency and its ham radio, Somewhere Between has no mechanism to explain the time travel.

At least, not yet.  The one thing we know is that Laura's trip back in time happened when she tried to take her own life, at the same time as Nico - a former cop - is being thrown in the same or very nearby water, bound, i.e., in an attempt by some people to kill him.  And just to up that ante even more, Nico's brother is at that very moment being administered a lethal injection in a long delayed capital punishment.

So Laura's jump back in time is in some way connected to or occasioned by two other attempts to take human life at that very moment - attempts made on the lives of two brothers.  Laura, by the way, is played by Paula Patton, who was excellent in Deja Vu, the 2006 time travel movie which I consider among the top five in the genre (I'm taking the Back to the Future trilogy as one movie in that counting).

That's more than enough for me to watch the second episode of Somewhere Between in its regular time tomorrow night, when I'll report back with another review.

Awake 1.9: A Reason to Stay

An excellent, really satisfying Awake 1.9 last night, which moves the plot nicely, powerfully along.

In yellow world, Britten is going along with wife Hannah's desire to move to Oregon, and get away from their painful past.   This move would have dramatically changed the basis of the series, and I knew that something had to happen to stop the move from happening.

Britten finds the reason in blue world, where Rex his son is broken up about his girlfriend Emma breaking up with him.  Britten provides good fatherly advice to Rex, who talks to Emma, and finds out that she was pregnant with his baby (but lost it).  When Rex tells this to Britten - in another fine father/son scene - and Britten discovers that the conception occurred right before the crash-up that took Hannah's life in blue world and Rex's in yellow world.  (Kudos to the script writer for the adept way this conversation was handled - giving us the precise information, without being likely to ruffle any FCC feathers.)

Back in yellow world, Britten realizes that the same conception must have occurred - before the car crash - and there's a chance that Emma didn't lose the baby.  We and Britten had already seen in this episode that given events can be reversed in the yellow and blue worlds - such as a single event in a sporting game that can change the outcome of the game.  And, sure enough, Britten discovers that Emma is still pregnant with his grandchild in yellow world.

So now Britten and his wife have a wonderful reason to stay.   And we also know that this will put Britten's life in danger, removing Captain Harper's best argument to the villains to leave Britten alone - that he's leaving town.  All of which gives us more than reason that ever to stay with fine, intellectually provocative series.

See also Awake ... Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family  ... Awake 1.3: Frequency of Yellow and Blue ... Awake 1.4: The Baker and the Hooker ... Awake 1.5: Stretching a Dream ... Awake 1.6: Popper's Penguin

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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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Awake 1.6: Popper's Penguin

Another excellent Awake last Thursday - 1.6  - which, like all the episodes, teaches us something profound and useful about Britten's condition.  Indeed, the show in effect makes use of philosopher Karl Popper's observation that we increase our knowledge not by finding or proving what's true, but by proving what's not true - and thereby increasing our knowledge by subtracting what's false.  If we think all swans are white, and see a million white swans, we haven't proven that all swans are white - the very next one may be black.  But as soon as we see one black swan, we now know that all swans are not white.

In Awake 1.6, we get a penguin not a swan, and like all penguins, it's black as well as white.  But this penguin is different from Popper's swan, white or black, because of the important fact that it's hallucinatory.  Now, an imaginary swan of any color would do Popper's epistemology no good at all - it would say nothing about the nature of real swans in the world - but the imaginary penguin in Awake provides us with an important lesson:

If Britten can hallucinate, and pretty quickly realize that what he's seeing is  an hallucination, then that suggests that what he usually sees in yellow and blue worlds is real.  True, Dr. Lee shows up as an hallucination, but that's only after Britten is given ketamine in this "real" world.   Which suggests to me, again, that we don't need quotes around "real" in either world.

Yes, I can see that the penguin could also be a metaphor or a symbol for the whole series, and the "fact" that one or both worlds are really dreams, but, as I've been saying (actually, writing) about this series from the beginning, that would be an obvious and too-easy resolution for what Britten is going through.

If have an interest in philosophy, and the finer intellectual things in life, you just gotta love Awake.  Where else can you get a review of a television show with relevance to Karl Popper's der Logik der Forschung.
 
See also Awake ... Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family  ... Awake 1.3: Frequency of Yellow and Blue ... Awake 1.4: The Baker and the Hooker ... Awake 1.5: Stretching a Dream

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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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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com

Awake 1.5: Stretching A Dream

Another good, thought-provoking Awake last night - 1.5 - which raises the possibility of what might happen if Britten and Hannah in yellow world move from Los Angeles to Oregon.

Here's why that's important:  At this point, yellow and blue worlds are both in the same place.  Although Britten goes to different places in LA in the two worlds, he lives in the same house, and works in the same place.   In fact, his alternation between yellow and blue worlds happens every morning, when he awakes either with Hannah beside him or Rex in the next room.

