Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: Tipping into the Mystic

So here's where I am regarding the nine episodes of Star Wars: I thought the first trilogy, by George Lucas, was fabulous - every bit as good, and maybe even better, than the other trilogy of that era, The Godfather (the third part of which, coming along almost 20 years later in 1990, not as good as the first two).  And I thought, contrary to a lot of critics, that the second Star Wars trilogy, also by George Lucas, in the movie theaters at the turn of the 20th into our 21st century and a little after, was every bit as good as the first trilogy, and at times even better.

And then there's the third trilogy (episodes VII-IX), of which The Rise of Skywalker is the third and final installment (episode IX), the creation of J. J. Abrams.  It takes place after the first trilogy (episodes IV-VI), which took place after the second trilogy (episodes I-III).  The second trilogy was thus a prequel, usually more difficult to do in a narrative than a sequel.  Which meant Abrams had a somewhat easier job than Lucas.   And, though I enjoyed this final trilogy ... now that it's concluded, I just think all of it just wasn't quite on the level of the first two.

This was a result of both the acting and the storylines.   In the first Star Wars trilogy (that is, the middle three episodes in terms of the time the story takes place), the acting was mostly campy, but lit up by some really high quality acting by Alec Guinness.  In the second Star Wars trilogy (the prequel), the acting by Natalie Portman, Ewen McGregor, Liam Neeson, and Samuel L. Jackson was downright excellent, and often incandescent.  In the third trilogy, just concluded, the acting returned to mostly campy, and the non-campy acting by Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley, especially in the finale, was strong and effective enough but not on the level of Portman and McGregor.

Indeed, the most appealing part of this third trilogy was the return of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and Billy Dee Williams in their original roles.   This was done well in terms of the acting.  But, in the final episode, the storylines in which they returned were a little ham-handed and under-explained.  In the first trilogy (episodes IV-VI) shown in theaters, one character, Obi-Wan, returns in a major way after he dies, and that worked very well in the narrative.  In third episode (IX) of the third trilogy, which debuted in theaters tonight, Ford, Fisher, and Hamill each return, and that was too much. And there were parts that were more muddled than need be in the part of the plot that centered around transitions from life to death and back again.  In the powerful scene in which Kylo brings Rey back to life, it wasn't clear if she was really dead, or if Kylo was dead and his appearance was an expression of Rey's unconscious.  It wasn't even completely clear whether Palpatine was dead or alive.  I know all nine movies were more mythic than literal, but the ratio of the final trilogy went a little too far towards the mythic, especially in this final episode.

All of that said, The Rise of Skywalker was enjoyable enough, and my wife and I will no doubt see whatever comes next on its opening day, whenever that arrives.   Our kids, who weren't born when my wife and I saw the first trilogy, were with us when we saw the second trilogy, and tomorrow are seeing the end of the third trilogy with their families. I'll be interested in finding out how they liked it.

See also Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Shakespearean and Fun ... Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Enjoyable Birds and Storylines

And see also Ten Reasons to Like the Clones

The Cloverfield Paradox: Fringe Meets Star Trek

Well, there really wasn't any paradox in it (things going very wrong does not equate to paradox), and the story was at least much horror as science fiction, but The Cloverfield Paradox on Netflix was pretty good science fiction of the alternate-reality variety anyway.

Earth in the future is in the throws of a grievous energy crisis.  Hope is placed in a new particle accelerator, to be tested in the Cloverfield space station.  A slightly nutty scientist or sooth-sayer warns that the energies that will be released in this test could rip reality apart and unleash untold monsters.  Of course, no one pays him any heed.

But indeed the tests do rip reality apart, or at least bring it into interactive smashing contact with another reality.  This is manifested by a woman who shows up in the metalwork of the station - literally - and a guy who loses his arm to the other reality (the arm comes back and writes our crew vital information), and you get the picture.  This is what I meant by Fringe (the Star Trek part comes from the crew in space).  The Cloverfield Paradox somehow mixes horror and humor in a way that only J. J. Abrams, one of the producers, can do it (hey, maybe that's the paradox).

There are good surprises, double-crosses, and breathtaking scenes throughout.  The protagonist, Ava (well played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, pictured above) is given the choice of reuniting with the family she lost in her/our reality - she can do this by going to the alternate reality - or saving our reality.   I won't tell what she does.

I will say that the changes unleashed by the particle accelerator usher in all kinds of horrors not only in space, but Earth as well.  Enjoy.

more alternate reality - "flat-out fantastic" - Scifi and Scary

Star Trek Beyond: The Rescue of Optimism

Continuing with my reviews of important 2016 movies, which I certainly should have seen and reviewed much earlier - in this case, July - but, hey, time itself has always been somewhat malleable in science fiction, especially Star Trek,

Star Trek Beyond is the lucky 13th movie in the Star Trek movie series - lucky to be released around the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of Star Trek on television in 1966, now known as Star Trek: The Original Series or ST: TOS for short.  ST Beyond is third in the reboots, in which  J. J. Abrams re-presented the original Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al crew, beginning a little earlier in time than TOS, somewhat before and during their time as trainees in Starfleet Academy.

In a brilliant move, the 2009 Star Trek reboot also brought into play the original Spock from TOS, older, played by Leonard Nimoy, via an alternate universe gambit.   I mention this, not only to praise it again, but because in some ways my favorite single part of Beyond was Zachary Quinto's Spock looking at a photo of his alternate, older self (Nimoy) near the beginning of the movie, and the whole original crew, again, near the end.   It was a satisfying way to again to make a connection to what started fifty years ago.

