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George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.
Chuck Todd interviews me about alternate histories
Showing posts with label Childhood's End. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Childhood's End. Show all posts
Hey, I saw the first episode of Josh Holloway's latest series, Colony, on the USA Network last night, and liked it. Definitely has potential. (I saw it On Demand - the series will premier this Thursday, January 10.)
With the demise of Falling Skies and the success of Childhood's End (it got pretty good reviews, though I wasn't thrilled with the ending of novel in the first place, but that's just me), we're definitely due for another alien occupation of Earth series. Colony could well be it.
Holloway's Will Bowman and his wife Katie (played by Sarah Wayne Callies = Lori Grimes from The Walking Dead) play the pivotal couple in the story, and do it well. It's good to see both back on television, as well as more work from Lost co-runner Carton Cuse.
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.
There's no denying that Childhood's End, which concluded its mini-series on SyFy last night, is a masterful rendition of Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 novel, which was itself a masterpiece. Indeed, the story rendered on the screen in many scenes had more power than the novel.
But as I said in my review of the first episode, I didn't like the ending when I first read the novel in the late 1950s, and I felt the same, maybe even more so, when I saw it on television last night.
[Spoilers ensue ... read on only if you've already seen the third episode, or don't care ... ]
We learn in the third part of the mini-series, as in the novel, that the reason that Karellen doesn't want Ricky and his current wife to have children is he wants to spare them the exquisite pain of losing them. This is an inevitable part of the literal ascension of humanity into a higher stage of evolution, in which human children become no longer children but the first expressions of this new species.
As such, this childhood's end is, in effect, a brief on behalf of children becoming liberated from and superior to their parents. I have no problem with that at all - in fact, it's already our way of life. But why can they never see their parents again - why is the ascension of the children mutually exclusive to continuing their relationship with their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and adult members of their families? That's the part I've always had a problem with - first, as a boy in the 1950s, and now as a parent myself.
The reason in the narrative, of course, is that the Earth itself is ending. But why must that be? Why couldn't humans continue on Earth, even as their children went out into the cosmos as a higher power?
Well, Clarke wrote the story, I didn't, and he's more than entitled to write the story he wanted to write. And as I said, he did it masterfully, as did the makers of this mini-series. So, by all means see it, but don't look for me to recommend it and its profoundly unhappy ending.
A really good episode of Childhood's End last night - 1.2 in the three day mini-series - which dealt with the impact of aliens on Earth on our terrestrial religions.
The first episode, and part of this second episode, focused on the impact of the Overloads on Earthling science. The vastly superior tech of the aliens makes our science unnecessary and obsolete. The impact on religion is even more destructive.
Religion is more than unnecessary in light of the Overloads. Their presence here on Earth is incompatible with the very bases of most of our religions. Karellen says this quite clearly near the end, when he points out that we already knew that all of our religions, with their competing views of existence and the universe, could not be right. But now we see that none could be right.
It was portrayed cogently and beautifully in Childhood' End last night. The ending was also powerful, when Karellen reveals why he prevented our leading human couple from having children. It was to save them the pain that would ensue.
Tonight we'll see exactly what he was alluding to. In the meantime, hats off to Charles Dance for his customarily superb performance, and to Childhood's End for now breaking some powerful new ground on television.
The first of the three-part Childhood's End mini-series began on the SyFy Channel tonight with a statement that Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 novel of that name changed and influenced science fiction for decades. That's true. When I read the novel a few years after its publication, it certainly changed my view of science fiction, making it more relevant to human life than even the great works by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, which I still enjoyed more. But the quietly breathtaking revelations of Childhood's End and the questions they raised were not to be matched.
The problem, though, as far as tonight's mini-series is concerned, was the pervasiveness of the influence of Childhood's End and its story of an alien visitation on Earth - a pervasiveness in all forms of science fiction, but especially on the television screen. Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" on The Twilight Zone a few years later, The Invaders with Roy Thinnes the next decade, V at its beginning and best in decades after that, all drew upon the story of Childhood's End in different and memorable ways. And that, inevitably, makes Childhood's End on television tonight less original, and therefore a little less compelling than it was as a novel in 1954.
Still, it was pretty good. I knew the truth of what the Overlords looked like, but their unveiling was still a strong moment, and I'd imagine especially so and more so for anyone who hadn't read the novel. I'm interested enough to see where this goes, and if the mini-series diverges in any way from the novel, whose ending was something that I didn't much like back then.
But it will be tough going. Unlike The Man in the High Castle, whose daring, stunning alternate history was something we haven't seen at all on any television screen, Childhood's End is too familiar, too reminiscent of too many science fiction motifs, to be great - at least, so far. And we'll see how the next two days go.
Hey, I saw the first episode of Josh Holloway's latest series, Colony, on the USA Network last night, and liked it. Definitely has potential. (I saw it On Demand - the series will premier this Thursday, January 10.)
Fargo concluded its second season earlier this month with a few episodes that were, literally, just out of this world. Well, one was, anyway.
There's no denying that Childhood's End, which concluded its mini-series on SyFy last night, is a masterful rendition of Arthur C. Clarke's 1954 novel, which was itself a masterpiece. Indeed, the story rendered on the screen in many scenes had more power than the novel.