What would happen to these alternate realities in the same point of origin if Britten changed one of those points by moving someplace else?  Significantly, both yellow and blue shrinks are happy to hear about this possible move - they rarely agree, but on this matter think it could be the beginning of Britten giving up what they say is the dream part of his double existence, and focusing more completely and healthily on the reality part.  Of course, we the viewers know, and Britten knows, that yellow shrink thinks blue world is the dream and blue shrink thinks that's the case for yellow world.

But we the viewers and Britten differ in our perception on one crucial point.  Britten seems sure that both worlds are realities, and we cannot yet be sure.   Although, as I've been saying all along, it would be disappointing if either world turns out to be a dream, or both worlds turn out to be a dream.  I'm with Britten in wanting both to be somehow be real.

In the single most telling series of scenes, at the end, Britten indicates that he might indeed move with Hannah to Oregon, but he insists to blue shrink that he's the one who's making this work now, and he'll find a way to make it (that is, the two worlds) work even if each world is in a different place.

Jason Isaacs is certainly making this complex story work with his strong, sensitive acting.  I have a feeling that the Brittens won't be moving to Oregon after all, but you never.   And Britten also now, in blue world, has a serial killing nemesis on his hands.

See also Awake ... Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family  ... Awake 1.3: Frequency of Yellow and Blue ... Awake 1.4: The Baker and the Hooker

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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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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com

Awake 1.4: The Banker and the Hooker

Given the rapacious performance of some bankers in our reality, one might say they're the same as hookers.  In Awake 1.4, that becomes literally true, as Kate, former babysitter for Rex, turns up as an investment banker in yellow world, and druggie/kept woman in grittier blue world.

This was a good episode and fine story in any case.  But what got me thinking about this set up of the same character leading two different lives in the two realities was this:

Up until now, it seemed to me that the two realities began with the crash, and, before then, there was only one stream of characters.  As example, Bird was Britten's partner before the crash, and after the crash he continue as Britten's partner in blue world but not in yellow world.

But let's look at Kate.   She was long ago Rex's babysitter - one world, one character.  Now, she leads a different life in yellow and blue worlds, just like Bird.   But unlike Bird, when did Kate's split of lives begin?  Not with the crash, but long before that, as she reacted to the death of her sister.   In yellow world, she got her life together after that loss; in blue world, she  did not.

But how, if the crash is the source of the bifurcations of worlds, did Kate's bifurcation start before that?

Yeah, I  know this could all be explained if any part of this is Britten's dream, but I'm still holding out that it isn't - and, if not, Kate's double life which began before the crash could somehow be an important clue.

See also Awake ... Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family  ... Awake 1.3: Frequency of Yellow and Blue

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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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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com

Touch: Fractals, Heroes, and 24

Touch joins Awake as one of the most intelligent shows on television - with heart and soul as well as intellect - refreshing, very complex, provocative, and altogether welcome.

Two great forces of popular culture come to bear in Touch - Kiefer Sutherland, who looks and sounds almost exactly the same as 24's Jack Bauer on Touch, and creator Tim Kring, who brought us Heroes.

Kiefer plays Martin Bohm, father of 10-year old Jake, who's mute and diagnosed as autistic, but is much much more.   Jake does have an incredible memory - like the classic idiot savant - but he also can see, intuit, understand the fractal nature of the universe, or the interconnected patterns of everything around us.  This part of the story - fractals - is science not science fiction.  Why, for example, do leafs and bird wings have the same patterns, when they have no evolutionary connection?   The universe, it seems, offers up a given series of templates - which harken, in a sense, to Plato's ideal forms.

But Jake sees much more than this, and here is where the wonder and amazement of science fiction come in.  Not only is Jake sympatico with fractals, but with quantum mechanics, and the part of it that compresses past, present, and future into an omnipresent now.   In plain English, Jake not only sees the interconnections, but where they can lead.   His chosen job is to get silent word out about bad futures to his father, so Martin can do something to avert them.

The pilot has two distinct stories, both connected via Martin, otherwise distinct from each other.  One concerns a smart phone that someone loses at the airport, which Martin gets his hands on, but before he can return to the owner,  gets called away to help get Jake down from a steep construction site on which he has climbed.  Good thing, too, because that phone set loose in the world eventually leads to stopping a suicide bomber, and making a singer famous.   The other plot concerns a firefighter who almost saved Jake's mother's (Martin's wife's) life on 9/11, and has felt guilty about that ever since.  Jake's interventions lead to a school bus of kids saved and the firefighter reclaiming his sense of self-worth.  Both of these happy endings follow a long series of apparently unrelated events, and the fun  is in seeing how these events all tie into one another - see, that is, what Jake already knows.

Meanwhile, Martin learns more of what's happening in Jake's head from Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), a sage old guy in the Bronx.   With Martin now realizing at least part of what Jake is up to do, the stage is set for some wild, complicated stories in which Martin tries to pick up on Jake's leads to shape the future.

Heroes meets 24?   That's just the past, Touch is the future, and I'm looking forward to more (including that 24 movie which is somewhere still to be made).

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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

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Awake 1.3: Frequency of Yelllow and Blue

No great shakes or revelations in Awake 1.3 last night - and I did get guess the villain as the old partner almost as soon as his mug was on the screen - but the episode did deepen our understanding of Britten's family nonetheless, with excellent exposition of Britten and his son Rex.