And it had a special pull on the heart because Leonard Nimoy is no longer with us, having died at 83 years of age in 2015.  The fact that Quinto's Spock not only knew but loved his alternate self, whom we also had come to know and love, has given Nimoy even more of a continuing place and life in our ongoing popular culture.

There was, indeed, a lot of the past in Beyond, with an earlier starship, the USS Franklin, playing a major role in the story.  It's a Warp 4 ship, which puts it a notch below the Warp 5 speeds of the Enterprise in the Star Trek: Enterprise series, which depicts voyages of the first Starfleet starship.   This immersion in the past was good to see, continuing a tradition which goes back to TOS itself, and its making an episode - "Menagerie" - out of its pilot episode, in which Kirk was not even yet Captain of the ship.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the optimistic view that underlies all of Star Trek - in contrast, to say, Star Wars - comes from Victorian times, and lasted until a little beyond the middle of the 20th century, when it was assaulted but not destroyed by the cynicism and pessimism that hold so much sway today.   I've just begun reading a great anthology of the writings of Hugo Gernsback (compiled and with a pathbreaking introduction by Grant Wythoff), and his unbridled but well considered optimism about how we could and would improve our lot via science and technology (I'll be reviewing it here soon).  I share that view - and certainly Star Trek did as well.

And the inspiration of the Star Trek reboots, continuing with Beyond, is that it still does.  The stories are exciting, the repartee between Kirk and Bones and Spock is clever and fun, but it's the joy in the prospect of humans out in there in the stars that was always the beacon of Star Trek - a beacon drawing us to it and drawing us out there.  Star Trek has rescued that optimism that animated Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, and I look forward to its continued presentation as it pursues its bold, new voyages on the screen in our 21s century.

See also Star Trek: Reborn, Reset, Resplendent and Star Trek Into Darkness: Echoes, Resonances, and Great

Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and J. J. Abrams

If you're talking about AI science fiction - robots or androids programmed to convincingly think and act like humans, or almost like humans, or more than humans - you've got to start with Isaac Asimov and his three laws of robotics:  (1) a robot can never harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow injury to befall a human, (2) a robot must follow all orders given to it by a human, except if such orders conflict with the first law, and (3) a robot should always act to preserve its own existence, except when following this third law would conflict with the first two.  Thus, a robot ordered by a human to dismantle itself must follow that order, unless the robot knows that the human giving such as order was set to commit suicide, a suicide which the robot not dismantled could prevent.  (This is not an exact quotation of Asimov's presentation of the three laws, but my own statement of them, with explanatory example.)

Now, Asimov was a fiction writer, a story teller, and one of the best all-time writers at that.  So, the only reason why he formulated the three laws was to provide the foundation of an exciting story in which, for some reason, the laws were broken.  A human is found murdered in a locked room, with a robot standing by, with blood on its arm, which indicates that the arm bludgeoned the human.  What happened?

Asimov didn't deal that much with the tricky nature of consciousness and sentience, but Philip K. Dick did, in a series of short stories and novels that stretched to the limits our understanding of how we understand sentience, and often put those stories in the brains of androids, as in Blade Runner.   Indeed, more movies and television shows have been made from Philip K. Dick's work than any other author, and most of them have been superb and pathbreaking.

So, when I say that Westworld, based on its first episode, is a combination of Asimov and Dick, served up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams, that's high praise indeed.

The HBO series goes so far beyond the 1973 movie, which was very enjoyable but much less sophisticated, that the new series could have been titled differently and that would have been fine. The androids in the Westworld and related amusement parks begin to malfunction in the movie, killing the guests, but the emphasis is on the action, rather than the metaphysics of the androids.   In the HBO show, this ratio is reversed, and the first episode sets up all kinds of reasons for what may be happening - androids who want to break out of their dream, i.e., programming.

Among the most interesting is the possibility that repeated "builds" or programming sets may be leaking into one another, with the result that the oldest androids might be experiencing an unintended synergistic mixing of programming with unforeseen consequences.   And, to be clear, by oldest I don't mean the androids that look oldest, but the androids that are oldest, as in  having been created first.  In other words, in the series, beauty's only skin deep in all kinds of ways - or maybe it isn't only skin deep in more ways than we can or can't imagine.

I'm not going to review the action all that much in this series.  But I'll be here with metaphysic disquisitions whenever I can.


  

#SFWApro

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Shakespearean and Fun

So here, at long last, is my review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens: fabulous!

Further, J. J. Abrams made a brilliant move in bringing back the father/son Greek drama conflict that animated the original trilogy, except reversing who was good and who was bad, that is, making the father good and the son bad.  That was brilliant.

And though I just hated Han Solo being killed by his son, I would have hated Han Solo killed by just about anyone else even more, because the son killing the father is also perfect classic Greek tragedy, and Shakespearean too, while we're on it.

J. J. Abrams had already shown in his Star Trek reboot that he knows how to weave in iconic, central characters from the original series.  Indeed, Han in The Force Awakens had an even more crucial role than the older Spock in Abrams' 2009 Star Trek, and that's saying a lot.  Harrison Ford is a powerful and subtle actor - a rare combination - and he brought that to this swan song in Star Wars, bringing Han's swagger, sense of humor, and soul in fine proportion to the role.

Women played a much bigger and better role than in the original trilogy, especially Rey (well played by Daisy Ridley) and her wielding of the light saber and keen sense of right and wrong, and Leia, who I actually thought was a lot better in The Force Awakens than in the original trilogy. And/or, maybe Carrie Fisher is a much better actress now.   The combination of Leia and Rey set up - what, an aunt and niece dynamic? - that compliments the father and son motif, and has the saving grace of both being on the side of light.  (I think it likely that Rey is Luke's daughter, almost certainly not Leia's.  Leia doesn't hug Rey in the way a mother would hug a daughter, certainly not one she hadn't seen in years. And Rey starting out on that backwater world reprises the way we first found Luke, in the very first Star Wars move.  For that same reason, though, I'd say there's an outside chance that Rey is Obi wan Kenobi's progeny.)

By the way, though I've been talking about the original trilogy, let me point out that unlike many dyspeptic critics, I loved the second, prequel trilogy, too, and I recommend anyone starting out on these movies should see all six, in the order in which they were originally released, before seeing The Force Awakens.

Other things: the new robot was great, it was fun to see the old ones again, and I would have liked to hear Luke at least say a word when he meets Rey at the end. Max von Sydow could have been on the screen longer, as an Obi wan Kenobi kind of character - he was on so briefly that I can't even recall his name.

This movie was so good that I wish it was twice as long.  I was glad to see Hillary Clinton say "the force be with you" at the end of the Democratic debate on Saturday, because you could say she's Leia and Trump was Snoke or maybe General Hux, or someone in between in age.   Right, I'm mixing politics into this, and if you don't like it, too bad, it's definitely something Han Solo would have done, may he rest in peace.

Star Wars, when first movie came out, brought science fiction out of the cult and into the mainstream, as I told AM New York and AP and Roy Green on his radio show.  The Force Awakens continues this grand tradition of science fiction as a Shakespearean form of our time, and hey those special effects and aliens in Maz's cantina's were a real treat, too.

See also this thoughtful review by James F. McGrath ... and here's my defense of Star Wars 2: Attack of the Clones, published back in 2002 in Locus Online ...



the force in our reality

The Blacklist Debuts: Alias meets Jay Z

One of the best nights of Alias - the early J. J. Abrams complex spy thriller - was when Irina Derevko shows up one day and turns herself in to the CIA. She did this for more than one reason, but high among them was to be closer to her daughter, Sidney Bristow, in CIA black-ops.   The Blacklist reminded me of that moment - which is to say, it was fast-paced, thoughtful, and struck tonight like a hammer on an anvil.

So is Red Reddington - played by world-class actor James Spader - agent Elizabeth Keen's father?  I'm suspecting that he is.   He wants only to talk to her - shades of Hannibal Lecter - and he's as interested in, and knowledgable of, her private life as he is of the crimes he's helping the FBI prevent.   He also arranges to have her husband severely injured, and we learn at the end of that he's some sort of spy, too.

The tropes of spy dramas have been played to the hilt in television shows and movies, so it's refreshing to find a show that is genuinely original and surprising in its plot turns - even though it echoes part of the set-up of part of Alias.   The husband's identity was unforeseen, and there will likely be much more of that as The Blacklist continues.

The big question is what is Red's ultimate motive?   To be closer to Elizabeth - sure.  But as Red goes through his blacklist with the FBI to stop the heinous crimes - to be committed by the worst criminals he's encountered as a master criminal, but off the FBI's radar - there will likely be other more purely political and espionage motives, where lives will hang in the balance,  and Red's deepest allegiances won't be clear.   There's an element of The Following and its harrowing brutality here, too, and an unflinchingness even in the closing lyrics, including Jay Z's "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one."

I'm down.

#SFWApro  

Star Trek Into Darkness: Echoes, Resonances, and Great

Tina and I just got back from seeing Star Trek Into Darkness - at a theater on Cape Cod on Enterprise Road, no less - and just loved it.  We both think this second J. J. Abrams Star Trek outing is a lot better than the first - which was excellent - and I think this movie is one of the very best of the twelve Star Trek movies made thus far.

Our central characters were more natural and confortable in their skins than in the first movie, in which they sometimes verged a little too close to caricature.  This time, not only were Kirk and Spock superb, but Bones, Scottie, and Sulu were outstanding, and played crucial roles in the story.   Chekov was still and likely always will be a little ridiculous with his Russian accent - I bet the average person who speaks English in Russia today speaks with less of an accent - but that's part of what makes him endearing.   My wife Tina wanted to see more echoes of the original Uhura in this movie, but I liked this Uhura just fine.

Bear in mind, as the old Spock explained to us in the previous movie, that what we've been seeing in this and the previous movie is an alternate reality of Star Trek - alternate, that is, in contrast to what we saw in the original and subsequent Star Trek television shows and the first 10 movies, which we can now identify as pre-JAbrams.  In most ways, the characters are the same.   And most of the original characters are in this rebooted universe.  Hence Nurse Chapel from the original series is mentioned in Into Darkness.

But there are differences, which account not only for Uhura - and her romantic relationship with Spock in the J. J. Abrams movies - but other characters including Christopher Pike.   In the original series, he ends up in a wheel chair, face disfigured, on a world in which he can live his dreams (Kirk and Spock help get Pike there).   In the new movie, he ends up dead - killed by Khan's attack.   My wife wondered why he couldn't have wound up disfigured in a wheelchair in the new movie, too.   It would have made a nice closing of the loop between the original and current Star Trek realities, and I would guess that J. J. Abrams and his producers and writers didn't want it to close quite so neatly.