Especially memorable was Rex's explanation of why he resents Britten (in blue world).   Rex understandably is still deeply grieving for his mother, and, every time he sees Britten, which (I think) is every day, Rex is angry and conflicted about his father rather than his mother surviving.  Up until this episode, we've mostly seen the internal conflicts of Britten.  It was good to see Rex's now as well.

I said "I think" about Rex seeing Bitten, and our seeing blue (and yellow) world every day, because I'm not sure.  Britten takes sleeping pills to go to sleep after the harrowing blue day in which Rex is kidnapped, because he thinks (correctly) that he'll find some clues in yellow world.  And he wakes up the next morning - or seconds later in screen time - with Hannah beside him.  But, in other interludes in the first three episodes, we've seen Britten just shift between blue and yellow worlds in the middle of the day.  Are we really also seeing a shift from the middle of one day in blue or yellow world to the middle of the next in the alternate world?

Meanwhile, speaking of Hannah, exactly how much does she know about Britten's blue world in which Rex lives (and she does not).  We've seen the couple talk a little about this previously.  Last night, Britten tells her he can't join her at a Rex memorial because he has a kidnap case - involving a boy.  Later, Hannah asks him if the boy was ok - was this shorthand for her asking if Rex was ok, and did Hannah realize on some level that the kidnap of Rex in Britten's "dream" was what he was working on, what was keeping him from being with her at Rex's memorial?

Important continuing questions, which make this show worth watching even when there is no further development of the apparently nefarious captain.

See also Awake ... Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family

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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

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com

Awake 1.2: "Whole" Family

With episode 1.2,  I would now say Awake is the most complex, intelligent show on network - and maybe all - of television.

Among the central issues:  Why are the shrinks - Dr. Lee in the yellow, wife-alive reality, Dr. Evans in the blue, son-alive reality - not also present in the alternate realities (Lee in blue, Evans in yellow)?  Most of the characters - including Detectives Freeman (blue) and Vega (yellow) - are, though in different roles.   Also of some significance is that Lee is more critical of Britten's talk of the other reality, in contrast to Evans finding value in this (my wife pointed this out).  Does this mean that the yellow, wife-alive reality is somehow more primary, and the blue, son-alive closer to wish-fulfillment?  Probably not, but these differences bear watching.

Also of keen importance is the relationship of the cases in each reality, and the information that Britten gets from both of them.  In episode 1.2, the killer is a short man, who is brought to justice at the end of the blue-reality story.

But the short guy has much more significance in the yellow reality, where we learn at the end that he's the guy responsible for the car crash that killed Britten's son in the yellow reality and his wife in the blue reality.  This explains why Britten is really so interested in the short guy - maybe, as Captain Harper (played by Laura Innis of ER and The Event fame) tells us at the end of the episode, Britten somehow caught a glimpse of him ...

Which brings us to the mind-blowing revelation at the end of this episode - mind-blowing, even though the series has just started.   Harper, introduced in this episode in the yellow, wife-alive reality, urges Britten about halfway through the episode to go home and be with his wife.  Ok.  But, then, at the end, in a conversation with some higher-up - from CIA, FBI, who knows? - talks about the "horrendous" tragedy of Britten losing his "whole" family.  Not only that, she was responsible for the attempt to take him out.

That one word, "whole," may carry tremendous significance.   If Harper were purely part of the yellow, wife-alive reality, which would she should talk about Britten losing his whole family?  That characterization could only be made, I would think, by someone who can see both realities, and know that, if considered together, Britten could be said to have lost his whole family, his son in yellow and his wife in blue.  But, up until now, the only person to have such knowledge appears to be Britten himself.

As I said, complex, intelligent, very compelling television.

See also Awake ...

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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

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Awake

I was awake enough to see and enjoy Awake on NBC last night.  And you do have to be fully awake to appreciate this show, whose story is a little complex.

But here it is:  Police Detective Michael Britten (played by Jason Isaacs, of Brotherhood and lots of other fine fame) is in terrible car accident, with his wife and teenage son.  Cut to a few months later.  Britten is with his wife, mourning his son.  But in another scene, Britten is with his son, missing his wife.  He's seeing sage shrinks in both realities.   He tells each of his experience in the other reality.  They each try to convince him that the other reality is a dream.

So, apropos Fringe, we have an alternate-reality scenario going on here.  But unlike Fringe, the alternate realities in Awake are confined to one person - Britten is at this point the only one who has knowledge of, and in fact movies back and forth between, the two realities.  Most of the characters - other than the wife and daughter, and the alternate psychologists - seem to exist in both realities, but with no knowledge of their alternate selves.

The series is called Awake so as to make clear, I assume, that Britten isn't dreaming this.  And if it ends nonetheless as Britten's or anyone's dream, I'll consign it to the same disappointed, waste-of-time bin where Lost now resides in my television viewing history.

But, until then, I'm giving this provocative new series a shot.

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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

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...