They're probably right.   What we want are glimmering reflections of the original Star Trek, not a more intense, constant search for similarities and coincidences with the original.   Khan, for example, who was a crucial character both in the original TV series and the original movies, was a Khan who in this movie bears only some resemblances to the original.   But Old Spock tells Spock about the essential similarity: Khan is a highly lethal danger to Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise.

In the end, people who have seen every Star Trek ever made will have to decide if they think the similarities are too little, too much, or just right.   My wife wanted more of the original Uhura - especially because other characters resonated so well with the originals - but I didn't really miss her in this movie at all.  But such differences in taste are akin to whether you prefer this touch of spice or that in a great dish.   What's undoubtable is Star Trek Into Darkness was one great movie indeed.

See also Star Trek: Reborn, Reset, Resplendent

 

#SFWApro

Revolution 1.14: Nanites and Jack Bauer

A big reveal on Revolution 1.14 tonight, and it's good science fiction, too.

Why did the lights aka power go out?   What did Rachel have do with that?

Her knowledge of this, not to mention her involvement in it, has been hinted at for months.  And tonight we find out the story.   "Nanites" which could keep Danny healthy - remember we saw how sick he was prior to the blackout - can't work in our plugged-in and digital world.  So Rachel and colleagues made it that all go away.

Danny lived, the world went dark and on the verge of barbarism, but that was ok, as long as Danny lived.   His death a few episodes ago did more than traumatized Rachel - it showed her that the world she had helped bring into to being, to save her son, had killed him anyway.  That's why she's so determined now to turn the lights back on.

A pretty good story, and satisfyingly logical as science fiction, too.  Because of that, I'd say Revolution is now one of J. J. Abrams' best franchises.

Meanwhile, there's good other stuff going down too - down, that is, in the old South, in the new Georgia Republic which is far more than our current state of Georgia, though Atlanta is still its capital.  There Miles not only stops a nuke from Monroe, but makes an alliance with Georgia's leader, played by Jack Bauer's late wife Teri (played by Leslie Hope) on 24.   Should be some big times ahead as Miles agrees to "become a general again," and lead a sizable troop of solders back to attack his power-crazy former partner from the inside-out.

See also Revolution: Preview Review  ... Revolution 1.2: Fast Changes

The Americans: True and Deep

The Americans, with Keri Russell as one half of the Soviet sleeper spy couple so deeply undercover in Washington they're more American than most of us, debuted on fx last night.  It was superb.

First, about Keri Russell, there are two interrelated things about her past as an actress that make her appearance in The Americans especially interesting.  She is best known for her breakthrough Felicity roll a while ago,  one of J. J. Abrams' early series about a college student.  And Abrams' next series was Alias, which featured Jennifer Garner not Russell as graduate student turned spy, but which had a major continuing storyline about a Soviet agent under cover in the United States - Sydney Bristow's (Jennifer Garner's) mother, Irina/Laura.   I like these sort of complex prior histories to television series.

In Alias, the Soviet spy (played by Lena Olin) was married to an American spy (played by Victor Garbor) - all powerfully acted, by the way.  In The Americans, both Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) and her husband Phillip (Matthew Rhys) are Soviet spies, and their acting is top-notch.  In fact, just about everything in this series seems to be, so far.  Plot twists, unexpected bursts of action, frank sexually vivid (not quite explicit) language combine with the acting to made the premiere never a dull moment.

Russell, especially, has a way of getting just the right pitch in her voice.  When her husband, wanting to show her a little affection and getting rebuffed, protests that he's her husband, Elizabeth responds "is that right?" with just the right slight cutting sarcastic edge.  This is because their marriage is their job as spies, not a true aspect of their lives.  But, as William James the American psychologist noted more than a century ago, when you go through the actions of something, often enough, you begin to grow real feelings for those actions, too.

Elizabeth and Matthew have been at this for more than a decade.   They have two children, a daughter age 13 and a son a little younger.  So of course they have some real feelings.  It's just that, at the beginning of the show, Matthew is more in touch with them than is Elizabeth.  But that changes at the end, in a sequence of events which show that, as much as Matthew has become a truly happy suburban American father, he's still tough as nails underneath.

The one part of the premiere episode that jangled a bit is the FBI guy who moves next store.  This can't be coincidence - which Elizabeth and Matthew seem to realize - but so far the show is playing it as coincidence one-hundred percent.  I expect we'll find out before too long what's really going on with the neighbor.

There's also great 1981 scenery, with talk about Reagan as a lunatic from the Soviet perspective, Walter Cronkite on television, and all sorts evocative 1981 music.  At this point, The Americans is looking to easily be one of the best new shows on television, with only The Following as any real competition.

                                                           

Revolution: Preview Review

I caught the complete first episode of Revolution last night - set to premiere later this month on NBC - courtesy of NBC putting this up On-Demand. Herewith a review, with soft (non-specific) spoilers.

Revolution is J. J. Abrams' latest. Now, I know what you're thinking - or, what I was thinking, anyway. With the exception of Fringe and (to a lesser extent) Person of Interest, Abrams has not come anywhere close to his extraordinary triumphs of Lost or even Alias. Half of his efforts have been like last year's Alcatraz, promising at first but pretty soon an irredeemable turkey.

So I approached Revolution with caution, and - I found the debut episode superb! It's chock full of punch-in-the-gut surprises, with characters we think are major dying on and off camera, and big, unexpected revelations right up until the end. The set-up, though it might seem at first glance to have too much in common with the ill-fated FlashForward and the high-flying Walking Dead, turns out to be refreshing and original.

The world has been beset by a power failure from hell - all electricity is gone, including battery power (which, in our real world, the Amish use instead of electricity from power plants). This means that everything digital is gone - useless - too.

We follow a family - no Family Robinson - in the Chicago area. (You notice how often Chicago is popping up in television drama these days? Boss, Revolution, Chicago Fire, last year's Playboy Club - probably another good consequence of Obama, seriously). Charlie, the daughter - a little under 20 - is strong, attractive, and believable. The others are good, too, and I found myself disappointed when the first episode was over - disappointed that I couldn't see more.

There's an endearing hipness about Revolution - the Hurley-like character (we had one, Hurley himself, in Alcatraz last year) - was a big exec at Google, before the permanent blackout. So far, I like this guy better than the Alcatraz guy.

"You say you want a Revolution, well, you know ..." I'm looking forward to this one on NBC.




"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

"Daddy, this the best book I've ever read!" -- Molly Vozick-Levinson, age 12 at the time

"cerebral but gripping" -- Booklist

Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Mission Impossible is back with its 4th movie, and one of the best - well, better than the 3rd, which was pretty good, but I'm not sure about the 1st and 2nd movies in the franchise, which were each in their own ways superb.

Alias, Lost, and Fringe fans (I'm a big one, though not of the ending of Lost), will be glad to know that J. J. Abrams is back, this time getting top producer credit (he directed MI3), and Josh Holloway puts in an appearance at the beginning.    The antes are raised nicely in MI4, with the Kremlin blown up, the US Defense Secretary killed (played by major actor Tom Wilkinson, making the death even more surprising, and all-out nuclear war at stake between the US and Russia.  This had an appealing retro flavor, and was refreshing in view of so many Islamic terrorists in movies and on television.

The MI slight-of-hand devices and impersonations were also in fine display - with a projector that makes the guard think he's looking at a far wall with no one in the room, even though Ethan and Benji are actually walking right by the guard into the guarded room - and a cool double feint in which the team splits up and fools two of the villain groups at the same time, keeping in touch via the comm at their disposal.  

As in all the MI stories, there are a couple of escapes that fall a little short of believability - Brandt's survival in the wind tunnel or whatever that was is the one that most comes to mind.  But these were balanced by the MI plans and strategies which don't work out - including failure to stop the launch of the Russian nuclear warhead toward the US - which gives the movie a good smack-in-the-face plausibility.

And the acting, including and especially Tom Cruise as Ethan, was excellent.  Jane (Paula Patton) and Sabine (Léa Seydoux) were both dangerous in different ways and good to look at.   The team - which was ghosted or put into non-existence when wrongly held responsible for the Kremlin bombing - accomplishes its mission in the end, and will clearly be back, as Ethan's new team, for another romp, I hope not too far in the future.

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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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Person of Interest 1.8: Widmore and Ben, At It Again

Hey, fans of Lost - and I was a devoted one, until those ruinous last few minutes of the finale - will be happy to know that Widmore and Ben were up to their old tricks on Person of Interest 1.8 the other night.

Well, not quite Widmore, but Alan Dale, who played Widmore so well in Lost, is back on the kill in Person of Interest.  This time, Dale as Ulrich Kohl is a former Eastern German agent, recently out of prison, and determined to end every member of his former team he holds responsible for the death of his beloved wife Anja, years ago.


Reese and Finch (Ben aka Michael Emerson), then, soon realize they are out to intervene with a perpetrator not a victim.  Kohl gets the drop on the usually almost invincible Reese - as I've said previous reviews, I like when heroes are not perfect, makes them more human and believable - and Reese and Finch have to work especially hard to finally get the drop on Kohl.


Two good twists in this episode - Anja is alive and well in NYC, and Kohl who feels betrayed by her turns out to be bluffing when he makes to kill her (and this provokes his suicide by Reese, which he is not happy about - where's Desmond and his time traveling when you need him).   And Carter and Fusco have a little more relevance than usual, almost closing in on Reese in the park, a few minutes after he shoots Kohl.


So Widmore again dies, if not by Ben then by his partner Reese (or whatever exactly Reese is to Finch - not quite his partner, but not quite his employee, either).  And we get some good flashback scenes - which seem to have a become a television staple since Lost - of how Reese got into the business.  But, hey, they're both J. J. Abrams' shows, and he's entitled.  It's not plagiarism to take from yourself.

See also Person of Interest of Interest  ... Person of Interest 1.2:  Reese and Finch ... Person of Interest 1.5: Potentials ... Person of Interest 1.7: Meets Flashpoint and The Usual Suspects

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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 ...

Person of Interest of Interest

I was interested enough to see the first episode of Person of Interest.  It's Minority Report (an operation identifies crimes before they're committed, and tries to stop them), Medium (sees the future), Mission Impossible (you know what that is), a bit of 1984, and a few other touches all its own.  I liked it a lot.

Michael Emerson (Ben from Lost) is one of the major characters (Finch) who is so much like Ben (Finch even gets roughed up like Ben) that it could have been Ben, but that's ok, because Ben was one of the more fascinating, provocative characters on Lost.   Here he plays a computer genius who built a device, in the aftermath of 9/11, that could track potential terrorist attacks, with a view towards our government's intercepting them.   An unintended consequence is that this special super-computer could also ID potential non-terrorist crimes like individual murders and kidnappings.  Ben - sorry, Finch - built a back-door to his program, and he's determined to stop as many of these one-on-one crimes as possible.  Not as easy, of course, as it sounds, and complicated by the fact that the computer program cannot be sure whether the person of interest it identifies is the victim or the perpetrator.

Finch needs eyes in the field.  Not only only eyes, but moves that can stop the crimes.  He's not government, but he has plenty of money, he's off the grid, and he's in the market for a James Bond kind of agent.  That's where Reese comes in, played by James Caviezel (who was excellent in another science fiction story, Frequency, one of the best communication-back-through-time movies ever made - in fact, the best).  My Mission Impossible reference gets to the complexity of Reese's assignments, and 1984 points to our government still watching all of us through Finch's massive computer and its omnipresent lenses.

The premiere was good,  the show has potential, and I'll keep watching it.  I'm always a sucker for stories about the government watching me.  And, hey,  J. J. Abrams - one of the executive producers - has done some pretty good previous work with Felicity, Alias,  Lost (except for the ending, which I don't think was his fault),  and Fringe.

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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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Lost 6.9: Richard's Story

Well, we finally get the story of Richard Alpert in Lost 6.9. Turns out he's not quite eternal, having come to the island on the shipwrecked Black Rock in 1867, but that certainly suffices for ageless immortality for our 20th-21st century characters.

First, let me say I always liked Richard. Timeless characters, whether observers or players, provide a satisfying unity, an anchor, to high-flying magic and science fiction. Over on Fringe, J. J. Abrams latest excellent creation, the eternal bald observer (revealed as part of a team of eternal bald guys) does a good job in this role.

Unlike eternal characters who literally look the same all their lives, Richard Alpert's appearance and manner changed with circumstances, while his age stayed constant (late 30s, maybe a little older). He was homespun on the island, but urbane when he traveled in the greater world, as when he recruited Juliet.

Tonight we learn that through all of this he has been a pawn in the battle between Jacob and the Man in Black (aka Nemesis, faux-Locke). Jacob pulled the Black Rock to the island, Nemesis recruited Richard to kill Jacob, but Jacob succeeded in turning Richard to the better cause and making him ageless in the bargain. We got about as explicit a statement from Jacob as we've so far heard about this cause: keep the evil that is now faux-Locke from spreading out from the island to the world at large. Keep the evil genie in the island-bottle.

Richard's commitment to Jacob and the good receives its ultimate test in Lost 6.9. Devastated by Jacob's death, recalling the Man in Black's offer to Richard to join him if Richard ever changes his mind, Richard is about to move over to the dark side when Hurley engages him in the jungle. Hurley's ability to see and converse with the dead - more full-fledged than Miles' - puts Richard in touch with Isabella, his wife, deceased. Richard's attempt to save her back in 1867 put him on this path of restless immortality. Fortunately, Hurley Reyes is of course fluent in Spanish, and easily converses with Isabella's ghost, who among other things praises Ricardo's fine English. The result: Richard is staying with the good guys after all.

There were some good Tenerife (Richard's original home) scenes in tonight's show, some interesting background on the Jacob-Nemesis conflict, but overall the story was oddly unsurprising, and I missed alternate better-LA and its inexplicably intersecting characters, which I look forward to seeing more of next week.


5-min podcast review of Lost

See also  Lost Season Six Double Premiere ... Three Questions Arising from the Lost Season Six Premiere: Linkage Between Two Realities,  Dead Bodies Inhabited, Who/What Survived H-Blast? ... Lost 6.3:  Kate and Claire, Tenacious Details, and Dr. Arzt's Arse at the Airport ... Lost 6.4:  Better LA, Wilder Island, Some Partial Answers at Last ... Lost 6.5: Jack's Family and Prester John's Speculum ... Lost 6.6: Sayid the Assassin in Both Realities ... Lost 6.7: A Better Ben in Both Realities ... Lost 6.8: The Third Team

More Lost - see : The Richard-Locke Compass Time Travel Loop ...

and Lost Returns in 5 Dimensions and 5.3: The Loops, The Bomb ... 5.4: A Saving Skip Back in Time ... 5.5 Two Time Loops and Mind Benders ... 5.6 A Lot of Questions ... 5.7 Bentham and Ben ... 5.8 True Love Ways ... 5.9 Two Times and a Baby ... 5.10 The Impossible Cannot Happen ... 5.11 Clockwork Perfect Time Travel ... 5.12: Ben v. Charles, and Locke' Slave ... 5.13: Lost Meets Star Wars and the Sixth Sense ... The Problem with Baby Aaron and the Return of the Oceanic Six ... 5.14: Eloise, Daniel, and Obsession Trumping Paradox ... 5.15: Moral Compasses in Motion ... Lost Season 5 Finale: Jacob and Locke

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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

Star Trek: Reborn, Reset, Resplendent

Star Trek, since its birth in our popular culture in 1966 on NBC television, has led a remarkable life. Canceled after three seasons due to an insufficiently large audience - of which my wife (then my girlfriend) and I were devotedly among - Star Trek went on to break the hold of network television, with a series of series beginning with Star Trek: The Next Generation that went directly into successful syndication. As I pointed out in How Star Trek Liberated Television, this in retrospect was the beginning of television entertainment on cable and the Internet which is still burgeoning today. Along the way, Star Trek had some of best time travel stories (City on the Edge of Forever in the original series, Yesterday's Enterprise in The Next Generation) - keep that in mind - as well as some of the best humans meet alien stories ever told. I truly believe that when we eventually get beyond our solar system with faster-than-light travel in centuries to come - who knows, maybe decades - we will still be inspired by Star Trek as we navigate our way through the cosmos.

Star Trek also inspired other works in popular culture, including a whole bunch of movies, most of which were not as good, not even close, to best of Star Trek television. This is the challenge that J. J. Abrams and his colleagues took up when they set out to make a new Star Trek movie.

They decided to make a movie about the original crew and characters - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov - before and during their first meeting up on the Enterprise. A movie about Star Trek Academy, detailing some of these budding relationships, had been talked about for decades. Abrams could have made such a movie, and it would no doubt have been excellent, a real delight for the fans, and everyone.

Instead, J. J. Abrams decided to something better. The reason, I'm sure, is that he didn't want to be locked into telling the same stories we already saw on television all those years ago, once again, now, on the big screen, if this movie succeeded. Nor did he want to be confined to filling in the gaps of what we already know about Kirk, Spock, et al....

So .... Abrams did something very different indeed. And here the story of the new Star Trek begins....

[[[SPOILERS BELOW HERE]]]




Kirk's father dies at the hands of Romulans, as Kirk's mother, pregnant with James T., escapes in a shuttle. The father has been Captain for all of 12 minutes. Some 25 years later, James Tiberius Kirk and Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy do meet up at Starfleet Academy. Uhura, whom Kirk has unsuccessfully flirted with, is there, too. And, of course, so is Spock, who is ahead of Kirk, and puts him to a famous test-

But the Romulans attack again - this time, Planet Vulcan. Star Fleet sends out a whole bunch of ships - including the Enterprise with Captain Pike in command, and Spock the science officer. By the time they get to Vulcan, Pike is in Romulan hands, and despite the best heroic efforts of Kirk and Sulu, and Spock, now in command, Planet Vulcan is destroyed, and along with it, Spock's mother-

Wait a minute! Vulcan destroyed? But didn't we see the planet, numerous times, in various episodes of various series of Star Trek? And Spock's mother, too?

Yes, of course we did! So, what's going on?

J. J. Abrams, in the sharp script written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (all three of current Fringe fame), are giving us a splendid time travel story (shades of Lost). We get this spelled out to us in detail when young Kirk meets old Spock - played by Leonard Nimoy - who explains that Romulans killed Kirk's father after being whipped back in time from a future in which old Spock failed to save the Romulan home world.... And old Spock has been pulled back through time, too.

Now, if I were a sufficiently versed fan, I would have noticed at the beginning that this was another Star Trek universe - not quite the one we have seen on television and in theaters all of these years. Because no one ever said in a word in those about Kirk's father dying a few seconds after he was born. But Vulcan destroyed was more than enough to wake even me up that we were seeing something very different and daring here in which ...

Everything is new, to some lesser or greater extent, except old Spock, who has seen everything that we have on the screens over the years. Young Spock, smartly played by Heroes' Zachary Quinto, is also a new Spock - who has lost his mother and his planet, just as the new Kirk, perfectly played by Chris Pine, has lost his father. And young Spock (call him Spock 2) now lives in the same version of reality (call it Universe 2) as does old Spock (call him Spock 1). Old Spock's story along side of young Spock's story makes this Star Trek a sequel as well as a prequel.

There are other nice differences in this new reality. Spock 2 has a romantic relation with - Uhura, who's given a winning, sassy, refreshing performance by Zoe Saldana. But McCoy, wonderfully played by Karl Urban, is just and sarcastically funny as he should. And Simon Pegg's Scotty, John Cho's Sulu, and Anton Yelchin's Chekov are also fine and satisfyingly in character and ambiance - though poor Chekov, only 17 in the movie, and on the Enterprise earlier than he was in the original television series, is still stuck with that laughable Russian accent.

But Abrams has done the seemingly impossible, and done it with style and savvy - he has given us a genuinely new Star Trek, from the very beginning, with a genuinely new story - and even given us a witness to the original that we all grew up with, in the person of the original, older Spock. The story will live long and prosper indeed.

See also How Star Trek Liberated Television

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SPECIAL TREAT: Photos: Front row at the Star Trek Premiere…see the photos on TV.com


15-min podcast review of the new Star Trek

Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke & Star Trek on Penultimate Fringe

Well, they threw in the science fictional kitchen sink on the penultimate first season episode of Fringe tonight - a fine and fanciful thing, if, like me, you love science fiction - as well some media-history science fiction concerning the phonograph, which also appeals to the media historian part of me.

King's pyrokinesis - the capacity to create fires through sheer mental focus - was mentioned by name, Clarke's Childhood's End (one of my childhood and still favorites) is on the bookshelf of a victim who can't control her pyrokinetic powers, and there's a guy who thinks he's Spock. (I predict some sort of recondite, glimmering connection to Fringe in the new Star Trek movie, which I'll be seeing this Friday. J. J. Abrams across space and time.)

And the story was crackerjack sharp on Fringe tonight, too. Peter builds a device to help Walter make digital copies of his old vinyl records, and this device is able to recover sound - speech and a cellphone number - from a molten window. As I pointed out in in my media history and future The Soft Edge, and worked into the story in my science fiction The Silk Code, the phonograph is at basis a very old technological process, in no need of electricity. Conceivably, ancient potters could have captured ambient sound in the clay they were molding....

Olivia also finally gets rid of the irritating FBI official who is trying to drum her out of business. Well, actually, he's working for bad guys, and Olivia doesn't plan to kill him, it just happens when she gets one of his intended victims to focus her fire-starting power away from Olivia and her, and it ends up burning up the FBI guy.
Good riddance to bad luggage.

But who, really, are the bad guys. Lots of things are pointing to William Bell, whom we'll meet next week, but it's pretty clear, I think, that Bell is just trying to prepare to fend off the real baddies ....

Klingons?

Nah, I don't think J. J. Abrams would go that far. But the eternal bald observer has collected Walter, and we should find out something about where they're going next week, in the Season 1 finale...

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8-min podcast review of Fringe penultimate

See also Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe

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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...

Heroes and Villains Across Series in Fringe

A literally hot lethal woman on Fringe tonight, who's infected with something that turns her into a vampire-like predator who picks up men to drink ... not their blood, but their spinal fluid. Not Twilight meets Spinal Tap, but the odds twists on horror and science fiction that is Fringe.

The deeper story, as always, is what is most of interest. Our predator became that way because ZFT - the teleporting and whatnot-producing terrorist organization - punished the woman's husband for not cooperating with them, and turned her into this nerve-wracking stalker.

We've seen ZFT before in this series, and next week we'll find out more about the secret revealed at the end of tonight's episode: William Bell, head of Massive Dynamics, is also a player in ZFT.

And that's not all we'll find out next week, or soon after. Leonard Nimoy, who will be making some sort of appearance in Star Trek (produced, as is Fringe, by J. J. Abrams), will be William Bell. So Zachary Quinto, who plays mostly bad guy Sylar on Heroes, will be playing the main, younger Spock on Star Trek, and Leonard Nimoy, who plays the bad in some way William Bell on Fringe, will reprise his classic Spock in the same new Star Trek. Nice mix of heroes and villains across series.

Meanwhile, back on Fringe, it looks as if the eternal bald observer will be teleporting into Walter's lab next week to collect him to go somewhere. But, don't forget, he has a cow...

See also Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect

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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...

Fringe Begins

J. J. Abrams is back with some of the best of his Alias production team - Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci - with Fringe, the X-Files-like science fiction drama on Fox.

Actually, lead character FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (well played by Anna Torv) does look a little reminiscent of Sydney Bristow, and dropped in on Baghdad in a scene that would have fit right in Alias. And there was Lost all over tonight, from the plane in distress in the teaser, to the brooding, complex music at the end of crucial scenes.

But Fringe does have a charm all its own, from cool floating titles to John Noble, the actor with facial expressions you can't forget. He's sometimes known as John Nogle, played Markov in 24, and in Fringe he's a perfect somewhat cracked beyond-brilliant scientist Dr. Walter Bishop, who has been locked away for years. He, his son Peter (played by Joshua Jackson - Peter reminds me of Jack Shephard), and Olivia are the team, and, hey Lance Reddick (of The Wire as well as Lost) is their superior.

And what are they investigating? Something to do with a multinational megalithic corporation, run by a former classmate of Dr. Bishop, apparently into plying some of the same things in his bizarre area of expertise. Tonight the menu included getting valuable memories from comatose and even dead brains - a old science fiction gem which I explored a little in my 2003 novel, The Pixel Eye - and strange skin-dissolving toxins.

More's promised in the future, and I'm looking forward.



See also Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... Fringe 4: The Eternal Bald Observer

Further reading:

The Night that Alias Reinvented Itself

Lost: Keys to What's Really Going On

More About Lost Season 4: (ii) Michael and Ben, Good and Evil, Alias Echo

I've been thinking Michael's unswerving drive to kill himself in Episode 8 - whether by car, gun, or bomb - and I think it's based on more than just Walt's rejection of Michael, after Michael tells Walt about Michael's murder of Ana Lucia and Libby.

I think Michael's commitment to end his life shows us that he is a fundamentally good person. Even if Walt had accepted him, Michael would have found it difficult to live with himself. He is not a killer. He shot Ana Lucia because he didn't want any witness to his freeing Ben - a witness that could have interfered with Michael's reunion with Walt. That murder was certainly not admirable, but it was based on love (for his son), not hate or greed. And Michael's shooting of Libby was an unthinking reflex - ignited when Libby surprised him.

That being the case, I'm thinking Michael may be on a course to some kind of redemption.

Ben is another story. He reminds me of Sloan in Alias - J. J. Abrams' other great production. Sloan was a genius - not only in intelligence, but in walking a razor thin line between good and evil, to the point that the audience couldn't tell, and wouldn't find out until the very last episodes, that Sloan was evil.

I'm guessing this is precisely the trajectory we'll be treated to with Ben. He keeps saying he is one of the good guys, and we do see him seem to do some good ... as Tom did in "helping" Michael. But there always seems to be a deeper motive with Ben, which is not so good.

In the end, it may be Widmore who is the better man.


See also...

Further Questions about Lost 4.4: Jack and Aaron, Kate and Sawyer ... and More About Lost 4: (i) Baby Aaron and the Oceanic Six

1. Lost's Back Full Paradoxical Blast 4.1 ... 4.2: Five Flashbacks and Three Rational Explanations ... 4.3: Thirty Minutes and Big Ben ... 4.4: Kate and ... ... 4.5 Desmond 1 and Desmond 2 ... 4.6 The True Nature of Ben ... 4.7 Flash Both Ways ... 4.8 Michael and Alex

and

2. More Thoughts On Lost 4.1: Those Who Went with Hurley and Those Who Stayed with Jack and Two More Points about Lost 4.1


special 60-minute jumbo podcast reviewing first 8 episodes of Season 4

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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 and its time travel ...





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